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Summary

The Dodgers carried a record $433 million luxury-tax payroll this season and were swept out of the NLCS by a Brewers team spending about a third of that. The other teams in the final four, the Rays and Guardians, ranked near the very bottom of the league in payroll.

This has been going on for 15 years. Tampa, Cleveland and Milwaukee keep losing their best players, their executives and their managers, and they keep winning anyway.

This video looks at how: the Rays’ early experiments with the shift and the opener, why the leaguewide boom in pitching velocity changed the economics of team building, the discipline of trading stars a year early, Cleveland’s pitching development, Milwaukee’s opposite-field approach at the plate, and why the people who built these systems haven’t been able to recreate them with bigger budgets.

My recent video on the state of analytics and sports:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UhhaNjHbmA

Subscribe for my next video: https://www.youtube.com/@iamjoonlee?sub_confirmation=1

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Bio: Joon Lee is an independent sports journalist reporting on YouTube. He’s written op-eds for The New York Times and The Boston Globe and worked for ESPN, Bleacher Report and The Washington Post, where he’s interviewed and photographed sports & pop culture figures like Kylian Mbappe, Shohei Ohtani, David Ortiz, Mookie Betts and Action Bronson. He previously was a contributor to SportsCenter, Around the Horn and First Take. His work has been featured on The Best American Sportswriting series and recognized as a finalist for the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting.

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