The Los Angeles Dodgers did it again, and the Detroit Tigers welcomed the continued destruction of America’s Pastime. They are not alone. The rental game of baseball has destroyed the competitive balance, and with a lockout looming, general managers don’t understand how they are damaging the game.
Did anyone outside of baseball know the name Jeff Greenberg? He’s been the Detroit Tigers’ General Manager since 2023. On Saturday, he traded All-Star pitcher Tarik Skubal, which gave the AL Central team four marginal prospects.
With Skubal set to be a free agent after the season, there’s every reason to believe that, without a salary cap, he’ll get a mega-rich deal from Los Angeles before baseball resumes in 2028. Yes, baseball is a deal-making sport, and it’s shameful that major league baseball teams continue to do business with the Dodgers.
The trade landed them arguably the best pitcher in baseball, and it’s an absolute certainty they’ll win their third straight World Series in October. The classic and iconic baseball series has already been decided.
The Dodgers have the most money. They do whatever it takes to win, and they’ve been using the other 29 baseball teams as their minor league. Time and again, they make deals and avoid giving up their top prospects because they manipulate the system.
Now, if you bleed Dodger Blue, you don’t care. If MLB Owners hold out for a Salary Cap, baseball will return in 2027. Thus, this will be the Dodgers’ last hurrah should they finally break the grip the most powerful union in the country, the Major League Baseball Players Association, has on this sport.
They are at the core of what’s wrong with baseball, and their leadership has continued to ignore the rank-and-file who won’t receive paychecks next year.
Until there’s competitive balance in baseball, the sport is dead. It can’t survive because no one wants to see the Dodgers win every year. If the MLB Players Association doesn’t agree to the NFL’s salary-cap mantra, then the have-nots of the baseball world should start their own league.
When Kansas City Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt decided in 1961 that the NFL would never allow him to own a team, he and seven other wealthy men started the American Football League.
Now you can’t blame the Dodgers for playing by the rules of the game, but you can be upset with General Managers like Jeff Greeneberg who would rather trade their best player without paying him, knowing the Dodgers will always be the default.
Further, he and others in the game know the Dodgers will always make a deal for the best talent, and they are mesmerized and diluted, and should be taken out to the woodshed for ruining baseball.
I know I’m all over the board, but I live in Kansas City. As a Royals fan, I’m convinced they’ll never win another World Series and that they should eventually trade Bobby Witt, Jr., to receive one of the biggest hauls in the game.
In fact, why not offer him to the Dodgers in exchange for their five best prospects? Kansas City could retool and develop the players they’d receive in return before trading them back to the Dodgers four years later.
I don’t think this trade is going to happen, but the Dodgers own every other team in baseball, and they’re not even hiding it anymore.
Even with a Salary Cap, they’d circumvent it by offering deferred dollars to their big free-agent acquisitions, as they did with Shohei Ohtani, who has $680 million deferred until he’s no longer playing baseball.
Again, another example is that the Dodgers don’t care what anyone thinks. They don’t care that they are ruining the game and diminishing the sport, where no small or mid-market team can compete anymore. They’d want World Series titles at any cost.
If I lived in Los Angeles, I wouldn’t care what the other clubs thought because my team does what it takes to win every year. However, unless there’s a lockout and the salary cap is the result, the Dodgers will continue to fleece other teams.
I doubt this is the last trade the Dodgers will make before the trade deadline on Monday, because they still have teams that are hoping to dump salary issues in the future and are willing to take less for a rental player.
That is precisely at the core of the problem facing baseball. The Tigers are just two games out of the Wild Card slot, and they traded their best player for a song, a dance, and the hope that one of these prospects pays dividends.
Rental players are a necessity for contending teams. They are paramount for those that need to rebuild their farm systems, which have been depleted by poor drafts and general managers who believe stockpiling talent is good business.
It can be said that’s a good model, but again, that’s why baseball is broken.
In the end, we can only conclude that baseball will eventually change. If there isn’t a salary cap implemented in 2028, fans won’t care, won’t spend the money to attend games, and will find other sports to occupy their time between April and October.
An area where MLB will lose ground is the sudden popularity of college baseball, which engages so many fan bases across the country that it could capture a larger television market and fill the gap left by the loss of professional baseball in late spring and early summer through the College World Series.
In fact, for me, the NFL is back, so baseball is already a distant memory. Later this month, college football comes back and basketball in October, so that’ll fill my time, and I already know my team, the Royals, aren’t going anywhere this season or next. It’s sad, but that’s the reality of baseball unless you root for the Dodgers!
