Three Quick Questions
Alright, let’s try this again. If you remember from last month, here’s a few quick topics I’ve been pondering about from around the sports world… I still don’t have a clever name for this type of post, but here goes:
Is ‘Heat Culture’ Real?
The last month has seen a bitter breakup between Jimmy Butler and the Miami Heat, with the team suspending their former star three different times since the beginning of the year. Each time is for something different — this last one was for walking out of team shootaround — but all the problems seem to really stem from Jimmy Butler demanding a trade due to his changing role on the team. (A demand the team now seems desperate to meet, if they can find any takers for the fading star.)
It’s not the first time that things have soured between an NBA team and their star player, but the ugly and public nature of the feud has people questioning “Heat Culture,” the supposed special sauce that has sustained the franchise since Pat Riley got there in 1995. Defining “Heat Culture” has always been rather tricky — like a lot of “culture” talk, it often relies on vague generalities that seem almost cult-like. Udonis Haslem, who spent 20 years on the Heat, often on the bench seemingly as little more than a reminder of “Heat culture,” described a typical Heat player this way: “Man, you had to go through something. You had to go through something in life that put a chip on your shoulder. And that’s built grit inside you that you’re willing to go through extreme circumstances to get where you're trying to go.”
Obviously, that is essentially meaningless. But players around the league DO agree that there’s something different about playing for the Heat, even if it’s hard to precisely articulate beyond following the rules, being tough, etc.
And what’s interesting to me about the Jimmy Butler spat is that it seems to illustrate the fragile nature of “culture” in general. As a socialist, I tend to be skeptical of attempts to impose “culture” on a workplace. But that’s not the same as saying culture doesn’t exist, or isn’t important. Indeed, it DOES seem like a big part of the Heat’s success since Riley got there is this nebulous concept of trying to preserve a culture.
Of course, until the last year or so, one person who always seemed to embody that was… Jimmy Butler. He was known to be demanding, hard on his teammates, but also seriously dedicated in a way similar to Riley and head coach Erik Spoelstra. He bought into the philosophy, and that was a big part of how the team made two NBA Finals appearances with him. But, of course, he stopped buying into that philosophy once his role in it became less prominent. In other words, no matter how real a culture is, it’s no match for material incentives.
Why Is Everyone So Weird About the Dodgers?
Earlier this week, Hal Steinbrenner, principal owner of the New York Yankees, complained about the Dodgers recent spending spree, saying that, “It's difficult for most of us owners to be able to do the kind of things that they're doing.” And while many were quick to point out the absurdity of the Yankees complaining about another team’s spending, Steinbrenner is only the latest person around the game to act like the Dodgers are breaking baseball. Last week, in a piece on the backlash to LA’s free agent spending, Jeff Passan called them “a stress test for the game itself.”
But all this makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills. As I have written several times before in this newsletter: There is no competitive balance crisis in Major League Baseball, and there hasn’t been one in the free agency era. At least in the early 2000s, when the Yankees’ spent a bunch on free agents following their late-90s dynasty, there was at least a plausible connection between big spending and on-field dominance.1 But baseball hasn’t had a repeat champion in 25 years now, way longer than any other major professional sports league in the US.
The Dodgers have won only two World Series in the last five years, and one was during the weird Covid season. In 2022 and 2023, they failed to make the NLCS. In 2021, they did not win the NL West. They are not only beatable — they are usually beaten! And yet people talk about them as if they are some unstoppable behemoth because of how they spend in free agency. But even this spending is greatly exaggerated: Passan’s ESPN story includes their total guaranteed money of ~$1.8 billion, but much of that is deferred over a 20 year window. Their actual payroll wasn’t even the highest in the league last year, and next year figures to be roughly on par with what the Mets spent in 2024.
So the Dodgers are hardly even outliers, both in terms of total spending and in terms of on-field success. It’s true that the Dodgers have landed three of the most coveted free agents in the last two off-seasons: Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki. The most obvious similarity between these three guys is that they are all Japanese, and it does seem like Dodgers may have an advantage when it comes to signing Japanese-born players — but that advantage comes from geography and experience.
The other thing about each of these deals is that they are all weird in some way: Ohtani’s deal is 97% deferred; Yamamoto signed an inordinately long 12-year deal because he was only 25-years-old; Sasaki’s deal, because of rules governing international signings, is technically a minor league contract with a $6.5 million signing bonus. So all these contracts look different from your standard baseball contract, but not because the Dodgers are OVERspending — if anything you can make the argument that all three players are underpaid: The present-day value of Ohtani’s salary is now roughly the same as Juan Soto’s, even though Ohtani is the better player; Yamamoto’s deal is back loaded to the extent that, in 2026, he will make less than ½ as much as Gerrit Cole; Sasaki will be paid like a minor leaguer despite being one of the most coveted pitchers in baseball.
Some fans seem to think that the Dodgers are inventing these contract structures to take advantage of “loopholes” in the Collective Bargaining Agreement. But that’s not really right2: These contracts are weird because the situations are weird. Posted Japanese players reach free agency early, and Ohtani’s a celebrity whose endorsement deals allow him to defer 97% of his contract. The real lesson here is that the labor market is not some law of nature, where people are paid what they are inherently “worth.” What people are worth is determined by the laws governing the labor market, and we can change those if we want a more fair and just society…
Who Should We Root for in the Super Bowl?
For a long time, my default position is that socialists should root for whichever football team pays its quarterback the most. This wasn’t just QB favoritism: Too much of the NFL was convinced that the only way to make the Super Bowl, if you didn’t have Patrick Mahomes, was to have a quarterback on a team-friendly rookie contract, so you could spend elsewhere on the roster. That was the situation with the 49ers and Brock Purdy last year, the Eagles and Jalen Hurts the year before that, and the Bengals and Joe Burrow the year before that.
Luckily, though, this year features two quarterbacks who got their bag already, since Hurts got a big contract extension back in 2023.
Now, the obvious thing to do is root for the running backs. That position has been underpaid for a while now, to the point that it was a real crisis for the league.
But last offseason, the Eagles invested $37.75 million in Saquon Barkley, a veteran running back who was undervalued by his old team, and it paid off handsomely. He nearly broke the single-season rushing record, and had an absolutely bonkers NFC Championship Game. I only regret that he’s not facing the Ravens, who did more or less the same thing with Derrick Henry. At least this makes rooting interests clearer: We should be pulling for the Eagles, and hoping more teams start paying running backs.
Although, it’s worth saying that the connection between the Yankees’ spending and their success was always overblown. Those late ‘90s teams were NOT built via free agency, and the teams that were, in the early and mid-’00s, generally lost in the Division Series.
You can make the case for Sasaki, whose salary really is being suppressed by the rules that classify him as, essentially, an amateur. But this loophole only hurts HIM, and theoretically should have made him affordable for MORE teams, not fewer.