Salary Caps, Savings Accounts And Searching For Your Perfect Audience

One of the most satisfying rewards in writing a book is receiving a thoughtful insight from others into the book you spent years creating. It used to happen in mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, but those days are gone

Even more rewarding is when you receive feedback years after the publication. Such was the case last week as book research expert Anny Golloway (BOOK RESEARCH SPECIALIST) tackled our 2018 book Cap In Hand: How salary caps are killing pro sports and how the free market could save them. She also addressed Tony Comper’s book Personal Account: 25 tales about leadership, learning and legacy, a book we wrote with former BMO CEO Tony Comper.

Golloway spends time expertly analyzing the thrust of the books, but also her specialty on getting the books into the hands of those who can most benefit from them. (Both books are still available at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.) Here are her reviews.

Cap In Hand: How salary caps are killing pro sports and how the free market could save them. (2018)

“Your career in investigative sports journalism has built a distinct legacy, particularly your work exposing systemic issues in league governance and sports labor. With Cap in Hand, you took on a deeply entrenched assumption in North American professional sports: the idea that salary caps and artificial parity models serve the best interests of the game. It is a rare book that approaches league mechanics with uncompromising economic transparency rather than leaning on standard fan nostalgia.

The central thesis offers disgruntled fans a powerful realization. You clearly demonstrate that mechanisms like salary caps, drafts, and revenue redistribution function primarily to protect executive profits and reward organizational mediocrity rather than lowering ticket costs or enhancing competitive play. When readers grasp this, the emotional payoff is immediate; it validates their quiet frustration with degraded regular-season play and endless team tanking.

However, standard sports distribution creates an unavoidable discoverability gap for a book with this specific focus. Cap in Hand is positioned as a traditional sports book, yet its core content addresses macro-economic structures, labor policy, and free-market dynamics. Casual readers searching for game recaps or player biographies scroll past it, while the business professionals, policy thinkers, and economics enthusiasts who would actively engage with your argument rarely look in the sports aisle.

This mismatch affects how potential readers encounter the book. People experiencing the exact problems you resolve—such as ticket price inflation or frustration over corporate league engineering—search online using problem-focused phrasing. They query why ticket prices keep climbing despite spending limits, or why bad teams are incentivized to fail. Because the market positions the text around the technical concept of salary caps rather than those immediate fan friction points, a large segment of your natural audience simply never sees it.

Relying on traditional Canadian sports media circuits and your established platforms introduced the title to core sports traditionalists. Yet it left broader, non-traditional networks untouched. There remains a vast, untapped reader base across free-market business channels, sports management programs, and policy circles that aligns directly with your free-market analysis but remains unaware the book exists.

Bridging this gap requires aligning the book's presence with actual search behaviours and alternative economic networks. By translating the core macro-economic principles into direct answers for everyday fan frustrations, the work can systematically intercept the exact audience seeking those answers.

This type of strategic alignment is the focus of Book Visibility Mapping (BVM). By examining the precise intersection between your core message and organic reader search patterns, BVM helps identify where a book is missing its intended audience and highlights the clearest paths to bridge that gap.

Your work dismantles complex league structures with exceptional clarity. Ensuring that analysis reaches the readers actively looking for those answers is simply the final piece of the conversation.

Personal Account: 25 Tales about Learning, Leadership And Legacy. (2020)

“Personal Account stands out because it blends four decades of executive banking stewardship with a rare humanities perspective. Anchoring twenty-five critical business lessons in quotes from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales creates a unique bridge between literary character studies and high-stakes corporate governance. By demonstrating how a major financial institution can drive major software overhauls, introduce automated banking machines, and establish progressive Indigenous banking models under the Latin principle of festina lente, you have codified a calm, principled blueprint for executive resilience.

Readers who encounter your work often highlight how surprisingly digestible and practical these stories are. Reviewers frequently remark that the book is not boring at all, pointing to the bite-sized nature of each case study as a rare, insightful look into C-suite decision-making. By pairing your long-term institutional perspective with Bruce Dowbiggin’s journalistic pacing, the narrative transforms complex regulatory challenges and macroeconomic shocks into clear lessons on leadership, learning, and legacy.

