On the surface, this World Series matchup between the Tampa Bay Rays and Milwaukee Brewers would seem to be something out of Rob Manfred's worst nightmares, and for reasons that have nothing to do with television ratings. (Here's your near-annual reminder that you, as a normal baseball fan and not an MLB marketing executive, aren't obligated to care about any of that and can in fact just enjoy great baseball.) That the final two teams left standing ranked 19th (Milwaukee) and 28th (Tampa) in total payroll this year is a pretty compelling argument against the necessity of a salary cap to ensure competitive balance.

And sure, a Los Angeles Dodgers three-peat would probably have been useful, in so far as it would've given Manfred and the 30 owners he works for some extra PR cover in baseball's looming labor war. But in reality, nothing that happens over the next seven games will matter much at all when it comes to whether MLB might lock out its players, or whether we might lose regular-season games in 2027.

Because while well-meaning Pittsburgh Pirates or Miami Marlins fans might just want a way to coerce their cheapskate owners into spending some more money, "competitive balance" has never been at the heart of the league's salary cap push. And they've been all too willing to tell us as much, if only we'd listen.

MLB owners want to line their own pockets, and they don't care about being villains to do it

The above clip is taken from Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner's year-end press conference earlier this week, in which he made clear exactly where he stood in the salary cap debate. If you listened to fans of small-market teams on the internet, you'd think that New York would be among those most staunchly opposed to a cap; without the ability to run $300 million payrolls, the theory goes, the Yankees would be forced to walk without a crutch.

And yet, here Steinbrenner is, banging the table for MLB's proposal — and it's far from the first time he's done so publicly. (So, too, have the Dodgers.) That leaves us with one of two options: Either Steinbrenner is simply acting out of a sense of altruism toward his small-market competitors, or there's something in this whole thing for him. Given the history of the Steinbrenner family, it shouldn't be hard to figure out which one of those scenarios is more likely.

That's the inconvenient truth that the owners don't want you to hear. Would a cap help teams like the Pirates, Marlins and others to be more competitive? Sure, probably. But those teams aren't spending right now not because they can't, but because they don't want to — because they've deemed it suboptimal for the profitability of their investment. Were a salary floor to be instituted tomorrow, Pittsburgh would suddenly find the means to add some $70 million in salary. Everyone, from the Dodgers on down, has fallen in line here because fixing costs is the single most effective lever owners can pull to boost their precious franchise valuations. And that's something even Steinbrenner can get on board with.

So you can laud the Rays and Brewers for their front-office acumen all you want. You can point to that sort of organizational competence and rightly claim that money isn't the reason the league's bottom-feeders remain there year after year. But it's going to fall on deaf ears, because the owners are having a different conversation entirely. This is about making them richer, and they've clearly decided that torching the 2027 season or becoming villains in the eyes of at least a portion of their fan base isn't enough to offset that long-term financial gain.