Have the three Wild Cards somewhat mitigated baseball’s wealth inequality?
The topic of MLB parity has been top of mind and tip of tongue this offseason. It’s the natural result of the Los Angeles Dodgers signing numerous top-tier free agents and the New York Mets—with their free-spending owner—cleaning up the rest. The gulf between the top and bottom payroll teams hasn’t seemed this wide since the late 1990s.
In a sense, parity has always been broken in MLB. Without a salary cap to regulate spending, teams in larger markets or that just happen to be owned by “hey, this is a fun hobby!” tech bros (and the like) always have a substantial financial advantage over those in smaller markets or owned by “we must protect the family business” types.
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Baseball has tried to mitigate this rich-and-poor gap via a luxury tax. If that has helped at all, it has been nominal—with the big clubs now just going on spending sprees and reigning in the wallet here-and-there to avoid the compounding penalties.
As such, it is easy to look at baseball and see an extremely frustrating financial parity system—one in which a certain subset of teams constantly gets the jump on others by happenstance & geography. I wouldn’t blame anyone for drawing that conclusion.
But there’s another aspect to consider when it comes to parity: it isn’t all about $$$. The Dodgers have captured exactly two championships (one of those in a pandemic bubble) since Fernando Valenzuela was slinging sombreros. From 2001-present, the New York Yankees have added one—2009—banner. The New York Mets are…the New York Mets.
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Simply put: spending the most money does not equal popping bottles on a yearly basis.
Do the deep-pocket clubs make the playoffs more than other squads? Certainly. But MLB has somewhat mitigated that inequity via the six-team playoff structure. In looking at the three years (2022-2024) of three Wild Cards, a 90-72 record was the average WC mark in both leagues. On three AL WC occasions, 86 wins punched an October ticket. In the NL, 84 WC wins allowed bonus baseball twice. If shooting for 84 wins isn’t the goal of any team every season, I’d argue a problem exists internally rather than economically.
Putting this all together, we’ve learned that while monetary advantage increases playoff opportunities, it does not guarantee ticker tape parades. The postseason—and its succession of short series—is the great equalizer (just ask Billy Beane), and more teams are making the October tournament than ever before. Ergo: a sort of “forced parity” even within a broken system.
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So, if you are currently bemoaning baseball’s competitive landscape I feel your pain—to a certain extent. But remember: if your team-of-choice comes out victorious slightly more than not, they’ll almost certainly be battling for entry into the giant roulette wheel that is the MLB playoffs.