However, there is a clear disconnect between how the book is framed and how modern corporate leaders search for guidance. Executives and rising directors facing modern disruptions rarely search for a historical account of a single Canadian institution. Instead, they are actively looking for solutions to specific operational challenges, searching for guidance on managing corporate digital transformation, balancing social responsibility with profit, or leading through financial crises.

Because the book is currently positioned primarily as an institutional history of the Bank of Montreal, executives outside regional financial circles can pass it by completely. Global readers in places like New York or London who urgently need an elite handbook on operational risk, technological transformation, or social equity initiatives miss the fact that your twenty-five lessons directly answer their current professional anxieties.

This packaging creates a barrier where a deeply valuable leadership framework remains tucked away in archival channels. When an author’s background and title lean heavily into institutional history rather than universal executive problems, the book misses the very leaders who would benefit most from its ethical and structural lessons. The issue is not the quality of your career insights, but rather the way those insights are indexed in the public domain.

These patterns emerged from an evaluation framework called Book Visibility Mapping, which analyzes how an author’s core principles connect with the real-world search habits, needs, and discovery routes of their target readers. The goal is simply to identify where a book's current discoverability creates artificial boundaries around its potential reach.

Your focus in writing this memoir was clearly centred on stewardship, institutional legacy, and passing down timeless lessons rather than commercial self-promotion. Reframing the public positioning around universal executive challenges like slow-and-steady tech adoption or ethical stakeholder management could help bridge that gap, ensuring your forty-year blueprint reaches the broader global audience of leaders it was meant to guide.”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his 2023 book Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, was voted a Top 20 greatest professional hockey books of all time by bookauthority.org . https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1770415300?linkCode=gs2&tag=uuid0a1-20 His previous book with his son Evan, Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. His new poetry collection In Other Words is available via brucedowbigginbooks.ca and on Kindle books at https://www.amazon.ca/sk=hockey+books+bruce+dowbiggin&crid=3HACUVQ91F1Z8&sprefix=hockey+books+bruce+dowbiggin%2Caps%2C170&ref=nb_sb_noss

Anny Gollaway

BOOK RESEARCH SPECIALIST

"Turning Pages Into Insights"

Web www.insightignitee.com

Mail info@insightignitee.com

How Sports Betting Turns Fans Against Their Favourite Teams

Whereas in the past there was only one’s favourite team, today’s sports fans monitor multiple pick-up teams on a number of platforms. Granular water-cooler talk is now peppered with happy discussions of how Aaron Judge or Connor McDavid racked up a big night against your sentimental childhood squad. The notion of absolute fandom was shattered forever. And it's not coming back.

Just in time for the Alberta Referendum vote the province has become the second Canadian province to allow licensed online sports betting. Except you can't bet on politics under the new rules. Ontario does allow political betting in the country's only other legalized betting province. Why? It's complicated.

It's early days for Alberta's sports betting, but suffice to say with the NFL cranking up next week there should be plenty of action from the over 40 licensed sites. The popularity of licensed betting will still be in the guilty-pleasure category for a while. But the problems with gambling-- you must be over 18 in Alberta-- will raise their hands soon after. Offshore betting and provincial sports lotteries have been around for years, but being able to bet a game from your sofa is a new frontier.

There has also been Fantasy sports betting for a while, too. This week will see NFL pools do their drafts from amateurs to algorithms used to win glory and money. NFL Fantasy leagues are also prodigious as the fall season approaches. No doubt NHL fans will likewise parse their sport for fantasy purposes in postseason pools as well. All geared to enhancing watching your favourite sports through the championship season.

As we wrote in March, https://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com/i-dont-like-mondays/2026/3/9/bg47fwomj76yrbl6lalw6f7hau15kd the Fantasy sports phenomenon has re-invented how sports is perceived and consumed by North Americans fans. From a diversion for sports nerds to enhance their fandom it has grown to today’s multi-billion-dollar legal sports betting universe than blankets the broadcasts and dominates the internet.

Where in the past there was only one’s favourite team, today’s sports fans monitor multiple pick-up teams on a number of platforms. Granular water-cooler talk is now peppered with happy discussions of how Aaron Judge or Connor McDavid racked up a big night against your sentimental childhood squad. The notion of absolute fandom was shattered forever. Insider information became the lingua franca.

The revolution began shortly after Roto sports became a cult hit in the 1980s. Soon, the rules and regulations governing Fantasy were heard at dinner parties and dives. Everyone from judges to Wall Street hustlers to Hollywood luminaries was in on it. “Who’s your No. 1 draft pick, Bonds or Maddux?” 

