Can the White Sox Save Baseball From a Lockout?

Welcome to The Debrief, Box Score's freewheeling conversation about the sports we love that begins right when the action stops.

This week, we’re talking baseball—why the future of baseball may be riding on who wins the World Series; why the best thing that could happen to the Dodgers might be for them to lose; and why the White Sox (yes, those White Sox) are suddenly one of the most fascinating stories in sports.

Kelvin C. Bias
A reporter at Sports Illustrated for 25 years, Kelvin grew up in suburban L.A. spoiled by the invincible Vin Scully (“It’s time for Dodger baseball!”). When in Tokyo, he can’t go six seconds without seeing Shohei Ohtani’s face…somewhere. 

Sridhar Pappu
Sridhar is the award-winning author of The Year of the Pitcher: Bob Gibson, Denny McLain and the End of Baseball’s Golden Age, and Murderers’ Row: The Making of the 1927 Yankees, out in March 2027 from W. W. Norton.

Albert Chen
A Box Score co-founder, Albert is the author of Billion Dollar Fantasy and covered baseball for Sports Illustrated.

There's an unsettling possibility hanging over this postseason: that we’re watching the last championship before baseball goes to war with itself. The labor deal expires in December, and owners want a salary cap. Look at who’s left. On one side: small-market Milwaukee, Tampa Bay and Cleveland. On the other: the Dodgers and Yankees. And then there are the White Sox, two years removed from 121 losses and now two wins from the ALCS. Is this October a referendum on the future of baseball?

Kelvin: As a Dodgers fan, I’d love for the Dodgers to three-peat. The run they’re on now is historically significant, they have a roster stacked with future Hall of Famers, and it’s not their fault Detroit dealt Tarik Skubal to them. 

But the Brewers and Rays will save baseball from a lockout. At least that’s the secret hope of everyone. I think that a small-market World Series will help allay the definitive nature of there being a lockout. If the Dodgers go on and destroy everyone, I almost feel like a lockout is inevitable. 

Sridhar: Let’s be honest. The best World Series winner for baseball would be the White Sox. A parade through Vatican City? I don’t think you beat that.

But I really admire both Milwaukee and Tampa Bay. The Brewers reward their fans. They really do have a feeling that they owe it to them to put a 90-win team on the field. They’re just gunning for it every single year. Organizationally, they have competent people at every single level—they can lose their manager, their general manager, and they'll let players go. They’ll trade people at peak value and they’ll still win 90-something games. 

The teams all want to be the Tampa Bay Rays because, well, they don’t spend any money. But I admire them because their floor is also 90 wins. They had a couple down years, which we can attribute to Wander Franco’s effect on the team—making him the cornerstone of that franchise for a decade and then he was gone. That set them back a couple years. They stumbled, and now they’re back. 

Tampa’s ballpark is an abomination and they can do a lot of their mad-scientist moves because they don’t really feel like they need to draw fans. But Milwaukee is different—they sell out their stadium on a regular basis. For the Brewers to finally come through with this team, it would prove once and for all that competency wins.

Albert: Both the Rays and Brewers draft and trade for the raw material and then go out and build the machine. Four years ago, Jacob Misiorowski was a No. 63 overall draft pick out of Crowder College after one year of junior college baseball. This past winter he added 25 pounds of lower body strength and had twice as many pitches 100 mph or over as any other pitcher in the era of pitch tracking. The way the Brewers have developed him and managed his innings is so impressive.

I’ve loved the Rays Way since Joe Maddon was bringing Dominican merengue bands into the clubhouse. We know how little money they’ve always had to work with, but the gap has actually gotten wider over time. This year’s Yankees are spending roughly $230 million more than Tampa Bay. That’s more than the entire payroll of nine other teams. We shouldn’t take for granted how incredibly impressive it is how Tampa’s been keeping pace with everyone else. Since 2008, only the Dodgers and Yankees have won more regular-season games than Tampa Bay. 

So yeah, a Rays-Brewers World Series would be cool, a perfect advertisement for competitive balance. But I’m just not sure anyone in America would actually watch. Let’s face it. It would be a ratings disaster for MLB. 

Ratings have actually been up in baseball, fueled by the Dodgers’ rise. At the same time, L.A. is baseball’s new Evil Empire. They’re gunning to be the first team to three-peat since the 1998–2000 Yankees. At the end of the day, isn’t having the Dodgers in the mix good for the game? 

Sridhar: The Dodgers were just what the game needed. The super team we needed after that Rangers-Diamondbacks World Series, beating the Yankees with the game’s greatest star finally getting his. Every sport needs that villain. 

Last year, everyone in America was rooting for… Toronto. The Dodgers are the standard that everyone has to play up to. They’re what this sport needs. 

Kelvin: It’s true that the Dodgers are now the West Coast version of the Yankees. It’s bad for baseball if you don’t like the Dodgers. It’s good for baseball if your small-market team gets a significant, or bigger, share in revenue from the Dodgers' TV and merchandise sales, and actually spends that extra money on signing big free agents and fielding a competitive, audience-expanding team. 

