At 10:38 p.m. Central time, deep down in the heart of Texas and even further removed from most Americans' TV sets, Willy Adames watched a Julio Urias fastball fly by to finish off the Dodgers' 3-1 Game 6 victory over the Rays and clinch Los Angeles' first World Series championship since Kirk Gibson dragged himself around the bases in 1988.
Only this time, it's safe to say, the few among us who did watch very much believed what we just saw.
Oh, don't get the reference?
Try this:
Still no for some of you?
Yeah, that's pretty much the state of Major League Baseball these days, where the average age of the diehard fan is 61, where the most common location of the diehard fan is ... you know, New York, Boston, Chicago, L.A. and a couple other places big enough to offer revenue streams that empower teams like the Dodgers to knock on the door often enough to eventually win it all.
That's the moral of the broader story, too, make no mistake. Sure, the Rays rose up within two games of glory on a payroll barely $3 million bigger than that of the Pirates. And if they'd somehow prevailed, all the narratives would've been about parity, equality, hope for every fan everywhere, blah, blah, blah. But it all would've been nonsense. Because for every Rays or Royals or Marlins who'll pop up once a decade, you've got the Dodgers reaching the World Series three of the past four years on a payroll that averages out to nearly a quarter-billion dollars annually in that span.
Say what one will about the legitimately terrific drafting, international acquisitions and development done in the L.A. system, but the fact remains that Clayton Kershaw's adjusted salary of $16,308,641 -- slashed for the 60-game regular season -- eclipsed the entirety of the $12,738,842 the Pirates were paying everyone on their 28-man roster by season's end.
Want to wag the finger at Bob Nutting's cheapness to deflate that comparison?
Fine, no argument here. But one will accuse Tampa Bay's front office of not wanting to win, and the Rays' payroll is $28,290,689. Or Kershaw plus Mookie Betts.
The sport's a joke. No one should open the process with such an absurdly unfair advantage. The teams that are run the best, that perform the best, that come together the best, those should be the champions. If those happen to be in New York or L.A., so be it. Awesome. But if they're bequeathed, as if by birthright, through inherently big revenues ... that's a joke.
Baseball needs a salary cap.
Just like the NFL, NHL, NBA, Major League Soccer and every other variation or level of every sports league in North America.
And when I say salary cap, I mean the full system, not the way some misinterpret a cap to represent only a spending limit.
In a cap system, there's a built-in floor that's only $20 million below the cap, and there's greatly expanded revenue sharing to ensure that all teams can afford spending into that range. Which they do. Because there's no choice. And since the range is so tight -- negligible, really, when weighing the natural ebb and flow of rosters -- fans in those other sports largely don't know or care where their favorite team stands in relation to the cap.
Imagine neither knowing nor caring how much or little Nutting put into the Pirates.
Right. That.
I've written quite a bit about this over the years, as well as broaching it directly with Nutting a few months back. And the most common reaction I'll get from readers is that it'll never happen. That the owners won't go for it because it'd force the big spenders to spend less. That the players won't go for it because their union is so terrifyingly powerful.
More nonsense. On both counts.
When the NHL committed in the winter of 2003 to shut down until it had a cap to match those in the NFL and NBA, a lot of the same was expressed. The Rangers, Maple Leafs, Red Wings and other big-revenue teams would never go for it, would never give up their advantage in being able to sign pretty much anyone they targeted through free agency. And the union ... oh, my goodness, talk about a powerful union ... entire books were written about the NHLPA's stranglehold on their membership that spanned decades and was built on several unsavory characters. This group was never, ever going to be broken.
Until it was.
Gary Bettman banded the owners together, threatened to fine any of them $1 million for breaking ranks, and took nearly two years to get his cap. With a unanimous vote.
And the union ... well, in the end, the players want to play. They aren't union execs to be in this for the long haul, and they aren't agents worried about future 10% cuts. They wanted to play while they were still young enough to do so, and they did predictably, understandably break down on that principle alone.
It was always in the owners' hands. The only thing they needed to have in common, just as predictably, was losing money.
Most of the NHL was losing money at the time, more than enough to build up the three-quarters consensus to do something about it.
And hey, what do you know?
"We are going to be at historic high levels of debt,” Rob Manfred blurted out yesterday in an interview with Sportico's Barry Bloom. “And it’s going to be difficult for the industry to weather another year where we don’t have fans in the ballpark and have other limitations on how much we can’t play and how we can play.”
Oh, boy.
How much debt?
The majors' 30 teams have accumulated an unprecedented $8.3 billion of debt to their various lenders, Manfred further blurted, and that'll include $2.8 billion to $3 billion in operational losses this year alone.
Some won't believe him, naturally, and I'm betting Tony Clark and the MLBPA will be among those. There's no love lost between the two sides, as we witnessed in achieving that ugly, acrimonious coronavirus-time labor agreement. But there's even less trust. One side believes the other is always lying.
In this case, though, it doesn't matter. Because what matters is that Manfred saw fit to blurt this out in the first place.
The main labor agreement expires Dec. 1, 2021. Blood had been anticipated for a while, but that only multiplied after this past summer saw several team owners or executives pipe up for the first time about someday having revenue-sharing -- that's code in the industry for cap, as Clark was quick to call out -- and it carried more weight that some of those people were with big-revenue franchises like the Cubs and Diamondbacks. And in that setting, trust me, any suggestion from the commissioner's own mouth that teams are losing money is nothing less than an opening salvo toward the round.
Which is to say nothing of yet another round that'll certainly be needed in the interim, barring a vaccine that magically allows teams to pack their ballparks again next year.
“It’s absolutely certain, I know, that we’re going to have to have conversations with the MLBPA about what 2021 is going to look like,” Manfred further told Sportico. “It’s difficult to foresee a situation right now where everything’s just normal. And obviously, if it’s not normal we’re going to have to have conversations about it.”
Whatever. I hope that one goes badly, too.
Shut it all down. For a year. For two years. Anything it takes. I'd miss baseball, except that I already don't miss this baseball.