While gambling had always existed in the criminal underground and in above-board NCAA basketball pools, the appetite grew for the middle-class sports fan to profit from his/ her obsessive appetite for sports. But outside of Las Vegas, there was no legal sports gambling in North America. (Europe and Asia have long had legal sports gambling)

Leagues mortified at the thought of games being fixed pressured Congress and Parliament to halt any incursions into using their results for gambling. The first major attempts to successfully circumvent this monolith were quasi-betting pools such as Draft Kings and FanDuel who created daily “pools” where fans could assemble teams for that day. Winners were based on one-day production. Prize pools were divided among winners.

The formula spread to just about every sport from golf to auto racing to soccer. Algorithms based on successful business investing schemes were developed. The sports TV networks noticed. Soon, there were shows dedicated strictly to the craft and culture of “who is my backup third baseman” or what prospects were on the horizon for wily GMs to pick from.

The networks did not go so far as to insert any of this into their coverage of games live, of course. It was all euphemisms and wink-wink from folks such as Al Michaels or Brent Musberger. While the pressure to make sports gambling legal in the U.S. and Canada built steadily though court cases and government bills, they played hear no evil/ see no evil. Like Pravda or Tass they were censoring the reality everyone saw around them.

But stalling was a losing proposition. The leagues they covered saw an obscene amount of profit from pairing with the corporations that ran gambling. The advent of proposition betting further primed the pump. Needing money to pay the sky-rocketing price of superstar talent teams and leagues saw arms-length gambling as a solution. Don’t take money from betting, Take it from there people who run betting. 

Early in the century the dam finally broke for gambling with Supreme Court decisions that paved the way for, now, 40 American states to allow sports betting. Of them 32 allow online or apps for betting.

Thus, online touts and info are blanketing sports content with pop-up odds or banner ads running under the action itself. Traditionalists are horrified by this incursion, but it’s clear there’s no getting this tooth paste back in the betting tube. As seen by the high-profile cases of Shohei Ohtani’s translator or the point-shaving of former Toronto Raptors this has also not made sports gambling foolproof. 

But it’s too late now. Newer sites such as Kalshi and Prophet X allow you to bet on any prop or sport. Dedicated betting internet sites go 24/7 to guide live in-game betting. Cash-strapped governments needing tax revenues are opening up the sluice gates.

“Root-root-root for the home team”? Never going back.

Shooting Foul: Radical WNBA Has Lost The Plot

If you’re casting about for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest: Psycho Sports Edition you might not have expected stories about the WNBA. But as fans have now acknowledged, the past decade has defied traditional plot lines. Take the Toronto Trans Trauma where the Heathers met The Colour Purple. Now Canada’s radical Left has made the True North into the Truly Insane

Breaking: Former NBA star Enes Kanter was just kicked out of an WNBA game in Chicago after a player was triggered by his pro-woman shirt. Radical Natasha Cloud cursed out Kanter: "To every trans kid/person, You are apart of MY community & tribe. You belong. You’re loved. You’re seen. You’re perfect as you are. & you will always be protected by me."

If you’re casting about for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest: Psycho Sports Edition you might not have expected one or two stories every season about the WNBA. But as fans have now acknowledged, the past decade has defied traditional plot lines. Take the Toronto Trans Trauma where the Heathers met The Colour Purple.

From the stodgy Canada of Stephen Harper— the living embodiment of the Kowichan sweater— Canada has long projected peace and tranquility. Then along came Justin Trudeau and his faculty lounge of fashionable frauleins. Now Canada’s radical Left has made the True North into the Truly Insane. The unthinkable is now required. Men can have babies. J.K.Rowling is Goebels. 

As this unfolded Canadian media and DEI corporations were loyal to a culture bred in hyper-left culture. Even if the press corps knew it was ridiculous saying so would cost you your prestigious job covering sports.

Witness the progressive plot lines surrounding the recent visit of a white WNBA superstar to Toronto that smacks of a Ken Kesey psyop. In the past you’d have expected that Caitlin Clark bringing her superior shooting and charismatic play to modest old Hogtown would cause a parade of fans to the Scotiabank Centre. Hasn’t she made the league rich and emblematic?

