The Los Angeles Dodgers can be accused of a lot of things. (And in recent days, they have been.) But they can’t be accused of complacency.
Historically, teams that win the World Series have tended to take their foot off the pedal, trusting the talent that won them a title to be good enough for an encore. Sometimes, standing pat pays off (though no champion has repeated since the 1998-2000 Yankees). Other times, running it back backfires. Just look at last year’s Rangers: Beset by an uncertain financial situation, the Rangers refrained from making major upgrades last winter, instead banking on their previous spending, their young hitters, and their recovering pitchers to sustain them. Then regression struck, and they missed October entirely after winning just 78 regular-season games.
Rarely am I confident in a forecast about baseball. (Case in point: I picked Texas to win a wild card.) But I’m comfortable predicting that the 2024 Rangers’ fate won’t befall this year’s defending champs.
For one thing, the Dodgers’ offseason certainly hasn’t stuck to a Rangers-esque script. After their World Series–sealing comeback to beat the Yankees in Game 5, the Dodgers extended trade-deadline pickup Tommy Edman, re-signed Teoscar Hernández and Blake Treinen, and signed Blake Snell, Michael Conforto, and Korean infielder Hyeseong Kim. All that was just the prelude to this weekend’s coup de grâce.
On Friday, L.A. won the sweepstakes for Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki—from a surplus-value perspective, perhaps the most valuable player available this offseason—after a protracted posting process that culminated in Sasaki joining his former Samurai Japan teammates Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto in Dodger blue, as had been widely expected. And on Sunday, undeterred by mobs of baseball fans brandishing pitchforks and torches in response to the news that another elite talent had thrown in his lot with L.A. (this time on a league-minimum salary), the Dodgers signed the best late-inning arm on the market, Tanner Scott. Many baseball fans probably haven’t heard of Scott—blame the generic name and the fact that he’s pitched almost exclusively for terrible teams—but the lefty led all relievers in FanGraphs WAR over the past two seasons. (He’s also owned Ohtani, which won’t be an issue for Shohei anymore. If you can’t beat ’em, hire ’em.)
With the exception of a near-inevitable reunion with Clayton Kershaw, plus minor moves on the margins, the Dodgers may be done for the winter. All in all, they’ve committed nearly half a billion dollars in future salary, almost twice as much as any team but the Mets (who secured the top spot on the offseason-spending leaderboard by signing Juan Soto). If inking Ohtani to a heavily deferred deal and then winning the World Series cemented the Dodgers’ status as villains, then this offseason marks their official transformation into supervillains. Their dominance on the field, and in free agency, is such that they aren’t just seen as a threat to their direct rivals; they’re perceived as a threat to the sport.
Granted, it’s not as if the Dodgers didn’t have room to improve. Though the defending champs won more regular-season games in 2024 than any other team, last year’s club was the weakest Dodgers squad in several seasons. They’ve also lost some talent via trades (Gavin Lux), retirement (Daniel Hudson), and free agency (Jack Flaherty and Walker Buehler, who composed two-thirds of the team’s injury-diminished playoff rotation). At the majority of the position-player spots—catcher, second base, third base, left field, and center field—they rank no higher than 12th in projected team WAR.
Of course, any other team would love to be as flawed as the Dodgers. It says something that the worst Dodgers outfit in years was still the best team in baseball. They return all of the mainstays of last year’s MLB-best offense, along with this winter’s reinforcements and a few top pitchers who were missing from the mound for most or all of last season (Ohtani, Dustin May, Tony Gonsolin). Despite some relative weak points, their projected-WAR total tops any other team’s by five wins. Prior to the Scott signing, Baseball Prospectus’s PECOTA projection system foresaw 103 wins. Add in Scott, and most likely Kershaw, and the 2025 Dodgers will probably top the 2021 team for the rosiest preseason projection any team has received in 20 years. (PECOTA granted the 2021 Dodgers 103.5 wins; they won 106.)
As Rob Mains of Baseball Prospectus documented, the Dodgers have already reeled off the best winning percentages over spans of four through eight seasons that any team has recorded in the expansion era (since 1961). Clubs that previously managed such sustained, high-level success did so before the draft, before free agency—in many cases, before integration. If we era-adjust for today’s competitive conditions, the Dodgers have arguably been the best team of all time. To still be by far the best team on paper after 14 consecutive winning seasons and 12 consecutive playoff appearances, without having had a first-round draft pick higher than 15th since Kershaw was selected seventh overall in 2006, is completely preposterous.
