In the past 10 years, the Dodgers, the baseball team located in Los Angeles, has been utterly dominant. Winning World Series titles in 2020 and 2024, and making the playoffs every other year, fans seem to be growing tired of their continued success. Before entering the 2024 season, the Dodgers landed arguably the biggest free agent of all time, Shohei Ohtani, giving him the biggest contract in MLB history, a whopping $700 million dollars over 10 years. Ohtani, a megastar from Japan, is a two-way player, meaning that he has elite skills in both pitching and hitting – a rarity in the history of the sport. In his first year playing in the United States in 2018, he won the Rookie of the Year Award. He also won the Most Valuable Player award in 2021, 2023, and 2024, and has already been named one of the greatest players of all time. All this to say, the Dodgers’ signing of Ohtani felt inevitable. Many fans felt like there was no hope for their own teams, that the Dodgers, as they always seem to do, would win out.
Their 2024 World Series win did not help this perception. This off-season they’ve continued to spend exorbitant amounts of money, signing many big stars and building their threat level. In response, the baseball community generally has been in an outrage. Comments flood Major League Baseball’s instagram posts with “the dodgers are running baseball.” So are they? In my opinion, the answer is definitively no. Here’s why.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, a new kind of baseball analysis became popular. In a blockbuster movie Moneyball, Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill tell the true story of the Oakland Athletics, a small market team, finding success in evaluating players using analytics. With metrics that other organizations seemed to overlook, they signed “undervalued” players for low amounts of money instead of the superstars for millions of dollars. This style of ownership and player evaluation has become very popular, and since, the media has come to revere teams that spend less, as they present as underdogs.
Though the ‘Moneyball’ strategy has worked for the Milwaukee Brewers (though they haven’t made it far in the playoffs), its success is rare and takes highly skilled general managers and luck. In the past 5 years, teams such as the Oakland Athletics, Baltimore Orioles, Tampa Bay Rays, and White Sox have used the guise of this strategy to give more money to the owners. They purposefully spend low and tank their team, with little to no criticism from the public. To be clear, the aforementioned teams are only seeming to employ Moneyball, what they’re really doing is being purposefully noncompetitive. In 2024 the White Sox went on a historic 21 game losing streak, and cemented themselves as the losingest team in MLB history. They’ve traded away all their good players, and have a payroll of $79 million, 27th in the league. They’ve faced criticism, to be sure, but not nearly as much as the Dodgers. On the other hand, teams that spend like the Dodgers, Mets, and Yankees are criticized for signing “all” of the free agents, and sweeping the market. But why are we punishing teams for trying to win? Shouldn’t it be an expectation that all owners invest in their teams? If other teams showed they would pay good money for good players, they would have just as much success in signing free agents as the Dodgers. As it is now, not many players want to play for teams that have ownership groups that don’t want to win. The Dodgers owner Mark Walter is doing exactly what he should be doing – trying to build a good baseball team.
Not to mention, the Dodgers aren’t nearly as dominant as the media and fans make them out to be. Up until their World Series win last fall, they were known as playoff chokers, as they often lost in the playoffs. In the context of baseball history, they are not as dominant as other teams have been. The 2010s San Francisco Giants, 90s and 2000s Yankees, the 1970s Cincinnati Reds, and many many more. Though it seems like the Dodgers have made the game ‘unfair,’ it really could be worse.
So the next time the Dodgers are crushing your favorite team, (trust me it will happen) don’t be angry at them, be angry at the owners who refuse to spend money on their players.