Mark Walter says the Dodgers can’t win all the time. Even Magic Johnson agrees

The morning after the Lakers were eliminated from the playoffs and the Dodgers lost their fourth straight game, Magic Johnson flashed his trademark smile and took the podium to talk football.

“The world game will be in the greatest city in the world,” Johnson said Tuesday.

In Los Angeles, Johnson joined a celebration marking a month before the World Cup came to town. Meanwhile, in New York, representatives of Major League Baseball and its players’ union held the first session of collective bargaining that promises to be so contentious that the 2027 season could be in jeopardy.

The Dodgers may not be the only reason for the dispute, but they are Exhibit A. For these negotiations, the owners have shifted their benchmark for competitive balance from making the playoffs to winning the World Series.

No small-market team has won the World Series since the Kansas City Royals in 2015, and the Dodgers last year became the first team in 25 years to win back-to-back championships.

If you’re a Dodgers fan, these are the best times. If you own one of the other 29 teams, you might complain that you can’t sell championship hope and belief if the Dodgers spend five times as much as the Cleveland Guardians.

On the day negotiations began, the Guardians occupied first place in the American Central League. Of the top-ranked teams in all six divisions, four reside in small markets: Cleveland, San Diego, Tampa Bay and Sacramento/Las Vegas. The team with the highest payroll in the majors – not the Dodgers, but the New York Mets – had the worst record in the majors.

On Opening Day, Dodgers president Mark Walter told me this: “Here’s what the problem is: Money helps us win. We can’t win all the time. We have to have some parity.”

Johnson is the ultimate champion of Los Angeles. As a player, he won with the Lakers. As an owner, he won with the Dodgers, Sparks and LAFC.

So after the football talk Tuesday, I asked Johnson what a Dodgers fan should think when the Dodgers president says the team can’t win all the time.

Johnson, who is one of Walter’s owning partners, laughed.

“We want to win all the time,” Johnson said. “But in reality, we can’t win all the time.”

Why not?

The Dodgers went back-to-back, and everyone at the championship rally — including Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Dave Roberts, Andrew Friedman and even Walter himself — giddyly talked about a triple. They run Los Angeles – and now Japan – and their all-star team leads baseball in road attendance, generating money for rival owners who complain about the Dodgers.

“No one can win all the time,” Johnson said. “Mark made that comment, and I think he wants – everyone wants – the game to be great. It’s great when there’s parity. That’s what it’s about. That’s what you see in the NBA now. You want the same thing in Major League Baseball.

“Do I ever want to lose? No. But it’s great for the game that it can be level and everyone has a real chance of winning.”

In the NBA, which has the salary cap that major league owners covet as a supposed solution to competitive balance, the Oklahoma City Thunder have eight straight wins after winning back-to-back championships, just like the Dodgers did. The Sacramento Kings, the kind of small-market team that a salary cap is supposed to bring toward parity, have made the playoffs once in the last 20 seasons.

Regardless of how baseball owners and players resolve their differences, December’s almost certain lockout is expected to be followed by a looming look ahead to the season: Are players giving in to the salary cap rather than giving up their salaries for part or all of the season?

Or are the owners giving in on the salary cap, aware that a lockout in 2027 could drive away fans on the eve of media rights negotiations in 2028? After the 1994-95 strike, average attendance did not return to pre-strike levels until 2006.

And how long could the unified front that Walter and the 29 other owners are putting together now last, once the games and the revenue from them are lost?

Golden State Warriors owner Joe Lacob, one of the finalists in the Padres sale, said at a Sportico conference last week that his group’s offer assumed the possibility that MLB would not play the 2027 season. In order for the NHL to secure a salary cap, its owners shut down the sport for an entire season.

The Dodgers sold 4 million tickets last season. If parity made it harder for the Dodgers to win, what would Johnson say to the team’s fans?

“We’re going to try to win all the time,” he said. “That’s what we tell our fans. But, probably, things will change after this season, so we’ll see what those changes are.”

If the Dodgers don’t make it three times, or even if they don’t make the playoffs, it doesn’t matter. The negotiation battle is on.

But the baseball gods surely laughed about it: On the eve of the first negotiating session, and for the first time since the Walter ownership era that began in 2012, the Dodgers lost a third straight game by at least five runs.