Fans Don’t Want Money to Determine Sports Outcomes — But They Don’t Want Chance To, Either

Further meditations on big baseball spending.

(Credit: ChatGPT)

Over the past week or so, I’ve been thinking more about the controversy over the Dodgers’ spending and what it says about MLB (or pro sports) as a whole. I already wrote some on the matter last week — making the case that one team hoarding talent is less dire in baseball than in other leagues, because ultimately the best team seldom wins the World Series, and the inherent crapshoot of the postseason takes care of our inequality problems for us.

I wasn’t the only one to have this type of reaction after the Dodgers added the likes of Roki Sasaki and Tanner Scott. Joe Sheehan noted that baseball has plenty of parity, in the form of four different champions and seven different World Series teams in the past four years (with all but seven teams making the playoffs). Ben Verlander of Fox Sports pointed out that the sport hasn’t seen back-to-back champions since the 1999/2000 Yankees — the longest stretch in major pro sports history without a repeat champ.

But commenters jumped all over Verlander for focusing on World Series winners instead of broader measures like making the playoffs. So I wanted to take a deeper look at just how much influence spending has on making — and advancing through — the MLB postseason, and whether a league using randomness to drive parity is an unsatisfying solution (even if it is effective).