The Seattle Mariners have not only never won a World Series, but have never even appeared in one. They are celebrating their fiftieth year as a franchise this year, and I’ve been in it for half of that. Twenty-five years of being a fan of this team with the smallest amount of success imaginable during that time.
Last season, they finally put it together and very nearly made the World Series. They were up in Game 7 of the American League Championship, and they could’ve won if their manager hadn’t made a really stupid decision that I could clearly see 2,000 miles away. (This isn’t about that.)
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I wanted them to win so bad. So, so bad. I wanted them to win for all these years of futility, for all my years of staying up past midnight to watch them from afar. I wanted them to win for Ichiro and Felix and Edgar and Dave Niehaus and Macklemore and Mike McCready. I wanted it for USSMariner, my first favorite blog, and the reason I am the fan I am today. I wanted them to win for all of us who love this stupid team, despite all the logic pointing to it being a bad idea. Mostly, I wanted them to win because I knew they were on the clock. The end is near, and now 2026 might be their last shot at it.
That might be a tad dramatic, but it’s honestly not far off. Accepting the existence of anything from year to year in this world is already a huge risk, but the owners feel determined to break the union after this season and are willing to lose the year to do it. Teams have a $2 bilion dollar war chest, $75 million per team, which is not a move you make if you are looking to make a deal. War chests are for, you know, war.
The owners will lockout the players as soon as they are able to. Their goal is clear: to attain a salary cap and control labor costs once and for all. This isn’t the first time the owners have had a plan like this, but the current owners of Major League Baseball teams are all of the Epstein class. The owners during the 1994 strike felt the burn of lost games, but these guys won’t. They care far less about what happens on the field than how much the number goes up. The number is always going up in baseball, but it’s just not going up enough right now. That leaves them with no choice but to lockout the players, and I think we could lose the entire 2027 season in this fight.
A lot of people might support the idea of a salary cap because they want their team to better compete with the Yankees or Dodgers, but you can be sure that any talk of a salary cap is pure propaganda from the owners’ side. It will not help competitive balance. It will only help their pockets. A recent potential salary cap proposal set the league at a $270M cap and a $150M floor, exactly where the same old teams would be. The Mets/Yankees/Dodgers would be at the top, and the Midwest teams/Marlins would continue to be at the bottom. A $120M difference is roughly the difference between the Brewers and Braves right now. (Only one of those two made the playoffs last year, by the way.)
Here’s an easy one for the owner believers out there. Why would the Pirates, who have never spent more than $122M in a season, agree to a system that would have them spend at least $28M more than that every season for the length of the CBA if they aren’t already making that kind of money? Because they are lying. They are always lying.
There are many reasons I believe the players will never agree to a salary cap, but the chief among them is this: MLB will never open its books. To achieve a salary cap similar to the NFL or NBA, they need to share what the revenue actually is and then determine a split based on that. NFL players get 48% of league revenue, while the NBA and NHL are closer to 50/50. What is MLB currently, and what could it be with a salary cap? No one knows, and they won’t tell.
It also gets dicey, especially with baseball, because of all the bullshit that goes into stadiums these days. The Braves have “The Battery”, a huge mixed-use district surrounding the stadium with shops, dining, bars, offices, and a hotel. The Red Sox and Cubs own as many of the streets around their stadium as they can buy. The owners would argue this is not baseball-related income because it’s not directly tied to the game and thus has nothing to do with the players. They’d be lying assholes, but they would do it.
The finance bro brain creep into baseball has been taking over baseball for a long time now, and there is no better example of that than the current American League. The Mariners are one of the favorites, but that has a whole lot less to do with how hard they are trying to win than how not hard everyone is trying to be. Don’t get me wrong, the Mariners are a great team, and I think they’ll make the World Series, but they aren’t really going for it in the way a good team might have done a decade ago. They are acquiring good players who fit a budget, and they won’t go beyond that. It’s a failure, and it sucks, but the good news is that nobody is going for it either, so maybe it’ll work out for my specific interest. It’s all about sustainability and minimizing risk. Winning comes much later in the equation, if it does at all.
I’m sick of this stuff, and it’s only going to get worse. Baseball is a great sport that could be so much better, but these aren’t the guys who are going to fix it.
A year without baseball might really be the end for me. There’s so much to do in this world, so much that I haven’t experienced that would be easier to do without this weird addiction to men hitting balls. I could do anything. I could watch soccer!
That’s probably a bit idealistic, but what will baseball even be after all of this? It could be better. It probably won’t. Whatever it is, it won’t be the same. The end is here.
World Series Prediction: Mariners over Mets 4-2
#goms
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