SPORTS OPINION
It’s a rough time to be a midwestern baseball fan.
The last time a team from the heartland made the World Series was 2016. The Chicago Cubs took down the Cleveland Indians in one of the most exciting fall classics in recent history, but Major League Baseball’s economic disparity is making it challenging for those Midwest matchups to happen anymore.
MLB doesn’t have a salary cap, contrary to other professional sports leagues like the National Football League and the National Basketball Association. MLB has a luxury tax system where teams are taxed for every dollar they spend above a certain amount. For example, if a team exceeds a $244 million payroll in 2026, they’ll be taxed on every dollar they spend above that mark. This policy is supposed to limit wealthier teams from constantly out-bidding smaller market teams in free agency, but juggernauts have stopped flinching at these taxes.
The back-to-back World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers are one of those teams, and right now, they’re slated to carry a staggering $412 million of payroll into 2026, which would incur a tax bill of $160 million, according to Spotrac. For reference, the Minnesota Twins have a projected payroll of $140.5 million for 2026 — $20 million less than the Dodgers’ tax bill. It’s only in recent seasons that the spending disparity has grown this much.
In 2010, the average payroll ranking of the Midwest teams — the Cubs, Twins, Detroit Tigers, St. Louis Cardinals, Kansas City Royals, Cincinnati Reds, Milwaukee Brewers, Cleveland and Chicago White Sox — averaged to be No. 13 out of 30 teams, according to data from Steve O’s Umpire Resources.
The Cubs had the No. 3 payroll, the Tigers had the No. 6, and the White Sox had the No. 7. But from 2023 to 2025, the Cubs and White Sox were the only Midwest teams to crack the top 10 in payroll — and there were at No. 9 and No. 10 for one season each, respectively. The average payroll position of those nine teams dropped to No. 19 and 20 during those three years.
Midwest teams are also choosing to trade away star players before they become free agents, operating under the assumption that they’d get outbid by a wealthy team in the open market. A prime example came this offseason when the Brewers traded starting pitcher Freddy Peralta to the New York Mets.
Peralta was a career-long Brewer and had been on the team since 2018. Despite Milwaukee winning its division and advancing to the National League Championship Series (the semifinals) last season, the team traded away its star because he’ll become a free agent in 2027. Instead of going all-in after a successful season, the Brewers made a decision that hurt their 2026 roster and decreased their chances of winning a championship because they couldn’t compete economically.
Who’s to blame and what’s next?
It’s easy to blame teams like the Dodgers for bullying the league with their wealth, but they’re also taking advantage of unnecessarily frugal small-market teams.
Owners of Midwest teams put limits on spending that have handcuffed front offices from making championship moves. The Minnesota Twins exhibited this in 2023.
That season, the Twins ended an 18-year playoff drought and won a playoff series against the Toronto Blue Jays. The team got knocked out in the American League Division Series against the Houston Astros, but it was heading in a positive direction. The logical next step would’ve been to continue adding to an already impressive roster, but the ownership took a different route — they cut payroll.
The team quickly went downhill, missing the playoffs in 2024 and 2025 and trading away 40% of players on the active roster at last year’s trade deadline. If they’d spent more money, maybe they’d be in a position to compete for a World Series. Instead, they’ve joined other Midwest teams as bottom dwellers in baseball.
While this may seem bleak for fans, the hope is that change will come. The current Collective Bargaining Agreement between MLB’s owners and players will expire after the 2026 season, and the two sides will negotiate baseball’s next economic system.
The hope for Midwest fans is that the two sides reach an agreement that decreases some of the economic disparity. But the CBA is contentious, and when the last one was negotiated in 2022, discussions took so long that a work stoppage happened and regular-season games were nearly lost.
This is a worry for 2027, but the hope is that no games are missed, and an economic system emerges that gives fans more World Series like 2016.
