Thomas McAleer @thomas_mcaleer_ - Twitter Profile

4 days ago

The Dodgers already have Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts, among more. Jeff Passan says they are the favorites to add Tarik Skubal, the reigning two-time Cy Young winner. Four months later, the CBA expires. This trade might be the last piece of evidence the owners need to shut the sport down. On pure baseball logic the move is inevitable. Passan reported the Tigers will trade Skubal and named the Dodgers the favorite. Los Angeles has the best record in baseball and arguably the best farm system in baseball at the same time, which is not supposed to be possible. They can absorb the roughly $10 million Skubal is owed without blinking. Bob Nightengale reports the Dodgers are also Skubal's preferred free agency destination this winter, so this is not even a rental. It is a pre-acquisition. Now the calendar. The collective bargaining agreement expires December 1. The owners have proposed the first salary cap since 1994. Multiple owners have told Passan the only real path to a cap runs through missing the 2027 season. One official said they are ready to burn the house down. The mechanism connecting the trade to the lockout is simple. The Dodgers are the owners' entire case. Buster Olney wrote it plainly. The spending of the top teams has reinforced to the other 28 that change is necessary, and they believe that change is a cap. Every argument the owners will make across the table this winter is a picture of the Dodgers roster. Ohtani's $700 million. Deferred money. A rotation of aces. And now, potentially, the reigning two-time Cy Young winner added at the deadline for prospects, because they have so much talent they can buy the best pitcher alive with their surplus. The Dodgers adding Skubal does not just improve the Dodgers. It hands the owners their closing exhibit, timed four months before the negotiation. The competitive balance argument is empirically wrong. Baseball has produced 16 different champions since 2000, more than any capped league. The Dodgers are not breaking a rule. They are excelling within all of them, drafting, developing and spending at once. The punishment for running the best organization in the sport is that the other 29 owners get to point at you and demand a system that makes you impossible. But being wrong does not make the argument weak. It makes it convenient. Small market owners do not want to outspend the Dodgers. They want cost certainty, because cost certainty raises franchise values, and the Dodgers roster is the best sales brochure a cap has ever had. Every superteam headline between now and December 1 is worth more to the owners' negotiating position than it is to the Dodgers' World Series odds. Follow the incentives to the uncomfortable place. The 29 other owners benefit from the Dodgers getting Skubal. Not on the field. At the table. The Tigers get prospects. The Dodgers get the best pitcher in baseball. The owners get their exhibit. And the sport might get a season-long lockout, argued on the back of a roster that did nothing except win too well. The Dodgers can survive a salary cap. What baseball might not survive is the year without games it takes to get one.

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Thomas McAleer

@thomas_mcaleer_

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