The 2025 MLB playoffs began without a clear favorite. Jeff Passan’s postseason preview opened with the line, “The Los Angeles Dodgers were supposed to break baseball. Instead they just broke.”
Eighteen
days later, Dave Roberts accepted the Warren C. Giles Trophy for clinching the NLCS and said, “Let’s get four more wins and really ruin baseball.”
This must be prevented. There is only one solution that can save the future of baseball: MLB must contract the Dodgers.
All due respect to the Toronto Blue Jays, with the (checks notes) best record in the AL, but the Dodgers now seem inevitable. They opened the Wild Card against the Reds and dog walked them in two games, outscoring 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 more like a Triple-A team by the end of the four-game sweep.
In a normal situation, the possibility of a Dodgers World Series repeat would be annoying, exasperating, frustrating, depressing, what have you (especially for division rivals). But this is not a normal situation.
As Passan laid out before the NLCS, we could be staring down the barrel of a lost season when the Collective Bargaining Agreement expires on December 1, 2026. The Dodgers, with their $549 million payroll, spending as much as the bottom six teams in payroll combined, represent all that is wrong with baseball to the owners and many fans of the other 29 teams.
The Dodgers won the 2023-24 offseason, then they won the 2024 World Series, then they won the 2024-25 offseason, and now they are four wins away from winning the 2025 World Series. This offseason they may just make that classic headline from The Onion a reality.
Sure, as Passan points out, the Dodgers and Brewers constructed their teams though similar means, with the former spending on just five free agents compared to Milwaukee’s one. But that comparison obscures the ability to extend players acquired via trade (Mookie Betts), lock up the best 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 defer over $1 billion worth of contracts from 2028 to 2046.
The Dodgers don’t have more money than God, but if God ever ran into some liquidity issues, the Dodgers would be a good first call (with Ohtani being a close second).
At the end of the regular season the Dodgers looked to be in shambles. How could a team with half a billion dollars on their payroll look so vulnerable? With this narrative swirling around the team, you’d be forgiven for missing the fact that they won 93 games — fifth-most in baseball and only four wins behind the league leaders, despite logging over 2,500 days on the IL.
The Blue Jays won the AL—regular season and postseason—even though their prized pitching acquisition, Shane Bieber, spent most of the season injured. The Dodgers lost thirteen season’s worth of games to various injuries, had to patch together a pitching staff for much of the year, and finished one game back. Oh, that we could all have such problems.
Credit to the Dodgers for making adjustments—and don’t they always make 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 tendacious and specious argument, what Alexis de Tocqueville called “A clear but false idea” (and it doesn’t make much business sense but stick with me here).
The Dodgers spent 75% of their revenue on payroll, whereas the majority of the league spends about 40% to 57%. And yet, the Dodgers spent more on payroll than all but three teams brought in the year before. If you want to make the argument that every team should spend, at least on a percentage basis, like the Dodgers, you still have to contend with how much they bring in (and that doesn’t include all the cashflow from sources not counted directly in revenue).
The reason we like sports is because of the promise of a level playing field: on a long enough timeline, everyone’s chances to win a title are even. Some teams are in win now mode, others are in win later mode, and others are sitting in the sand with a two by eight hammered into their foreheads. Many suggest MLB adopt a salary cap (and floor) in order to level the playing field. Maybe that can solve these problems.
It sounds like a great plan, but it is also exactly the problem. Despite the effectiveness of a salary cap for competitive balance in the NFL and NBA, that suggestion is a non-starter for CBA negotiations with the players union, who see salary caps as a method of suppressing spending. But if the Dodgers can sign, extend, and improve everyone (rumors abound around the next big incoming star from Japan), what realistic chance do other teams have?
With 12 of the last 13 division titles, five of the last nine NL pennants, and two* of the last five World Series titles, the Dodgers run of dominance rivals only that of European super giants of soccer like Bayern Munich, who have rendered the German Bundesliga a mere staging ground for their dominance, having won 12 of the last 13 league titles.
This cannot be allowed to continue. If it does, we may well witness the complete destruction of the game and league we love so much, allowing it to become a vanity project for Los Angeles. If the proposal of the salary cap in the next CBA negotiations threatens the future of the game, and the existence of the Dodgers threatens owners with the ennui of competitive futility, we need to adopt drastic measures.
I’m not picky on what actions are taken next. But contracting the Dodgers seems the most elegant solution.
What would we do with their players? Their front office? Their stadium? Perhaps, like when SMU football received the “death penalty” for their football program, the Dodgers will be permitted to rejoin the league when they demonstrate the appropriate level of contrition. Maybe they could even make a bowl game playoff series in a decade or three. Like I said, I’m not picky.
(Tell us how you think this scenario will play out in the comments!)
But the time has come. The only way to save the game of baseball—especially if the Dodgers fulfill expectations and beat the Blue Jays—is to remove the thing that may cost us an extended number of games.
Contract the Dodgers. For the greater good.
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