She’s promoted a league that has only ever lost millions and played to friends and family in college gyms. For postmodern Toronto she’d have smashed all the feminist tracts about female subjugation and non-equity that make modern Toronto hum.  The Toronto of old (okay, Jean Chretien) would have been over the moon for Clark.

But you’d be wrong. Clark was booed steadily by the heavily female Toronto crowd on her visit to play the Tempo. Why? Because she and her teammate Sophie Cunningham refused to fall in line on men playing women’s sports. This quickly marshalled the Trans forces of Toronto into action with a wall of she-bots making themselves the story. While there media looked the other way.

The Toronto yahoos also disgraced themselves and the city by particularly targeting Cunningham. What was Sophie Cunningham’s sin? She didn’t support the viral notion of men playing in women’s sports under the banner of trans ideology? This was considered stealing the spotlight from the league’s heavy mix of LGBTQ players and BLM radicals. The hatred for was so pervasive that even Clark’s own coach (who’s married to ESPN’s Lisa Salters) wouldn’t condemn an opposing player who clotheslined her own player Cunningham.

And now we have the throwdown at courtside between Fire star Cloud and Kanter who’s seeking to playing in the WNBA under their hazy “we can’t define a woman” rules. 

You might think the definitive stance of gay tennis legend Martina Navratilova would count for something in all this. “Women’s sports is not the place for mediocre male athletes who compete as women. Period,” she has said. But Navratilova and any other women resisting the push have been shunned by the aggressive mobs of the miniscule trans community (0.007 percent of U.S. population).”

Typically you’d expect the members of the fourth estate to perk up on this juicy men-playing-women theme. Instant headlines. But that was before Trump scrambled their brains going forward from 2016. In desperation to hold their educated white female Pink Pussy Hat demographic the legacy media cratered before radical Megan Rapinoes and Angel Reeses.  To staunch the flow of subscribers to social media they’ve made radical LGBTQ women athletes into road warriors and XY men into road kill. 

While the one-offs of a Clark visit to Toronto or Clark going head to head with nemesis Angle Reese have produced good ratings, the rest of the picture is red ink and pink paraphernalia. Attendance is entirely reliant in most cities on the NBA team propping them up. 

And, as journalist Matt Calkins discovered, the league is abetted by media fan boys and fan girls in the newsroom whose goal is not accuracy but DEI hypocrisy. “After 11 years as a sports columnist at the Seattle Times, I have decided to resign. It was entirely my choice, and it was not an easy one. The impetus was the Times declining to run a column I wrote from the perspective of two female student athletes who were opposed to competing against biological males. It was one of several pieces of mine that had been spiked, and I no longer felt like I could properly do my job as a columnist.”

Which brings us back to Toronto’s shoddy treatment of Clark and Cunningham. Sophie was sanguine. “I think that's what sports is all about, you're gonna get boos, you're gonna get cheers.” But Toronto police took a stance, ticketing a Rebel Media messaging truck $265 for supporting her in parking spot outside the arena

Those who’ve known Toronto in the past must be asking themselves who are these radical women and low-T men who shout down visitors who actually believe that men can’t have babies nor dress in the same room with men still having their full tackle? Even if they’re asking they know the deck is stacked against their honesty. Better to play along or go radio silent than endorse the rights of straight women.

Rahm Gone. Will LIV Survive The Happy Gilmore Strategy?

The only certainty in 2022 was that the financial benefits for player would be significant. And it was. So good that Rahm is returning to a Tour transformed from its new schedule that is more Happy Gilmore than A Tradition Unlike any other. Can't wait till next April when they announce, now on tee \"Jon Rahm!\"

The news that John Rahm is going to pay a $250 M penalty to rteturn to the PGA Tour has many puting LIV on the clock. Ther sheiks are pulling the plug on their creation and the formats havve not taken the imaginastion of the public. That's a far cry from Jauary of 2022 when LIV was the future and the PGA Tour was road kill. Here's how we saw their entry into big time golf .

Has Saudi Arabia become the 2020s version of South Africa for sports? Back in the 1970s and 80s organized sports helped head the drive to isolate the apartheid regime in South Africa. Despite the offers of huge amounts of money (for the day) most establishment sports figures said no, leaving South Africa alone in its racist policy.

There are now the rumblings about the same shunning of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his ruling family over their politics in the region. Specifically the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 has been seen by many as typical of the regime’s cruelty. There is no doubt that the murder was bloodthirsty and arrogant. No one deserves to die that way.

