Baseball fans will be exposed to some ridiculously horrid takes from pro-commissioner-or-owner windbags during MLB’s final winter of peace with a lockout looming in 2027.
They will claim that the Los Angeles Dodgers have ruined the game of baseball. Their wild spending and super-team-building capabilities with no financial regulations have created the closest thing we have seen to a dynasty in a quarter-century.
The NL West superpowers won their second straight World Series on Sunday morning in as thrilling a Game 7 as we’ll ever see, becoming the first repeat champions since the New York Yankees’ three-peat from 1998-2000.
This was expected. Mark Walter and Guggenheim Management built the game’s most expensive team, with a payroll of $350 million. Their staggering offers won the signatures of the greatest ballplayer we’ve ever seen, Shohei Ohtani, of World Series hero Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who won three of the four games in the Fall Classic, of Freddie Freeman, of Blake Snell, of Roki Sasaki, and of Tesocar Hernandez.
But there’s so much more to it.
They traded for Mookie Betts, Tyler Glasnow, and Tommy Edman. They drafted Will Smith, who hit the eventual game-winning home run in Game 7. They signed defensive hero Andy Pages as an international free agent seven years ago.
They develop talent better than anyone. They build complete teams with the grit to come back on the road to win championships. They have a manager who presses the right buttons more often than not. Nearly everything Dave Roberts did in Game 7 worked.
Instead, you will see owners and perhaps even MLB commissioner Rob Manfred complaining that most teams in the league are at a competitive disadvantage, as they cannot keep up with the Dodgers’ spending.
That’s not the case. They simply do not have owners committed to winning.
All but five team owners are worth under $1 billion, yet still refuse to cough up the money that is relative to the league’s exploding revenues to field competitive teams. The Boston Red Sox traded Mookie Betts to the Dodgers because their owner, John Henry, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into his other team, Premier League giants Liverpool FC — specifically into the signing of star Egyptian striker Mo Salah.
The Los Angeles Angels’ foolhardy investments did not work out, squandering the prime of Mike Trout and half a decade of Ohtani to the point that they never made the postseason together. How could one fault Ohtani for wanting to find greener pastures of contending baseball while getting paid?
The Tampa Bay Rays did not want to pay Glasnow and traded him to the Dodgers. Snell was on the market for anyone’s taking, but no one was willing to take the chance the Dodgers did on the oft-injured southpaw.
The Atlanta Braves did not want to pay up for Freeman after he led them to a World Series in 2021, instead inking Matt Olson to an Alex Anthopolous-special of a cheaper deal. Freeman now has two more rings while the Braves missed the playoffs in 2025.
What’s that old saying? Don’t hate the player, hate the game?
The Dodgers are playing the game right; it’s cheap, penny-pinching owners that refuse to adjust to the times that are going to spark a lockout that could completely eliminate baseball in 2027, if not longer.