Prior to the 2015 season, I wrote that the Dodgers were the “one franchise in baseball that’s uniquely positioned to turn a peak into a long plateau—to postpone the roster’s inevitable unraveling long enough that years could go by with no end to the team’s playoff aspirations in sight.” While working on that story, I spoke to Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten and had the temerity to refer to the club’s competitive window. Kasten cut me off. “No, we’re the Dodgers,” he said. “We should be contending every year, period. We’re. The. Dodgers.”
They’re still the Dodgers, and their demise is no more conceivable now than it was a decade ago. Could injuries derail the Dodgers? Maybe, but suffering more than their share for the past several seasons has hardly slowed them. Could age undo them, in an era that isn’t kind to veterans? Perhaps—nearly all of their starting position players will be 30 or older this season—but like Gavin Belson, the Dodgers keep paying for infusions of youth, from the likes of Yamamoto, Kim, and Sasaki. Plus, their farm system is still fairly strong. (FanGraphs ranked it second best at midseason last year; more recently, the Dodgers’ tally of five prospects on Baseball Prospectus’s top 101 was exceeded by only four other teams, the same number that garnered more support for boasting the best system in an MLB.com survey of front-office executives.) Could an even better team surpass them? Possibly, but I’m not seeing one this season.
The Dodgers used to be somewhat sympathetic, for a big-market, perennial contender. They lost a lot in the playoffs, including a 2017 drubbing by the sign-stealing Astros. They spent plenty, but they rarely waded into the deep end of the free-agent pool. The Dodgers hired Andrew Friedman away from the Rays in October 2014; in his first six offseasons, he never spent more than $55 million on a free agent from outside the organization. Much of the team’s success stemmed from homegrown guys (Kershaw, Buehler, Corey Seager, Cody Bellinger, Will Smith, Kenley Jansen, the now-disgraced Julio Urías, etc.) and reclamation projects (Justin Turner, Max Muncy, Chris Taylor).
Most of that has changed. The Dodgers’ current players are still fairly likable. (It’s hard to hate Ohtani or Mookie Betts.) But Friedman and controlling owner Mark Walter have handed out numerous nine-figure contracts, to Betts, Trevor Bauer, Freddie Freeman, Ohtani, Yamamoto, Snell, Smith, and Tyler Glasnow. The 2025 payroll is approaching $400 million, with $300 million earmarked for each of the next two seasons (and more than $200 million for 2028). Smith is the only remaining prominent player on the star-studded roster who’s homegrown. The Dodgers increasingly seem like a team of well-compensated mercenaries. And we can’t call them underachievers who are due for a breakthrough: They’ve now won two titles, as many as the odds say they’ve deserved during their extended run.
Sports fans prefer a fair fight, or at least the appearance of one, to a rigged game (or the appearance of one). Thus, with the possible exception of NFL refs appearing to disproportionately punish Patrick Mahomes’s opponents, nothing provokes more sports outrage right now than this already talent-rich team getting richer by signing seemingly anyone it wants. But do the Dodgers deserve their new supervillain label, and are they ruining the sport? First, let’s play Dodgers advocate and defend Friedman and Co. Then we’ll turn around to play prosecutor.
The Dodgers can’t be causing a competitive-balance problem if such a problem doesn’t exist. And judging by the league’s recent results, any imbalance that does exist can’t be so severe.
It’s curious that competitive balance has once again become a big concern following a season that seemed to herald the death of superteams, with the 98-win Dodgers the only team to top 95 and all but a few teams at least clinging to the race into September. The preceding season, some free-spending teams (the Mets, Yankees, Padres, and Angels) missed the playoffs after much rending of garments about the Mets breaking baseball. People complained about the upsets and playoff flukiness that produced 2023’s Diamondbacks-Rangers World Series; then they complained about last October’s supposedly deterministic Dodgers-Yankees matchup, even though the relationship between spending and winning hasn’t grown stronger with time. Obviously, spending helps, but restrictions on young players’ earnings, coupled with the inherent randomness of baseball games and the vagaries of small-sample postseason series, give lower-payroll teams a boost and build in anti-dynasty safeguards.
Now, about those deferred dollars. Of the seven players who’ve signed deals with deferred money this winter, five are Dodgers. They join Ohtani, Betts, Freeman, and Smith on the list of Dodgers who’ll be paid far into the future. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the Dodgers didn’t invent deferred deals, which have been a common contract structure dating back to the beginning of MLB free agency. They’ve certainly signed more of them than anyone else, but they aren’t breaking any rules or employing creative bookkeeping in ways that other clubs couldn’t.
