The 2025 MLB playoffs started without a clear favorite. Jeff Passans preview after the season opened with the line, “The Los Angeles Dodgers had to break baseball. Instead, they just broke.”
Eighteen days later, Dave Roberts accepted the Warren C. Giles Trophy for making the NLCS and said, “Let’s get four more wins and really screw up baseball.”
This must be prevented. There is only one solution that can save the future of baseball: MLB must sign the Dodgers.
With all due respect to the Toronto Blue Jays, with the (check notes) best record in the AL, but the Dodgers now seem unavoidable. They opened the Wild Card against the Reds and the dog let them out in two games, defeating them 18-9. The NLDS, hosted by the Phillies, was closer, with the series-clinching runs scored on an error in the 11th inning of Game 4. That brought the heavyweight matchup with the Brewers, who, despite having the best record in baseball, looked better. as a Triple-A team towards the end of the four-game sweep.
In a normal situation, the possibility of a Dodgers World Series repeat would be annoying, annoying, frustrating, depressing, whatever (especially for division rivals). But this is not a normal situation.
As Passan submitted to the NLCSwe could be looking into the course of a lost season when the collective bargaining agreement expires on December 1, 2026. The Dodgers, with their $549 million payroll, which spends as much as the bottom six teams on the payroll combined, represent everything that is wrong with baseball to the owners and many fans of the other 29 teams.
The Dodgers won the 2023-24 offseason, then the 2024 World Series, then the 2024-25 offseason and now they’re four wins away from winning the 2025 World Series. This offseason, they just might get there classic head of The onion a reality.
Certainly, as Passan notes, the Dodgers and Brewers have constructed their teams similarly, with the former spending on just five free agents compared to Milwaukee’s. But that equation clouds the ability to expand players acquired via trade (Mookie Betts), lock up top international free agents (Yoshinobu Yamamoto) and international prospects (Roki Sasaki) and still have enough money to commit long-term to Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, Blake Snell, Tanner Scott, Will Smith and Teoscar Hernández, because they can. postpone more than $1 billion in contracts from 2028 to 2046.
The Dodgers don’t have more money than God, but if God were to ever run into liquidity problems, the Dodgers would be a good first choice (with Ohtani a close second).
At the end of the regular season, the Dodgers seemed to be in shambles. How can a team with half a billion dollars on its payroll look so vulnerable? With this story circulating around the team, you’d be forgiven for missing the fact that they’ve won 93 games – fifth-most in baseball and just four wins behind the league leader, despite logging more than 2,500 days on the IL.
The Blue Jays won the AL (regular season and postseason), even though their prized pitching asset, Shane Bieber, spent most of the season injured. The Dodgers lost thirteen games of the season due to various injuries, had to build a pitching staff for much of the year and played one game back. Oh, that we could all have such problems.
Credit to the Dodgers for making adjustments – and they don’t always just the right adjustments– and we can’t blame their owners for wanting to spend money when no other owner (non-Steve Cohen division) wants to spend, right? This is a persistent and misleading argument, what Alexis de Tocqueville called “A clear but false idea” (and it doesn’t make much business sense, but I stand by it).
The Evaders spent 75% of their turnover on payroll administrationwhile most of the competition spends around 40% to 57%. And yet the Dodgers spent more on payroll than all but three teams did the year before. If you want to make the argument that every team, at least on a percentage basis, should spend like the Dodgers, you still have to take into account how much they bring in (and that doesn’t even include all of the cash flow from sources that aren’t directly counted in revenue).
The reason we love sports is because of the promise of a level playing field: if the timeline is long enough, everyone’s chances of winning a title are equal. Some teams are in “win now” mode, some are in “win later” mode, and some are sitting in the sand with a two-by-eight hammered into their foreheads. Many are proposing that MLB adopt a salary cap (and minimum) to level the playing field. Maybe that can solve these problems.
It sounds like a great plan, but it’s also exactly the problem. Despite the effectiveness of a salary cap for competitive balance in the NFL and NBA, this suggestion is a non-starter for CBA negotiations with the players’ union, which sees salary caps as a method to suppress spending. But if the Dodgers can sign everyone, expand and improve (rumors abound around the… next big incoming star from Japan), what realistic chance do other teams have?
With twelve of the last thirteen division titles, five of the last nine NL pennants and two* of the last five World Series titles, the Dodgers’ dominance rivals only that of European soccer supergiants like Bayern Munich, who have made the German Bundesliga merely a stage for their dominance after winning twelve of the last thirteen league titles.
This cannot be allowed to continue. If so, we could witness the complete destruction of the game and competition we love, making it a vanity project for Los Angeles. If the proposal of a salary cap in the next CBA negotiations endangers the future of the game, and the Dodgers’ existence threatens the owners with the boredom of competitive futility, we must take drastic action.
I’m not picky about the next steps. But signing the Dodgers seems like the most elegant solution.
What would we do with their players? Their front office? Their stadium? Perhaps, just like when SMU football was given the “death penalty” for its football program, the Dodgers will be allowed back into the league if they show the right level of contrition. Maybe they can even make one bowl game playoff series in about three decades. Like I said, I’m not picky.
(Tell us in the comments how you think this scenario will play out!)
But the time has come. The only way to save the game of baseball – especially if the Dodgers live up to expectations and beat the Blue Jays – is to remove what could cost us a greater number of games.
Sign the Dodgers. For the greater good.
#modest #proposal #sign #Dodgers