In the movie “Moneyball,” Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt) asks, “How could you not be romantic about baseball?”
Well, this is a tough time to be romantic about baseball. As the MLB trade deadline approached last week, wealthy teams spent gobs of money to grab talent, all at the expense of small-market teams. “Baseball’s Little Guys Folded After the Dodgers Went All In,” declared a headline in The Wall Street Journal. Indeed, the Dodgers landed back-to-back American League Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal. Meanwhile, the Boston Red Sox procured catcher Adley Rutschman from my beloved Baltimore Orioles.
This is just the way it goes in baseball, which, unlike the NFL, does not have a salary cap. But last week, the gap between the haves and the have-nots hit me with particular force. Maybe it’s because of my rooting interest in Baltimore. Or maybe it’s because the situation in baseball seems to resemble the situation in politics, where it’s increasingly hard to escape the sense that the American economy is rigged in favor of the uber-rich.
It’s not supposed to be this way — in life or in sports. For baseball fans, the unspoken rule goes like this: Sure, the big-market teams are expected to have a leg up. But their leg up isn’t supposed to be quite this overwhelming. Yes, there are small-market or low-payroll teams in contention this year and every year: The Milwaukee Brewers currently have the best record in baseball, and the Tampa Bay Rays aren’t far behind. But three of the last six World Series have been won by the wealthy, free-spending Los Angeles Dodgers; it has been more than a decade since a small-market team won the World Series (Kansas City in 2015); and the list of World Series winners since the late 1990s is dominated by some of the biggest markets in baseball.
It wasn’t always like this. From 1966 to 1983, my Orioles appeared in six World Series, winning three of them. Of course, back then you could pay big league players’ salaries with spare change you found in the owner’s couch — a situation that was bad for the players but good for towns like Baltimore.
The O’s won their last World Series when I was 9 years old, which had the effect of locking me into fandom and naively making me expect that they would win every year. Instead, they haven’t even played in a World Series since.
A few years ago, things got so dire that the O’s decided to blow up the team and start over. This basically meant they sold off all the spare parts, ditched all the best (read expensive) players, and began at square one by signing talented young players with an eye on the future.
The face of this rebuild was Rutschman. His arrival in the major leagues seemed to usher in a long-awaited Baltimore golden era. With Rutschman leading the way, the O’s won 101 games and captured the American League East in 2023, besting the hated Red Sox and Yankees. They flamed out in the divisional round of the playoffs, but still, the future was bright.
Until it wasn’t. The Orioles are under .500, and so, before the trade deadline, they decided to shed the man once seen as the savior of the franchise. He is now playing in Boston.
Boston’s payroll is bigger than Baltimore’s, but it doesn’t spend nearly as much as the Dodgers, who landed Skubal. Why didn’t other teams make a strong play for this ace? As the Journal explained: “Limited financial resources require [small market teams] to act more disciplined than teams with giant payrolls. The Dodgers and Yankees can use money to hide their mistakes and mitigate risk. One failed transaction for the Brewers and Rays could derail their chances for years.”
It’s a lot, in short, like the real world. The rich get to take big swings. If they strike out, there’s a safety net. If they hit a home run, they can say they did it all on their own.
The more years go by without a small-market team winning the World Series, and the more trade deadlines pass with teams like the Dodgers greedily gobbling up talent, the more the game starts to feel not just unequal, but fundamentally unfair.
Which is exactly the way American life feels to a lot of people right now. According to a recent PRRI survey, only 49% of Americans believe that “if you work hard, you’ll get ahead.” That’s down from 55% only two years ago. More troubling is the fact that among 18-29 year olds, the number has fallen from 50% to just 36%.
No doubt, this is why we are seeing democratic socialism have a moment right now. Just as some observers believe MLB needs to impose a salary cap, an increasing number of Americans want to take extreme measures to change the rules of our economy and our politics.
For those of us of the conservative bent, flirting with any sort of socialism, even the ostensibly benign kind, carries its own serious problems. But to forestall the rise of radical politics, it might help if we conservatives demand that business leaders show some foresight by taking voluntary steps to benefit rank-and-file workers rather than simply focusing on “maximizing shareholder profits.” If capitalists don’t do something to start leveling the playing field, then the steps down the road might not be voluntary. Wouldn’t it be better to address these problems before everyone decides the game is rigged?
“There are at least two kinds of games,” academic James P. Carse argued. “One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” Unfortunately, getting too greedy and trying to maximize your chances of constantly winning the finite game can jeopardize the latter.
Call me old fashioned, but I’m hoping that America — and America’s pastime — can live on in the infinite category. Wouldn’t it be nice to once again feel romantic about both baseball and our country?
Matt K. Lewis is a NOTUS Perspectives columnist.
More from NOTUS Perspectives:
Why the R-Word Is the Defining Slur of the Trump Era