Here’s how we saw the murder in our 2018 column “He May Be An SOB But He’s Our SOB: “Well, the Saudis and their latest omnipotent leader appear to have made the mistake of killing someone who frequented the same DC dining salons as the American national press and political establishment. Some broke flatbread with him in his capacity as a columnist for WaPo. He was pals with prominent reporters.

Thus, we have a fury unseen for at least a fortnight over a guy who, though he didn’t deserve to be butchered with bone saws, was something short of Jimmy Olsen, boy reporter: Nephew of arms dealer Anan Khashoggi, cousin of ill-fated Princess Di consort Dodi Fayed, dabbler in the Muslim Brotherhood propaganda, estranged pal of the current Saudi Royal family, supporter of the Turkish-Qatari axis, friend of disaffected princes and the anti-Saudi elements of the American elite.”

As the expression goes, anyone who thinks they understand Saudi Arabia and the Middle East doesn’t understand Saudi Arabia and the Middle East. But it seems that Khashoggi will nonetheless be the poster boy for the disquiet felt by celebrities such as Lewis Hamilton about a 14th century Islamic fiefdom— with more money that God— upsetting the sports apple cart.

As evidence, NBC Golf Channel hosts this week got in high dudgeon over a golf tournament the Saudis are running opposite the legendary AT&T Pebble Beach Classic in February. As is their wont the Saudis are paying so much in appearance fees that a large number of top Tour pros is headed there. Dustin Johnson, Bryson DeChambeau and Phil Mickelson are among the players to have committed to playing in what organizers hope will be a World Golf Tour.

Golf Channel’s Rich Lerner and Eamon Lynch likened the players to those who took money to appear in Sun City in the 1970s. Kashoggi’s publisher The Washington Post got straight the point. “There’s no disguising the fact that it’s blood money.”

But Jordan Spieth thinks the competition will push the Tour . "I think as a player overall it will benefit in that I think that the changes that have come from the PGA Tour have been modernized in a way that may or may not have come about if it weren't there,” he told Sky Sports.

The only certainty in 2022 was that the financial benefits for player would be significant. And it was. So good that Rahm is returning to a Tour transformed from its new schedule that is more Happy Gilmore than A Tradition Unlike any other. Can't wait till next April when they announce, now on tee "Jon Rahm!"

Hoop Screams: Kawhi Beats The Rap. Sophie Beaten Down

The NBA is not the only basketball league seeking to embarrass itself. The WNBA seems intent on disgracing itself with a league running amuck with politics and race on the court. For a league coddled by leftwing LGBTQ BLM elements and ESPN (but we repeat ourselves)  it’s getting hard to buy the obsessive race baiting.

It was a dream reunion. The Toronto Raptors re-creating the magic NBA championship of 2019 by re-acquiring their former star Kawhi Leonard. The iconic photo of Leonard’s last-second shot from the corner against Philadelphia in the deciding game of the NBA Eastern final is imprinted on the memory of every Raptors fan.

Leonard, who was about to become a free agent, then went on to lead the Raps to their first and only NBA title, defeating the Golden State Warriors. In a  city where the Maple Leafs haven’t won a Stanley Cup since 1967 and the Blue Jays have no World Series title sine 1993, it seemed too good to be true. The went mad for Kawhi, imploring him to stay longterm with the Raps. 

Sadly, Leonard instead chose the Los Angeles Clippers. While the Raptors have had some competitive teams since Leonard blew town— they made the playoffs twice— the deal signalled the end of any logical chance to dethrone the league’s elite. The chances got even dimmer this past offseason as rivals in the East loaded up on talent/ Giannis Antetokounmpo moved to Miami. Lebron James and Jaylen Brown now in Philadelphia. 

The situation gets even cloudier on Kawhi thanks to some excellent reporting from Pablo Torre Finds Out that reveals that when Leonard jumped from Toronto to L.A. the Clippers engineered some backroom deals that would enable them to circumvent the Clippers’ salary cap. Specifically Leonard had a hidden "multi-million dollar" sponsorship agreement with scoreboard manufacturing giant Daktronics. 

