On the morning after the Lakers got swept out of the playoffs and the Dodgers lost their fourth consecutive game, Magic Johnson flashed his trademark smile and stepped to the podium to talk soccer.
“The world’s game is coming to the greatest city in the world,” Johnson said Tuesday.
In Los Angeles, Johnson joined in a celebration marking one month until the World Cup arrives in town. Meanwhile, in New York, representatives of Major League Baseball and its players’ union held the first session of collective bargaining negotiations widely expected to be so contentious that the 2027 season could be in jeopardy.
The Dodgers might not be the lone reason for the dispute, but they are Exhibit A. For these negotiations, the owners have shifted their benchmark for competitive balance from making the playoffs to winning the World Series.
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No small-market team has won the World Series since the Kansas City Royals in 2015, and the Dodgers last year became the first team in 25 years to win back-to-back championships.
If you’re a Dodgers fan, these are the best of times. If you own one of the other 29 teams, you can complain that you cannot sell championship hope and faith if the Dodgers are spending five times as much as the Cleveland Guardians.
On the day the negotiations started, the Guardians were in first place in the American League Central. Of the first-place teams in the six divisions, four reside in small markets: Cleveland, San Diego, Tampa Bay and Sacramento/Las Vegas. The team with the highest payroll in the majors — not the Dodgers, but the New York Mets — had the worst record in the majors.
On opening day, Dodgers chairman Mark Walter told me this: “Here’s what the problem is: Money helps us win. We can’t win all the time. We’ve got to have some parity.”
Johnson is L.A.’s ultimate champion. As a player, he won with the Lakers. As an owner, he won with the Dodgers, Sparks and LAFC.
So, after the soccer talk was done Tuesday, I asked Johnson what a Dodgers fan should think when the Dodgers chairman says the team can’t win all the time.
Johnson, who is one of Walter’s ownership partners, laughed.
“We want to win all the time,” Johnson said. “But, realistically, we can’t win all the time.”
Why not?
The Dodgers just went back-to-back, and everyone at the championship rally — from Shohei Ohtani to Mookie Betts, from Dave Roberts to Andrew Friedman to Walter himself — giddily talked about a threepeat. They run L.A. — and now Japan — and their star-studded team leads baseball in road attendance, generating money for the rival owners that complain about the Dodgers.
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“Nobody can win all the time,” Johnson said. “Mark made that comment, and I think he wants — everybody wants — the game to be great. It’s great when there is parity. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what you’re seeing in the NBA now. You want the same thing in Major League Baseball.
“Do I ever want to lose? No. But it’s great for the game that it can be even and everybody has a real fair chance of winning.”
In the NBA, which has the salary cap that major league owners covet as a supposed solution to competitive balance, the Oklahoma City Thunder are eight victories from winning back-to-back championships, just like the Dodgers did. The Sacramento Kings, the kind of small-market team a salary cap is intended to lift toward parity, have made the playoffs once in the past 20 seasons.
However baseball’s owners and players resolve their differences, the almost certain lockout in December is expected to be followed by a season-threatening staredown: Do the players give in on a salary cap rather than give up their salaries for part or all of the season?
Or do the owners surrender on the salary cap, well aware that a 2027 lockout could drive away fans on the eve of media rights negotiations in 2028? After the 1994-95 strike, the average attendance did not return to pre-strike levels until 2006.
And how long might the unified front Walter and the other 29 owners are putting up now last, once games and the revenues that flow from them are lost?
Golden State Warriors owner Joe Lacob, one of the runners-up in the sale of the Padres, said at a Sportico conference last week that his group’s bid assumed the possibility of MLB not playing the 2027 season. In order for the NHL to secure a salary cap, its owners shut down the sport for an entire season.
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The Dodgers sold 4 million tickets last season. If parity would make it harder for the Dodgers to win, what would Johnson tell the team’s fans?
“We’re going to try to win all the time,” he said. “That’s what we are telling our fans. But, probably, things are going to change after this season, so we’ll see what those changes are.”
If the Dodgers do not threepeat, or even if they somehow fail to make the playoffs, no matter. The bargaining battle is on.
But the baseball gods surely had a laugh about this: On the eve of the first bargaining session, and for the first time in the Walter ownership era that started in 2012, the Dodgers lost a third consecutive game by at least five runs.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
