THE BETTER ORGANIZATION WILL PREVAIL IRRESPECTIVE OF OTHER INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS.

Come see what's brewing.

😃, i’m having a great time on this app right now pic.twitter.com/YT4It9Zc5J

— nickmearsmuse (@Brew_Crew_fan) July 21, 2025

Baseball's All-Star break can be a momentum-breaker, although the Milwaukee Brewers came out of the break by winning three straight in Los Angeles, sweeping all six games with last year's champions.

Los Angeles Times sports pundit Bill Shaikin suggested that if the Dodgers couldn't repeat, perhaps the best thing for organized baseball was for the Brewers to win.

If you’re a Dodgers fan, of course, you would love to see the Dodgers win the World Series again. If you’re a baseball fan above all, though, you ought to be pulling for the Milwaukee Brewers.

The Dodgers served as a convenient bogeyman for owners of many other major league teams last winter. To fans pointing a collective finger at the owner of their local team, all too many of those owners pointed a finger in our direction: It’s not us. It’s them.

“The Dodgers are the greatest poster children we could’ve had for how something has to change,” Colorado Rockies owner Dick Monfort told the Denver Gazette last March.

How, those owners shrugged, can we compete against a team playing in a major market and spending half a billion dollars on a star-studded roster?

Major league baseball, recall, does not impose as many constraints on team owners as the other professional sports.  The National Football League does all sorts of things to make it hard for a champion team to repeat.

The National Football League structures competition in such a way that it's difficult for any one team to remain better than the others for any length of time.  There is, first, attrition of players, broken down by age and sex and the length of the season.  Then there's the inverse-order draft, giving the current poor performers more favorable access to the reserve army of aspirants.  The salary cap constrains spending on high performers, and high-performing veterans can hawk their services on the free-agency market.  In addition, schedules going forward are based on current performance.  Under the current configuration of the league, each team plays six games with divisional opponents each year, four games with the teams of another conference division, and four games with the teams of a division from the other conference.  These divisions rotate predictably.  Two remaining games adjust for performance: a team that wins its division plays all three division winners within its conference.  The rationale is similar to that of a Swiss-system chess tournament, in which successful players face successively stronger and comparably successful opponents.

That scheduling makes it possible for consistently strong teams to play each other, and improve.  On the other hand, if a general manager waves a lot of money at a high-performing free agent, he must fill other positions with journeymen.  The rationale is to constrain payroll.  "Bear in mind, dear reader, that collective bargaining agreements in sports leagues serve to disarm the positional arms races among general managers at the same time that they provide terms of employment for players."

Mr Shaikin suggests that the Brewers succeed in order to head off a future baseball strike.

The Brewers play in the smallest market in the major leagues — Sacramento included, Denver definitely included.

This is not about a sprinkling of fairy dust. The Brewers have made the playoffs six times in the last seven years, prospering even beyond the financially motivated departures of star shortstop Willy Adames, Cy Young winner Corbin Burnes and two-time National League reliever of the year Devin Williams, and even after manager Craig Counsell and president of baseball operations David Stearns left for teams in major markets.

“It’s not really an abnormal year,” said designated hitter Christian Yelich, the Brewers’ franchise anchor. “Each year, we’re picked to finish last or second-to-last in our division, regardless of what happened the year before.”

The Brewers cannot pay the going rate for power, so they do not try. Of the free agents signed by Milwaukee last winter, the most expensive one in the lineup for Friday’s victory at Dodger Stadium: outfielder Jake Bauers, signed for $1.4 million. Shortstop Joey Ortiz was obtained in the trade of Burnes; third baseman Caleb Durbin was acquired in the trade of Williams.

Recall, dear reader, Cold Spring Shops thoughts about the organization before the 2023 trade deadline.

Put another way, when the San Diego Padres offered the Brewers multiple prospects for Josh Hader, the business decision to make the trade might have been the right one.  Yes, that might have been demoralizing to the clubhouse, trading an All-Star for promising prospects, and it's possible the trade was demoralizing to Mr Hader, whose struggles as closer for the Padres have prompted some schadenfreude in Brewer Nation.  From what I understand, the Padre clubhouse is not as harmonious as the Brewers (in basketball, choose any of Boston, Brooklyn, or Miami's locker rooms and compare them with the Bucks) and a career move at the same time your wife had a difficult delivery of a new baby might affect the performance of even the most focused of professionals.

At the same time, if that gaudy start was not indicative of the current team's playoff capabilities, the prudent thing for management to do might be to maintain that winning culture by developing future performers, rather than going all-in for a championship (which might work every hundred years, if you're the Cubs, but look how that 2016 corps has scattered) that you might not achieve.  We'll be watching developments, for instance, out of San Diego to see if they secure that final wild card.  With the Brewers doing Harvey's Wallbangers, er, Counsell's Crushers stuff on Saturday night, I'm not yet ready to give up on this season.  Consistently in the mix is not a bad place to be for a small-market team in a town known for beer.

A World Series win for Milwaukee might be just the thing,  Mr Shaikin suggests, to preserve the status quo in baseball, including the opportunities for the Dodgers and Yankees to keep loading up on talent.

The collective bargaining agreement expires after next season. The owners have not explicitly stated a salary cap is their goal — well, the Rockies’ owner has — but, at least the way the players’ union sees it, why else would commissioner Rob Manfred already be talking about a lockout as a means to an end?

At the All-Star Game, union chief Tony Clark blasted the concept of a salary cap.

“This is not about competitive balance,” Clark said. “This is institutionalized collusion.”

A salary cap would provide owners with cost certainty and potential increases in franchise values, not that fans would care much about either. So, to the extent that owners might settle on a talking point in negotiations, what Manfred said at the All-Star Game would be it: “There are fans in a lot of our markets who feel like we have a competitive balance problem.”

If you’re the union, you’ll say MLB has not had a repeat champion in 25 years. If you’re an owner, you’ll say no small-market team has won the World Series in 10 years.

If you’re the union, you’ll say expanded playoffs offer every team the chance to win a wild-card spot and get hot in October, as the 84-win Arizona Diamondbacks did two years ago. But, should the Brewers win the World Series this year, owners certainly would call it the exception that proves the rule.

Over the last seven years, the Brewers have made the playoffs as many times as the Yankees have. Yet, for all their success in the regular season, the Brewers have not won a postseason series since 2018.

Which might be where the odds being in the favor of the big payrolls tells.  When you think of World Series wins, what teams come to mind?  The Yankees.  The Dodgers, both in Brooklyn and in Los Angeles.  The Cardinals.  It's about establishing a winning attitude.  "George Will offers a Trenchant Observation About Many Things in the course of taking stock of the baseball season.  'The itch to fix complex systems often underestimates the ability of markets, broadly understood, to respond and adapt to incentives.'"  Perhaps that applies to the imposition of a salary cap or other restrictions on free agency.

The better organization prevails.  The Cardinals have that winning culture and a few World Series rings.  The Brewers, a culture adapted to the incentives, but no rings.  The Dodgers have a big payroll and more than a few rings.  Take a ride on Metrolink, though, and although the train will get you to the Angels' stadium, how many rings do they have?  Similarly, in New York, the Yankees are almost always in the mix, but the Mets are up and down.  Chicago?  World Series wins by both teams in this century, and a lot of inconsistency.