Moreover, the deferrals don’t help as much as they’re widely believed to. They aren’t a luxury-tax loophole, and the Dodgers can’t just spend deferred money freely until the bill comes due decades down the road. They have to set aside those future payouts in a dedicated account. The deferrals may help players avoid some state income tax, and the Dodgers can invest the money that they set aside to make it work for them while the player awaits his check, but it’s not as if they can spend wildly with no limits until it’s time to pay up. If you’re a Dodgers hater, though, you can dream of those deferrals inflating and festering until one day L.A. is deep in debt and forced to make an ownership change, as the overleveraged Diamondbacks were when they spent heavily on veterans to speed up their transition from expansion club to contender.
Friedman’s maxim on free agency notwithstanding—“If you’re always rational about every free agent, you will finish third on every free agent”—the Dodgers had help from other teams to assemble their stars. Friedman can’t sign or trade for someone who isn’t available, so it takes two teams to turn another club’s cornerstone into one of the Dodgers’ key cogs. The Braves could’ve kept Freeman. The Red Sox could’ve kept Betts. The Rays could’ve kept Glasnow. Instead, they allowed them to leave or dealt them.
Even when the Dodgers do sign a high-profile free agent, it’s not always—or often—because they’re the high bidder. Other teams have offered as much or more money for many of the players Los Angeles signed, including Ohtani, Sasaki, and Hernández. (Sasaki would have fit in any club’s budget.) In the past, the Dodgers could afford to splurge on elite players because they had a homegrown core that wasn’t making much money. Although that’s not true now—1.9 percent of the Dodgers’ projected payroll is owed to pre-arbitration players, easily the major leagues’ lowest figure—the developmental acumen that helped the Dodgers put those past cores together still helps them entice players who hope to improve.
The Dodgers are drawing comparisons to the 2000s Yankees, whom The Onion immortalized in a 2003 article about buying a pennant by acquiring literally every major league player. Like those Yankees, these Dodgers are outspending their opponents so significantly that the example they’ve set may actually have shifted the balance between leagues, but the Yankees were lapping their league to a far greater degree. The 2005 Yankees spent 68 percent more than the second-ranked Red Sox, and the 2006 Yankees spent almost 12 times as much as the most miserly team (the Marlins). The 2025 Dodgers are projected to spend “only” 24 percent more than the second-ranked Mets, and 5.5 times more than the cheapest team (the Marlins again; some things never change). Those are big disparities, but not nearly as wide as they were 20 years ago.
Plus, that the Dodgers spend more on competitive-balance tax penalties than some teams spend on their whole payroll is less an indictment of the Dodgers than of those clubs’ parsimonious owners. While the Dodgers were landing Sasaki and Scott, Cubs owner Tom Ricketts (he of the “biblical” losses) was pretending the Cubs are a small-market team and talking about breaking even. Pirates GM Ben Cherington, speaking at a fan fest where fans chanted “Sell the team!”, stated that the team has “tried” to sign an outside free agent to a multiyear deal, and said that someday it would succeed. (We’re pulling for you, Pirates!) Meanwhile, the Marlins, one of Scott’s former teams, have signed a single free agent this offseason—Eric Wagaman, who’s played in 18 big league games—despite being in line to earn at least $70 million in revenue sharing. At present, their payroll is lower than that. Some teams aren’t trying, and the Dodgers are getting grief for trying too hard.
It would be one thing if the Dodgers were brute-forcing their way to wins, but on their biggest-ticket targets, they’ve rarely spent unwisely (Bauer being the glaring exception). They spend money to make money, and make money to spend money. They’ve scouted well, drafted well, developed well, and invested well, just as any fan would want from their team. And now they’re in a self-sustaining virtuous cycle in which winning begets more winning: Players who want to win want to play in L.A., and last year’s signees become this year’s recruiters, who help lock down the next would-be MVP. It’s Moneyball with money, including countless millions from the team’s new fan base in Japan.
If you weren’t already rooting for the Dodgers, did any of that sound persuasive? Probably not, so let’s switch sides and try to beat L.A.
Sure, the Dodgers can’t buy a championship, but they can put a pretty big down payment toward a division title, and that sort of stinks. The Diamondbacks and Padres are both quality teams with top 10 payrolls who’ve made good-faith efforts to compete, yet it would be exceedingly difficult for them to steal the division from the Dodgers, whom they trail by 16 and 21 wins of true talent, respectively (per PECOTA). Realistically, their only hope is to win a wild card and take down the Dodgers in a short postseason series, as the 2022 Padres and 2023 Diamondbacks did. Which is all well and good, if it works out that way, but doesn’t exactly make for a must-see regular season. The Dodgers’ resources raise their floor, giving them the depth to be bad-luck-proof. Their budget is big enough for them to take risks, because they can bounce back from the bad ones.
