When the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers take the field on Friday night, it will be the dream scenario for Major League Baseball.
The Yankees represent the team with the most World Series appearances in league history, as well as the most championships. The Dodgers have the most appearances of NL teams, while also having the most World Series losses in league history. The Dodgers have won seven times, which doesn’t touch the 27 wins by the Yankees.
In present day, the Yankees and Dodgers represent the modern day MLB Dream Teams. The Yankees opened the season with a $303 million payroll, ranking second in the Majors. The Dodgers ranked third, spending just under $250 million. The Dodgers got to the World Series by eliminating the number one spender, the New York Mets, who opened the year with a $305.6 million payroll.
The Dodgers feature the highest paid player in the game, with Shohei Ohtani guaranteed $700 million in his latest contract. The Yankees have the fourth and eighth highest paid players in Aaron Judge ($40 million in 2024) and Gerrit Cole ($36 million).
New York has nine players making eight-figure salaries. That group of nine makes up over $230 million in payroll.
Los Angeles has seven players making eight-figures in 2024, including Ohtani’s massive and highly-deferred $70 million salary. The Dodgers are paying close to $120 million for that group in 2024, thanks to the Ohtani deferments.
MLB’s Intended World Series
Yankees vs. Dodgers. The history. The present day star and spending power.
You can tune in every game and see some of the best players in the game on both sides of the ball, on both teams. It’s the Wrestlemania of World Series possibilities. It’s DC vs Marvel. It’s the weird phenomena you get when you learn that Abbot Elementary is crossing over with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. It’s the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object. It’s the place at the end of time where all things converge and reset to repeat in the exact order they once found themselves. It’s a buy one, get one free sale on Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. It’s Linkin Park and Jay-Z crossing over for a six-track remix. Or at least, this is how Major League Baseball intends.
It’s hard to say that Major League Baseball intends for anything other than Yankees vs. Dodgers when Major League Baseball is designed for all of the best players to go to the Yankees and Dodgers. This is what Major League Baseball intends when the Yankees and Dodgers are allowed to have payrolls that are 3-4 times the amount of the lowest spending teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Yet, this actual matchup is so rare. The last World Series between the two teams was in 1981, long before MLB’s finances spiraled out of control toward the large markets.
This is the fourth time the two teams have met since the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, with the series split 2-2.
A big reason the Dodgers have the most World Series losses is because the Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers six out of seven times. Brooklyn won their first World Series in 1955, but the Dodgers didn’t become a powerhouse until moving to LA. That’s where they won in 1959, 1963, 1965, 1981, 1988, and most recently in 2020.
I’m not going to list all 27 World Series titles by the Yankees, but they did have a gap from 1962 to 1977, then 1978 to their four World Series titles in the late 90s. Their last title was in 2009.
The Impact of Local TV Money
In recent years, local TV deals have been the biggest factor toward World Series winners.
The Dodgers signed a local TV deal in 2013 that pays them over $8 billion dollars across 25 years, amounting to $334 million in local revenue per year. The Yankees have long owned their own network.
The Rangers won in 2023 with $90-100 million per year from their local deal. They’ve recently been held up in the Diamond Sports bankruptcy, which is impacting a lot of local deals that were signed during the revenue explosion over the last decade.
The Astros were one of the teams who signed a big local deal, receiving $73 million per year, which led them to eventually spend enough to win a World Series in 2017 and 2022. They lost in 2019 and 2021. There was also some cheating involved along the way. They’ve since joined the Houston Rockets to buy their network back, amidst the uncertainty with Diamond.
The Braves won in 2021, and have been receiving $80 million per year in their local deal since 2007. They’re another team currently wrapped up in the Diamond bankruptcy.
The Nationals won in 2019, through the heavy use of deferred contracts. That year, they deferred $30 million of Stephen Strasburg’s deal without interest, paid in 2020-2022. Max Scherzer deferred $10 million of his salary without interest, which will start being paid back next month. From a TV deal standpoint, the Nationals have a complicated situation, with the Orioles owning their rights. In recent years, the Nationals won a dispute to award more revenue for previous seasons. The amount took the Nationals from receiving about $40 million per year to about $60 million per year.
And of course, the Red Sox beat the Dodgers in 2018, in the SummerSlam version of potential dream scenario World Series matchups.
Buying a World Series
If you follow Major League Baseball with only a love for the game, then Yankees vs. Dodgers is an amazing matchup. When else are you going to see the absolute best hitters and pitchers competing against each other for the championship?
Yet, if you follow a small market team like the Pirates, the numbers in this article will make you sick of this game. Each of those previous World Series winners received more in local revenue than the Pirates spend each season.
If you follow the Pirates, you know how hopeless the future has become in Pittsburgh.
The Pirates don’t have a massive TV deal. They were also caught up in the uncertainty of local deals, and have since joined Pittsburgh Sports Net, which is owned by the owners of the Red Sox. That means the Red Sox can profit off the Pirates’ TV deal, which is already considerably less than the Red Sox’ local deal.
Bob Nutting is extremely conservative owner, who is risk-averse in spending. He puts his energy toward charity and community events to present his organization as good natured and well meaning, to hide that they are perpetual losers. There’s never a push toward winning from Nutting, other than a casual going through the motions.
Nutting spends conservatively, which renders his voice ineffective when it comes time for small markets to make a push for equal competitiveness in the league. While the Yankees and Dodgers are a rare matchup, it’s not rare to see one of the top half spenders in the league winning the World Series. It is rare for a small market team to even lose a World Series, much less win one.
The Yankees and Dodgers are taking advantage of MLB’s economic situation, which allows big market teams an easier path to the World Series through access to the best players in the game. Nutting also takes advantage of MLB’s economic situation, spending conservatively with the ultimate goal of keeping the team in his family.
In order to be one of the rare small market teams who can make a World Series, Nutting needs to take on a level of risk that could potentially lead to him needing to sell the team to cover the losses. I might go into that in a future column, but the reality is that Nutting is only going to work with the funds that MLB provides. MLB has a system where small market teams are provided considerably less than large market teams.
As long as Nutting follows that system, he has no room to speak out about the way that system restricts his organization from contending. The system is designed to produce a Yankees vs. Dodgers World Series, while keeping the small market teams in business.
Fans in New York and Los Angeles can enjoy baseball, knowing that their teams will attempt to be competitive with a chance to win it all. Fans in Pittsburgh can’t enjoy the game in the same way, knowing that the focus of their favorite franchise is to keep the Nutting family in the ownership game for as long as possible.
Yankees vs. Dodgers is the dream for MLB.
The dream in Pittsburgh is an owner who actually wanted to disrupt the system, in order to better his own organization’s chances.