There are further stories of a second secret circumvention. Leonard and his representatives also sought several prohibited incentives from the Lakers during the 2019 offseason free agency. Lakers co-owner Jeannie Buss reportedly told Leonard's adviser that the requests violated the NBA's collective bargaining agreement, then rejected them.

The NBA finally launched an investigation last September into the allegations. Curiously Leonard was allowed to play the season and then, this summer, he was traded to the Raptors/ According to sources, Toronto knows all about the chicanery but were so desperate they went ahead with a trade for Leonard in exchange from Bobby Ingram, Gradey Dick and three first round picks. 

Stories alleged that the investigation by a prominent legal firm was going slowly and Kawhi’s second coming as a Raptor might be delayed till even 2027. Why the wait? Toronto just wanted assurance they will not be part of any possible NBA punishment against Leonard or the Clippers. 

Now, new reporting from Michael Grange of Sportsnet says that the problems are almost ironed out. "The most likely outcome? A negotiated settlement where the NBA gets to enforce some version of its rules, [Clippers owner Steve] Ballmer can save face and Leonard can play for the Raptors.” 

Stay tuned. The only certainty is that Raps fans spurned in 2019 will forgive just about any indiscretion today once the deal is complete.

The NBA is not the only basketball league seeking to embarrass itself. As we wrote last month, https://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.ca/blog/wnba-come-for-the-rumbles-stay-for-the-racism the WNBA seems intent on disgracing itself as a league running amuck with politics and race on the court. For a league coddled by leftwing LGBTQ BLM elements and ESPN (but we repeat ourselves)  it’s getting hard to buy the obsessive race baiting.

The latest embarrassment was another ejection for a black player hammering on women’s rights supporter Sophie Cunningham. https://x.com/ZillaDilla/status/2086307918224199908?s=20  DiJonai Carrington then texted from her dressing room that the ejection was “white privilege”. That led Sports Illustrated to label Cunningham’s getting whacked as “karma” Apparently SI thinks that if you don’t believe men should play in women’s sports, then you deserve to be physically assaulted.

Meanwhile Caitlyn Clark, whose impact has turned the WNBA into a semi-profitable league after decades of red ink, was labelled as a whiner for suggesting that referees were targeting her to placate rather politics of the WNBA’s old guard. https://x.com/NevadaLiberty64/status/2086237725288714671?s=20 Then her own coach chose to defend Sophie Cunningham’s attacker instead of Cunningham. There is no coming back from that.

The result was predictable. The insufferable tolerance for trans players being allowed to play in the WNBA has had its bluff called. Former NBA star Ennes Kanter Freedom has announced he will identify as a woman so he can play next season in the the league. The 6-foot-10, 245 pound forward will have company as another former NBA player Royce White is applying to test the WNBA’s tolerance for dicks in the dressing room. https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/08/08/ex-nba-players-say-theyre-declaring-for-wnba-as-league-considers-transgender-player-policy/

Let’s see how that goes down with the sisters who are free with their virtue but bitches when it causes a Nimby imposition on their selves. 

Ultimately the NBA can get away with owners and players breaking the rules. The League’s teams are worth $5.4 B on average. But the WNBA is the bastard child of the league and ESPN. It has never made money. Were it not for ESPN they’d be playing to crowds under 5000 in gymnasiums around North America. Just extrapolate the NHL and the women’s pro hockey league. You get the idea.

In its current iteration women's basketballis headed more to reality TV than ESPN. 

Out At Home: Tigers Accept Reality, Dodgers Get The Benefit

And the winner of the Tarik Skubal sweepstakes is?… The Los Angeles Dodgers. Talk about your “what colour is that green light?” obvious conclusion. The two-time World Series champs (we hear they beat some team from Toronto in last year’s Series) have seemingly become baseball’s answer to Love Island, attracting free agents and trading for superstars while the rest of MLB stands helplessly by. If you’ve ever played poker and faced a large stack with your short stack you know how this feels. There’s no doubt who's the big dog.

Saturday night’s trade of the two-time Cy Young Award from Detroit in exchange for three prospects is no doubt going to set off the parity argument just as MLB is poised to lock out the players of the 2027 season. It’s already started online with the Dodgers as the Dr. Evil of baseball, threatening to blow up the sport with their rapacious acquisition of talent.

