Brewers' World Series run has taken on a CBA burden as lockout looms

The Milwaukee Brewers are preparing to do battle with the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLCS for the second year in a row right now, which is about all the pressure any team needs when trying to make their first World Series appearance in more than 40 years.

Unfortunately, the Brewers have more than just their own fate in their hands. As baseball stares down the prospect of a tenuous, painful lockout, the small-market No. 1 seed from Milwaukee has a league-wide narrative to tackle. The Dodgers, armed with roughly triple the payroll of their opponent, have set the sport on an irreversible course with their recent dominance both on the field and in free agency.

With the parity of baseball in question, can the Brewers prove that perfect team-building is still an equally valid way to pursue a championship?

Brewers' NLCS showing against Dodgers will be major data point in lockout, salary cap discussions

Let's address an obvious caveat to this whole discussion: The league's owners nor the players' union are going to make sweeping decisions because of one year of postseason data. As Billy Beane said, the playoffs are a crapshoot, and future policy won't be impacted even if the free-spending Dodgers fall to a small-market foe in October.

Still, the court of public opinion matters too, and that's where the Brewers can make their mark in the NLCS. If they win, there's going to be a very strong, very recent data point that works against the narrative of "needing" a salary cap.

So much of the talk surrounding baseball over the past three years is that the Dodgers are "inevitable." With Shohei Ohtani in tow and both the farm system and financial resources to support him, they've become the boogeyman of baseball. They're just eight wins away from the first three-peat this sport has seen since the 1998-2000 Yankees, who were not-so-coincidentally referred to as the "Evil Empire."

The Brewers got sliced and diced by their well-oiled buzzsaw last year, scoring just one run per game as the Dodgers curb-stomped the Crew on their way to a second consecutive World Series title. The experts like the top seed's chances better ahead of the sequel, though overcoming a battle-tested superteam is much easier to do on paper than on the field.

Of course, it's not all on Milwaukee. The Dodgers may have the largest payroll in baseball this year, but the Brewers (22nd), Rays (28th), and Guardians (29th) are the other teams still standing. Even in a world without a salary cap, it's evident that you can win without blowing past various luxury tax thresholds.

We'll see how the league, the owners, and MLBPA respond to the economic disparity of the LCS participants. But the Brewers could really help the players' union's case against a cap by beating the Dodgers this time around.

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