I used to like sporting my Dodgers hat more when they sucked as a nod to missing my hometown as I listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers on repeat. Now people all over the world are wearing Dodger hats.

Albert: Those hats are why the Ohtani Dodgers are one of the greatest growth engines baseball’s ever had. There was a report that put the economic impact of Ohtani and his teammates Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki at roughly $900 million in Japan during the 2025 postseason alone—that’s across broadcasting, merchandise, travel and fan spending. In other words, roughly a billion dollars of economic activity from three Japanese players in one postseason.

But the story’s getting a little old. The Dodgers are the Avengers not just because they’re a super team stitched together from everyone else's stars, but because it’s the same characters, the same storylines, and we all know how it ends. Baseball’s getting a bit of Marvel fatigue.

Sridhar: And then there are the accusations of financial misconduct against the Dodgers' owner, Mark Walter. The whole argument against the Dodgers from other teams has been that they have unlimited resources, they can do whatever they want, and they built an empire that none of us can compete against. And now it’s like, wait, where exactly is this money coming from?

Sridhar, you raised Mark Walter. Owners want a cap because the Dodgers have money no one can match. Now the Dodgers' owner is under federal investigation over how his insurance companies moved money into his own businesses. Does this hand owners their best argument for a salary cap, or blow it up?

Sridhar: The argument has always been that the problem is all these other clubs have been mismanaged badly. There is already a salary cap of some sort—it's just that other clubs are pocketing their luxury-tax money and not spending it. We've seen that in Pittsburgh and with the A's.

But the owners are going to stand firm and say, "We need a salary cap like the NFL, like the NBA." And if I'm a player, I'm looking at the NBA, where a cap-circumvention scandal just took down an owner in one of the biggest scandals in sports history. I'm looking at the NFL, which is supposed to create parity, where dynasties rule and players get cut or asked to take pay cuts all the time. I'm going to give up what I have for that? No.

Players don’t want to get paid like they do on the Rays. They want Dodgers money. They want Yankees money. But they can point to these organizations and say, “You're talking about competitive balance,” and look around the playoffs. We're not seeing all these free-spending teams like the Mets advancing to the World Series.

What we're seeing are really well-run organizations making it to the final rounds because they're well-run.

Kelvin: It’s going to be interesting to see where the Walter story heads in the offseason. Will the Dodgers, maybe in a weakened position given the looming investigation, have to concede some added money in revenue sharing? I’d love for them to three-peat, but  if Atlanta wins two more games and bounces the Dodgers from the playoffs, the bull's-eye on the Walter situation might actually fade. 

But if they do have an easy road to another title, that will put the investigative lens on this whole scandal. Where is this money from? You can’t ignore the similarities to the Clippers situation.

By the way, the Clippers need to change their name. They've needed to change their name for, like, 40 years. That's the first step to their exorcism of a bad curse. But that's a totally different topic. 

And that brings us back to the strangest team in this whole conversation: the White Sox, whose incredible run says either something profound about competitive balance or something about how little money has to do with any of it. What’s the lesson of the 2026 White Sox?

Kelvin: They’re the inverse of the Dodgers—no one expected them to win anything. I feel weird saying this, because it’s Chicago, but to me they’re a small-market team. Right now they’re a lesson on how in baseball, you can get on a hot streak and anything can happen. It’s sort of like hockey when the Kings won the Stanley Cup in 2012, and they were an eight seed. To me, baseball is the same, where once you’re in the playoffs, anybody could win it.

Albert: What I love about this team is how it was built, like a heist crew of castoffs trying to run off with the trophy. Garrett Crochet goes to Boston for a pile of prospects. Miguel Vargas comes over from the Dodgers as a near throw-in in a three-team deadline deal. And last winter, when every rich team talked itself out of Munetaka Murakami, a guy who hit 56 home runs in Japan, the White Sox signed him for two years and $34 million.

That's an old-school way to build a winner: a few pretty smart trades, one bargain signing, and some young guys who got good at the same time. Nobody does this anymore. I wouldn't call it a blueprint, though. Blueprints are what Sridhar's Reds had.

Sridhar: My first team and I are on hiatus. I’m taking a break from the Reds. It’s been an interesting couple of years—you can read Ken Rosenthal and Trent Rosecrans’ article to see why. 

There’s something very White Sox-y about this team. Because when you think about that 2005 White Sox championship team in the midst of the analytics revolution and the way they did it, that was the most anti-Moneyball team that was ever going to win a World Series. It was a one-off, and I don't think this team is a one-off, but I think they were in the middle of implementing a blueprint. It's just that they stumbled into something really good. 

Look at the teams that had real plans and fell off, like the Reds and the Orioles. Total teardowns, complete visions, telling fans it'll take X number of years, and then we'll have sustained success. But baseball is unpredictable, and these master plans don't necessarily work. 

So to White Sox fans: Enjoy the ride. And to every fan whose front office is saying, "Be patient, wait four years and watch," I'd say: Don't be patient. You don't deserve that. 🧢

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