Tracking Wealth Through the AI Lens
Tracking Wealth Through the AI Lens
This isn't just a playoff series. It's a battle for baseball's soul.
We think we’re about to watch a simple best-of-seven baseball series. We see the Los Angeles Dodgers, a gleaming monolith of talent and treasure, facing off against the Milwaukee Brewers, a team of scrappy, brilliant overachievers. But I’m telling you, what’s unfolding on that diamond is something far more profound. This isn't just sport; it's a live-action experiment, a stress test of two fundamentally different blueprints for the future.
When I first dug into the numbers and the narratives surrounding this NLCS, I honestly just sat back in my chair, speechless. Forget the box scores for a second. This is a clash of operating systems. On one side, you have a model built on overwhelming force and near-infinite resources. On the other, a model built on an elegant algorithm of efficiency and human ingenuity. The winner won't just get a pennant; they'll provide the defining data point in a battle for the very soul of the game—and maybe offer a lesson that extends far beyond it.
Let’s start with the Dodgers. It’s almost impossible to comprehend the scale of their financial power. Their 2025 payroll is north of $350 million, a figure so colossal it almost loses meaning. A rival beat writer joked they outspend the Brewers by the GDP of a developing nation, and it’s not even really a joke. The difference in their payrolls could literally buy the island nation of Tuvalu four times over, with enough left to purchase a majority stake in a European soccer club like AS Monaco. Every single year.
This is the brute-force approach to problem-solving. It’s like building an AI supercomputer not with a more elegant code, but by simply adding thousands of extra processors, cranking up the power until it can solve any problem through sheer computational might. It’s an attempt to eliminate chance, to smooth out the beautiful, chaotic variables of sport with a tidal wave of cash. And let’s be clear, it’s not a dumb strategy. The Dodgers are brilliant; they draft well, they develop players, and their front office is the envy of the league. But their ultimate trump card is the ability to paper over any mistake, fill any hole, and acquire any asset with a nine-figure check. They signed Shohei Ohtani to a $700 million contract. They brought in Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, and Blake Snell. They operate with a safety net the size of the Pacific Ocean.
It’s a system designed for inevitability. But as we design systems for our future, we have to ask a critical question: Does this model of overwhelming resource consolidation create a truly sustainable and engaging ecosystem? Or does it inevitably lead to a centralized, predictable world where only the wealthiest can truly compete?
And then, you have the Brewers. Milwaukee represents the counter-argument, the elegant, subversive algorithm that seeks to win not by outspending the competition, but by outthinking it. Of the 26 players on their NLCS roster, a staggering 15 came via trade. They have exactly one major league free agent, signed for a paltry $4 million. They are masters of arbitrage, of finding value where others see none.
They excel at identifying asymmetric advantages—in simpler terms, they look for opportunities where the input cost is low but the potential payoff is absolutely massive. This is where it gets truly fascinating because what the Brewers have built is a testament to human ingenuity over raw capital, a system that thrives on cleverness, scouting, and development which proves that you don't need to own a small country's GDP to compete at the highest level. Look no further than their first baseman, Andrew Vaughn, who was struggling so much he got sent to the minors by another team this year. The Brewers saw something, acquired him, and he’s now putting up the exact same offensive numbers (a 141 OPS+) as the Dodgers’ Freddie Freeman and his $162 million contract.
That isn't luck; that’s a system. It’s a paradigm shift in thinking. If the Dodgers are a mainframe computer, the Brewers are the lean, agile startup that wrote the code that changes the world. It reminds me of the dawn of the personal computer. The massive mainframes had all the power and resources, but it was the nimble, efficient, and cleverly designed PCs that democratized the technology and sparked a revolution. Can a better algorithm truly beat a bigger machine?
This series is the ultimate test case, and the results will echo far beyond the ballpark. We are hurtling toward a 2027 league-wide lockout, a "nuclear winter" as some insiders have called it. The central fight will be over a salary cap. If the Dodgers steamroll their way to another World Series, owners across the league will hold them up as Exhibit A for why the system is broken, why spending must be regulated from the top down to ensure "competitive equity." It will become their cudgel in a war to reshape the league's financial structure. MLB's labor war is coming. The Brewers-Dodgers NLCS will be cannon fodder.
But if the Brewers win? The players' union gets its ultimate rebuttal. They can point to this small-market team from Milwaukee, this collective of cast-offs and shrewdly acquired prospects, and declare that the system works. They can prove that smarts, guts, and a superior strategy can still triumph. The irony, of course, is that the union would be championing a team that almost completely ignores the free agency system they fought so hard to create. But that’s how high the stakes are.
This forces us to look in the mirror. As we watch, we’re not just passive observers; we’re witnessing a referendum on two competing visions of the future. Do we favor a world of regulated, predictable outcomes, or one of chaotic, beautiful, and inefficient innovation where underdogs with a better idea can still change the game?
In the end, you can’t help but marvel at both models. The Dodgers have built a breathtaking machine, a monument to financial and organizational power that is, in its own way, a work of art. But the Brewers… their model is the one that feels truly human. It’s messy, it’s improbable, and it relies on the belief that insight and ingenuity are the ultimate market inefficiencies. It’s a system that leaves room for surprise, for hope, for the kind of story that reminds us why we fell in love with these games in the first place. That, right there, is the soul of it all. And it’s what I’ll be rooting for.