Dave Roberts and the Los Angeles Dodgers aren’t afraid of embracing a villain persona. Especially when they have a fully operational Death Star hitting and pitching for them.
As the Dodgers celebrated a second straight National League title and a chance to become MLB’s first back-to-back champions in 25 years, their manager took the microphone and executed a perfect heel turn:
“Before this season started, they said ‘The Dodgers are ruining baseball.’ Let’s get four more wins and really ruin baseball!”
Roberts’ players approved of the statement, as did their fans at Dodger Stadium. The group will attempt to do so against either the Seattle Mariners or Toronto Blue Jays, with the Mariners holding a 3-2 ALCS advantage after Friday.
That’s the kind of confidence you get after a dominant sweep of the Milwaukee Brewers, who posted the best record in MLB during the regular season (including a 6-0 record against the Dodgers). The L.A. rotation of Shohei Ohtani, Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow anchored those four wins with a combined 28 2/3 innings, nine hits, two runs, seven walks and 35 strikeouts.
Of course, that quartet of pitchers also epitomize why so many opposing fans see the Dodgers as not just bad for their own team, but bad for baseball.
Are the Dodgers really bad for baseball?
The Dodgers and Brewers were perfectly set up as a clash of baseball archetypes. The Dodgers were the big, bad large-market team with the most expensive roster in baseball, underwritten by an enormous local TV contract and Ohtani’s cultural power. The Brewers had a bottom-10 payroll in one of the league’s smallest markets, succeeding through shrewd decisions at the plate and in the front office.
You already know which one won.
Even if you adjust Ohtani’s heavily deferred $700 million contract for inflation, that four-man Dodgers rotation will collectively make more than the entire Brewers’ $123 million roster. The smallest of those four contracts (Glasnow’s five-year, $137 million deal) would still obliterate the Brewers’ largest ever contract for a pitcher (Matt Garza, four years and $50 million).
Brewers manager Pat Murphy, fond of calling his very talented roster the “Average Joes,” leaned into that dichotomy throughout the series, at one point claiming some Dodgers players couldn’t name more than eight players on his roster. It possibly became a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the Dodgers absolutely looked and acted like the more talented team.
Back-to-back Dodgers titles would mean money works, even if plenty of teams — the Dodgers included — were struggling to dominate like what L.A. is doing now. The New York Mets, MLB’s second-largest payroll, failed to make the postseason. The New York Yankees have won only one title since 2000 and crashed out hard in the ALDS with the third-largest payroll.
It’s funny to think the Dodgers were quite literally bankrupt 15 years ago, and then they landed with a dream ownership group, who hired the right people and signed the right Japanese unicorn. Until 2024, it was easy to disregard them. Their money had bought them only one World Series title, the often-mocked 2020 title held amid the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, it’s not so easy.
The Dodgers look unbeatable. It might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. (Photo by Mary DeCicco/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
(Mary DeCicco via Getty Images)
Will the Dodgers ruin baseball with another title? That probably depends on your definition of “ruin.” Baseball itself would probably see higher ratings and general interest with a true juggernaut capturing headlines, just like pretty much every other major league over the past half-century. Last year’s World Series saw a seven-year high in ratings and drew more viewers in Japan than the NBA Finals did in the U.S.
However, the Dodgers finally putting it together is very bad news for your team, if you’re not a Dodger fan. Rooting for a team is hard enough when it theoretically has a 1-in-30 chance of winning the only thing that people care about. It’s harder when you look over and see a team, particularly a rich one, seemingly ready to gobble up half the titles of the next decade.
It’s more a basic question of fairness than the fate of the game, though those debates might become one and the same during the next CBA negotiations, in which MLB is already pushing for a salary cap.
There is a way to credit the Dodgers for what they have done — what Ohtani has done in particular — while conceding that, yes, Milwaukee was facing an uphill battle because of all that expensive talent. The same will be true in the World Series if the Mariners finish off the Blue Jays, who had a top 10 payroll this year.
For now, though, the Dodgers are just going to have fun with their critics. That’s what villains do.
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