Phillies star Bryce Harper doesn’t like the Tigers’ new prospects. “The Tigers made a terrible trade. Zyhir Hope is just another Raul Mondesi/Yasiel Puig player. He wasn’t even in their top 3 rookie outfielders like De Paula, Tibbs and Sirota. And, River Ryan and Brady Smith have already both had Tommy John surgeries in their young careers.”

Here’s former Montreal Expo John Vander Wal, now a Tiger fan.“You had the best pitcher in baseball, and instead of building around him, you traded him. That’s baseball malpractice. Chris Ilitch is one of the wealthiest owners in baseball. If you’re not willing to spend to keep the best pitcher in the game and build around a team that’s already proven it can compete, then sell the team to someone who will.”

On the surface that’s a predictable rant. But re-signing a rental Tarik Skubal as a free again in the offseason will not be a joy. And Detroit reportedly got the best haul ever of prospects for a rental player. Still, the Dodgers can use their $32 billion local broadcast package to gamble on talent. (For example they owe Japanese superstar Shohei Ohtani $700 million in deferred money.) An organization that does it the way Branch Rickey did it in the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

But look beneath the surface of this trade and others the Dodgers have made. They are the gold standard in attracting and developing talent. Two of the prospects going to Detroit are players the Dodgers acquired in minor-league trades. The two other team reputed to be in on Skubal— AL leading Tampa Bay and NL leading Milwaukee— said money was not an object. Tiger fans loved their potential return. They had every chance to make the deal. But they demurred.

The Dodgers’ big preseason free-agent signing Kyle Tucker took less money in L.A. rather than go to Toronto. Consider, too, that California’s crushing taxes subtract millions from a player’s cheque. Finally, the now-invincible Dodgers filled for bankruptcy 15 yers ago. 

It’s nothing new. In January we pointed out https://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com/i-dont-like-mondays/2026/1/18/zwadgsjschsflq9nqgf2fbfpeixfg7“George Steinbrenner’s New York Yankees teams were prime examples of spending to the hilt from 1980-2010. They used their advantage in scouting and cable TV to underwrite high-profile free agents and manage lopsided trades for stars. They were soon followed by a like-minded group of other large markets.”

Like the Dodgers. Ken Rosenthal of the Athletic put his finger on the contradictions. “Skubal to the Dodgers was not fait accompli, nor should it have been. Other contenders had big-time prospects to offer. Every team could afford the remaining $9.4 million on Skubal’s contract. How is that the Dodgers again were the ones to step up? How is it they so often pull off these kinds of moves, even when money is not the deciding factor?

They also possess a singular quality that most other teams do not, a fearlessness that could help them become the first team to win three straight World Series since the 1998 to 2000 Yankees."

None of this will matter to fans who worship the alleged parity brought on by a salary cap in the NHL, NBA and NFL. They see a cap as a lifeline for small to mid-markets getting a title. They see baseball --m which has no cap--as a cliff that would push little guys over. We dealt with the evolution of this fan’s mindset in our book Cap In Hand: How salary caps are killing pro sports. 

But the veneration of caps misses their real attraction to big league owners. Yes, they eliminate holdouts. Share some talent. But the expansion factor is the real payoff.  If a free market like England’s Premiership (20 teams) existed there would be a finite number of MLB markets who could realistically compete with the Dodgers. Ryan Reynolds alone won’t cut it. But salary caps suddenly create a whole new segment of otherwise weak markets that can now be fleeced for an expansion fee and where they can market their merchandise and digital product.  

And they're the driver that has sent Dodgers team equity to $5.45 B. As we wrote in January “self-serving owners want to bloat their leagues to 32 (MLB) or even 36 (NHL) teams to capture the domestic and global marketing opportunities afforded by more teams. Their least concern is for fans who want to see the best but are fed watered-down competition. 

That’s why the 2027 MLB labour stoppage could go as long as two seasons should players stay together. (Two years was what former NHLPA director Bob Goodenow estimated in 2004 before his members turtled.) As strong as the MLBPA has been it’s hard to see global superstars like Ohtani and Juan Soto (and Skubal)  putting on the hair shirt for long with hundreds of millions at stake for them. They do not emerge from the culture of union loyalty Marvin Miller created 60 years earlier.” 

Yes, it could get bloody. Tarik Skubal may not get the GDP of Slovakia after it’s all over. What will fans now lamenting trades and parity think? Knowing the MLB owners, what true fans of baseball want is a way, way down their to-screw-up list.