Losing out on Sasaki is extra-frustrating for fans of other teams, because the Dodgers didn’t even have to flex their financial might to sign him. They should, by all rights, be the spoiled, unpleasant rich kid who has to pay people to spend time with them, but somehow, it seems, they’re also baseball’s best hang. It may be beneficial for baseball to have a villain—a common foe that fans of other teams can commiserate about—but not if that villain becomes unbeatable, at least where signing free agents is concerned. Even if the Dodgers have earned their attractiveness to players, the news that “The Los Angeles Dodgers have signed so-and-so” is getting old. The Blue Jays have been in on almost every free agent over the past few months—not to mention the past few offseasons—and until Monday, the only one they’d signed this winter (aside from former Jay Yimi García) was Jeff Hoffman, who reportedly flunked two other teams’ physicals before he took Toronto’s offer. (Signing Anthony Santander eases the sting of losing Sasaki, though unlike Sasaki, he didn’t come cheap.)
Sasaki is entitled to sign with whomever he wants—that’s the point of free agency—but the Dodgers were the most predictable, boring destination. Yes, there’s a spectacle to the prospect of a Glasnow-Snell-Ohtani-Yamamoto-Sasaki-May/Gonsolin six-man rotation (until an arm or three goes sproing), but the Dodgers were projected to have the most productive—and, perhaps, entertaining—rotation in baseball before they signed Sasaki. Professional sports isn’t a charitable enterprise, but from a spectator perspective, MLB would have a more compelling product if some of L.A.’s pitcher wealth were spread among less fortunate teams.
Speaking of fortunes: Dodgers defenders often suggest that other clubs should get more aggressive to try to beat the Dodgers at their own game. Certain teams that spend beneath their means could stand to take that advice to heart. But let’s not pretend that just any team could do what the Dodgers have done, no matter how adept at development. The Dodgers have a humongous TV deal that runs through 2039, giving them financial security most teams lack as the cable bubble bursts. (Not to mention more resources to devote to development.) They’re a historic franchise, in a massive market, at the epicenter of celebrity and endorsement deals. And they’re in Southern California, which means warm (but not too warm) weather and convenient travel times to Asia. Other teams could come closer to acting like the Dodgers. But the vast majority would be hard-pressed to top L.A. if it came down to a bidding war. The Padres tried to pull it off, but the death of their owner and the dissolution of their TV deal soon blunted their ambitions.
If you ask me where I stand, it’s somewhere in the middle. (Exciting, I know.) The Dodgers aren’t really ruining baseball, but they are optimizing it, and pushing their advantage to the point that even some of their faithful may feel a little sheepish. In baseball, you can’t buy a championship, but you can become enough of a favorite that a title might start to seem slightly hollow. Maybe the best hope for the 29 other teams is that the next player they set their sights on will decide that winning with the Dodgers would be too easy. A more thrilling goal would be ending their reign.
Anti-Dodgers sentiment is spiking now, when L.A.’s latest cash splash is all there is for fans to talk about. But once the season starts, the action will provide a merciful distraction from Dodgers discourse. L.A. will lose some games (and some pitchers), as even the best teams do, and the outrage will fade for a time.
In the longer run, there could be ramifications: We are, after all, less than two years away from the expiration of the CBA. There always have been, and always will be, inequities in professional sports; there’s always a best team that’s way above the worst. And while leagues with salary caps may seem more sporting on the surface, their records don’t show any more competitive balance than baseball. Still, the prevailing perception that MLB’s playing field is steeply tilted may matter more than the reality. A cap plus a floor, set at acceptable levels, could be a PR win as well as an impediment to Dodgers dominance. Maybe the Dodgers are spending their way to a system that will stop them from spending like this, by stacking the deck so much that they unify small-to-mid-market owners against them and even piss off players who are sick of losing to L.A. (Remember the so-called “Cohen Tax” in the current CBA?) Then again, players are pro-spending, and the Dodgers do a lot of that. One way or another, the labor battles will be bitter.
MLB’s disparities in market size and spending aren’t perfectly paralleled by disparities in either regular-season standings or postseason results. More so than a leaguewide competitive-balance problem, what MLB has is a handful of teams that aren’t trying hard, and a couple of teams—if we credit the deep-pocketed Mets for their attempt to be Dodgers East—who are acting as if money is more or less no object. Are the Dodgers bad for baseball? Maybe. More accurately, though, they’re becoming a bad look for baseball. And they don’t seem to care what they look like, as long as they win.
