LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles Dodgers blew away the Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Championship Series. Try as all parties involved might to suggest that things could have gone differently with a few breaks here or there, the Brewers simply did not have the horsepower to keep up. They looked like a team built on a budget playing a team that spares no expense – which, of course, is exactly what they were.

Maybe that had nothing to do with the Dodgers’ sweep. Maybe, if they played this series again – say, in a stretch when the Dodgers’ starting pitching wasn’t historically dominant – the Brewers would win it. They did, after all, beat the Dodgers in all six games they played in the regular season. No one can say for sure.

But what is certain is that even the downright modest present-day value of Shohei Ohtani’s 10-year contract (roughly $460 million) could cover the Brewers’ entire payroll three times over with room to spare. In other words, the fight for this year’s NL pennant put baseball’s haves-and-have-nots economics on national display.

Twelve months and a few weeks from now, baseball’s collective bargaining agreement will expire, a moment for which the industry has been bracing for years. Payroll disparities across MLB – such as the one on display when the Dodgers and Brewers met – have widened so much that almost everyone agrees substantial economic change is necessary.

But the owners and players disagree so dramatically on what shape that change should take that both groups are bracing for a lengthy lockout, readying themselves for the possibility of an extended work stoppage so completely that players and executives alike are crafting contracts with security in the event of a missed season.

From some vantage points, then, this series had the makings of a referendum.

An easy Dodgers win would prove the point of MLB and its owners, who are in favor of a salary cap – but are careful not to say for certain whether they will push for one. Sure, their argument would go, a so-called small-market team such as the Brewers can be an annual contender in the regular season. But when it comes to the playoffs, all perceptions of parity evaporate. No small-market club has won the World Series since the Kansas City Royals in 2015, and only one other such team (the Florida Marlins in 2003) has won a title since the turn of the century.

Certainly, parity is not the only motivation that team owners would have in pushing for a salary cap, which would limit the money they could spend on payroll and, they believe, increase franchise valuations by establishing cost certainty more like that held by NFL, NBA and NHL teams.

The players union, by contrast, could look at this series as proof that parity is as strong as ever. The team in MLB’s smallest market (as measured by the CBA) had its best regular season record and home-field advantage into the NLCS. The Brewers had as good of a chance as anyone. If they had spent even a little more, they might have had the pitching they needed to keep up with the Dodgers.

Player salaries are not the problem, the union would argue; stingy owners are. Look what happened, for example, when the Seattle Mariners splurged at this year’s trade deadline after years of relative frugality: They are one win from the World Series.

“I think that we’re in a big market [and] we’re expected to win. Our fans expect us to win. I can’t speak to what revenue we’re bringing in, but our ownership puts it back into players, a big chunk of it, which I know that’s the way it should be with all ownership groups,” Dodgers Manager Dave Roberts said. “… I think that that’s what sports fans would want from everyone – to get the best of their team.”

The Dodgers batted away the Brewers with elite starting pitching – more than $1.3 billion worth by total contract value. The Brewers were not alone in finding their offense suddenly inert against this Dodgers rotation: The formerly slugging Philadelphia Phillies scored more than three runs just once in four games against them in the NL Division Series and are now reevaluating the makeup of their roster.

The Dodgers also can afford to stockpile arms and approach the regular season with only mild desperation, which is how they ended up with four top starters at full strength in October. They let Ohtani take his time working back from Tommy John surgery so that he would be fully built up by late in the season and not a moment before. They let Blake Snell take his time working back from shoulder trouble, so much so that he made just 11 starts before the postseason. They could give Tyler Glasnow a lucrative contract extension despite his injury history because they were not signing him to be their only ace but rather one of several.

“I think the one constant, at least from my time here in L.A., is we use a lot of people. We use our roster. Our front office does a really good job of providing depth from the beginning of the season and supplementing it as the season goes on,” Dodgers pitching coach Mark Prior said. “And it allows us to use guys to bring in, to get big outs, even if it’s for two or three games.”

Brewers Manager Pat Murphy repeatedly brought up his team’s underdog status this past week, pointing out at one point that Snell “makes more money than our entire pitching staff.”

“That’s for a reason – because he’s great. What he demonstrated [in Game 1] was the high end of his game, unbelievable. That’s great,” Murphy said. “We can’t do anything about it.”

But even Murphy, who is not one to filter, knew better than to inflame tensions with a comment on whether his team would face a fairer fight with a salary cap in place. He insisted he does not use the Brewers’ perceived financial disadvantages as a motivator.

“That’s a correlation between great success and great payroll, so you can bring it up if you want to, but I don’t bring it up with our guys,” Murphy said. “I just try to get them to play hard and believe they can.”

Even if this series was symbolic, it is hard to see it changing many minds. Certainly, neither side’s position would be altered by its outcome. MLB Players Association bulldog Bruce Meyer, for example, seems unlikely to rethink his union’s most fundamental position because those doggone Dodgers won again.

But even a year before those negotiations begin, the questions were being asked and the stories were being written. MLB and union officials made their cases to reporters on the field. And everyone from team officials to coaches in the dugout wagered their guesses about how long a work stoppage might last – and which side will blink first.

These are supposed to be the halcyon days before collective bargaining’s cruel reality check, but the storm clouds are already here.