It’s good that a recent article at The New Yorker posed the question, “Did The Dodgers Ruin Baseball?” and, eventually, responded with “no.” What’s less good is… pretty much everything else in said article. Every time a collective bargaining agreement is set to expire, there are readers to remind and to educate, so it’s a shame that this particular effort missed the mark, especially given The New Yorker’s status as a legacy media outlet with a sizable following and influence.

But hey, that gives us an opportunity to do the educating and reminding ourselves. Let’s consider the overall premise of the piece first: The reason the question about baseball’s ruination was brought up at all is because of the Dodgers trading for Tarik Skubal before this summer’s deadline. To which author Diego Lasarte said, “With every superstar the Dodgers add, the more attractive they become to other superstars. Put another way, the Dodgers may have become too big to fail. And the real ramifications of this, some have suggested, will arrive not in October, when the world expects the Dodgers to hoist another World Series trophy, but later in the year, when the owners of other teams, dissatisfied with the current arrangement of things, insist on changes that the players can’t abide, causing all baseball to stop for the foreseeable future.”

That’s simply not true, though: commissioner Rob Manfred discussed using the lockout like a weapon—more like a .22 than a nuclear weapon, if you’ll recall—in an interview in January 2025. That’s over a full year before actual collective bargaining occurred between the league and the Players Association, months after the Dodgers officially shed their postseason-choking reputation and won their first full-season championship in a generation. Hell, that interview was published mere days after Tanner Scott signed a free agent deal with the Dodgers and supposedly made some owners hardline believers in the need for a salary cap. MLB had already decided that a lockout and potential work stoppage were both necessary and normal outcomes of the expiration of the current CBA, well before the Dodgers had repeated, never mind threatened to make it three in a row.

Which is as good a time as any to remind that MLB’s owners will certainly attempt to use the Skubal acquisition as ammunition, but their targets were set regardless of what actually happened in reality. As I wrote prior to the 2025 World Series: