Amid the NLCS trophy presentation, surrounded by his victorious ballclub, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said the quiet part out loud. Very loud.

“They said the Dodgers are ruining baseball,” the future Hall of Fame skipper hollered to the home crowd. “Let’s get four more wins and really ruin baseball.“

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Well, the Dodgers got those wins — if just barely. By outlasting the Toronto Blue Jays in a World Series for the ages, these Los Angeles Dodgers are officially the first repeat champions in MLB since the 1998-2000 Yankees.

But with the revelry, the champagne, the confetti and the parade comes a torrent of scrutiny. It is noisy at the top. Dominance brings debate. This franchise has become a lightning rod, a token, a symbol for the sport’s economic shortcomings and imbalances. Understandably frustrated fans from other cities are holding the Dodgers and their overwhelming financial might responsible for the miserly behavior of other organizations. And so, the Dodgers have unleashed a contentious debate around the game about the possibility of a salary cap.

That entire dynamic is projected onto the backdrop of baseball’s upcoming labor battle. The current collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2026 season. A fierce round of negotiations is a given. A league-initiated lockout of the players is highly expected. Missing games in 2027 is a distinct possibility.

Major League Baseball remains the only prominent professional American sports league without a salary cap. The luxury tax system, implemented in 1997, was designed to encourage competitive balance and restrict big-market teams — at that time, it was the Yankees — from using their pocket books as a cudgel. Clubs that surpass the competitive balance threshold (the exact number grows slightly each year) are forced to pay a tax on the overage. The structure prevents some teams from going buckwild, but deep-pocketed behemoths such as the Dodgers view the tax as a worthwhile expenditure.

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According to FanGraphs, Los Angeles ran a payroll just under $400 million in 2025. As such, the Dodgers blasted past the CBT line, necessitating a tax payment of more than $100 million. That means the total expenditure, on players alone, for the 2025 World Series champs was more than half a billion dollars. L.A.’s playoff rotation — Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Shohei Ohtani — accounted for $131.83 million of payroll this season.

Compared to the league’s small-market penny-pinchers, that’s a preposterous figure. The Miami Marlins finished 30th in payroll this year, at an embarrassingly paltry $67.8 million, which was, coincidentally, about the amount the Dodgers spent on their players who didn’t make their playoff roster. The Milwaukee Brewers, who led MLB in wins during the regular season, boasted a somewhat sturdier $137.6 million payroll, which ranked 18th in MLB.

To be fair, the Dodgers didn’t win the World Series just because they spent money. This organization has done a superb job at all the little things and features one of the best player development operations in the sport. At the same time, the striking chasm in spending across the league is undeniable.

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As a whole, big payrolls carried the day in 2025. Six of the top 10 spenders made the postseason. Ten of the 12 playoff teams — Cincinnati and Cleveland were the exceptions — finished in the top 18 in payroll. If not for historic late-season capitulations by the big-spending Mets and Astros, those numbers would be even more striking.

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Simply put, the gap between baseball’s haves and have-nots has never been larger. That has some fans and many owners clamoring for the implementation of a salary cap.

“I wish it would be the case that we would have a salary cap in baseball the way other sports do, and maybe eventually we will, but we don’t have that now,” Orioles owner David Rubenstein said in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

“The only way to fix baseball is to do a salary cap and a floor,“ Rockies owner Dick Monfort told The Denver Gazette in March. “With a cap comes a floor. For a lot of teams, the question is: How do they get to the floor? And that includes us, probably. But on some sort of revenue-split deal, I would be all-in.”

The MLB Players Association, long considered the most powerful union in American sports, has always vehemently opposed the adoption of a salary cap. It will do so again when the topic inevitably arrives at the bargaining table next winter. The union views an artificial ceiling on player contracts as inherently anti-free market. In its mind, the prevailing issue with the sport is not the Dodgers’ profligacy but the tightfistedness of lower-spending teams.

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Whether the growing fan support for a salary cap plays any role in future labor negotiations remains to be seen. The Dodgers’ winning the World Series certainly turned the volume up on those conversations. Public sentiment goes only so far at the bargaining table, but it’s fair to expect the league and its owners to feel increasingly empowered by the fans pleading for a cap.