I'd rather not keep discussing this, but it's impossible to escape salary cap discourse in Major League Baseball in 2026.
The League Championship Series round is upon us, which is the last four teams standing and vying for the piece of metal that is the World Series trophy. The two-time defending World Series champion Dodgers are in the mix, along with three franchises on the opposite end. The Tampa Bay Rays and Milwaukee Brewers are two of the five current MLB franchises with zero World Series titles in their history. The Cleveland Guardians technically have the longest drought, having not won a title since 1948 (when the Brewers and Rays didn't exist).
In terms of history, it is Davids vs. Goliath, and that's where the payroll numbers stand as well.
Figures can vary based on loopholes and clever accounting (such as deferrals and back-loaded contracts). We'll use the competitive balance tax numbers from Major League Baseball. It seems like the number the league is taxing teams on is reasonable. Here are those payrolls, along with their ranking among the 30 MLB teams, for each of the final four in this season's playoffs.
1. Dodgers, $432.8 million
19. Brewers, $154.7 million
27. Rays, $112.9 million
29. Guardians, $93.1 million
We could look at other places, as noted. The year-end 40-man roster salaries, for example, have the Dodgers second behind the Mets (monster deferrals drop the Dodgers way down to $339.6 million on their current 40-man) with the Brewers still 19th, the Rays 28th and the Guardians dead last in 30th with a payroll of less than $75 million.
Regardless, we can see the gap here between the have and the have-nots -- or, more accurately, the big spender and the not-so-big spenders -- and that's one of the main focuses off the field during the league championship series this season, unfortunately.
Before we go any further, and I'm gonna bold this so it doesn't escape anyone:
No, this doesn't prove we don't need a salary cap. And, no, if the Dodgers still win the World Series, it doesn't prove we do need one.
You can't just take results in small-sample playoff baseball, especially in one-year increments, to prove anything of the sort.
I'm not immune to seeing the disparity in the payrolls and realizing it looks absolutely absurd. I just think it's a lot more nuanced than "spending more equals winning automatically" in baseball.
Just look how close the Dodgers were to not winning in 2024 (they fell behind in the NLDS to the Padres) and 2025 (pick absolutely anything in Game 3 or Game 7 of the World Series). They might well win it all this time around, again, but they have an uphill battle to overcome an 0-2 deficit to a 103-win Brewers ballclub.
The owner side in the upcoming CBA discussions would love nothing more than the Dodgers to win it all again so they can say the proof is in the pudding. I have no doubt that some on the MLBPA side would love to see the Brewers topple the Dodgers and point to the low-payroll teams competing in the Fall Classic.
What if the Guardians win? We could look at the 40-man payrolls and say the team with the lowest payroll just won the World Series and WHAT'S UP NOW?!?!?
The MLBPA could easily argue that you can't act like low-payroll teams have no chance of competing with the likes of the Dodgers and Mets if, for example, the Rays and Brewers square off in the World Series after dispatching the Yankees and Dodgers, respectively? And conversely, we can't (or shouldn't) pretend that if the last four teams were, say, the Mets, Dodgers, Yankees and Blue Jays, the ownership side would suddenly become nuanced and say, "hey, this doesn't necessarily mean we need a salary cap." It would all be used as definitive proof.
But it isn't. It's obviously more nuanced than that. One-year results don't necessarily prove anything at all.
At the very least, though, the mix of these four specific teams in the LCS is pretty amusing heading into some inevitably contentious CBA talks.
