Okay, that line is slightly tongue-in-cheek. But only slightly. To be fair, it’s not particularly the Dodgers that broke baseball. Jesse Friedman made a salient post on Twitter, which I largely agree with.
All of these statements can be true at once:
1) Dodgers are doing precisely what they should be doing.
2) They probably won’t win the 2026 World Series.
3) Some owners need to spend more.
4) MLB’s competitive balance mechanisms are flawed and in need of fixing.
My major disagreement with the above
is point #2. I think the Dodgers probably will win the 2026 World Series, and if they don’t, it will only be due to the randomness of the playoffs. Perhaps the Yankees or the Blue Jays might be able to edge them over the relative sprint of seven games. But my concern is more to do with the 2026 regular season, which occupies the great bulk of the year, even if MLB probably makes most of its money over the month of the postseason. After the arrival of Kyle Tucker on the Los Angeles Dodgers, the over/under on their win tally is the best by eleven games.
Not the best in the NL West. Or even the best in the NL. It’s eleven games better than any other team in the major leagues. They are projected to win the NL West by seventeen games over the Padres. The division is shaping up to be an absolute procession, of the same kind seen in 2019. Remember that year? No, you don’t. Because the Dodgers’ divisional lead hit double-digits by the first week in June, and fans of every other team tuned out on the race the rest of the way. The projection for 2026 isn’t too much of a surprise, considering the current projected payrolls in the NL West.
Yes, the Dodgers this year, between salary and luxury tax, will be spending more than twice as much as any other team in the NL West. There’s no other division which will have such a dramatic imbalance. Sure, the Mets are spending, but the Phillies are right there with them. The same goes in the AL East, where the Yankees, Blue Jays and Red Sox are within $62 million of each other. The next most top-heavy would be the NL Central, but there, the Cubs’ spending difference over the next team, the Brewers, is only about $104 million: barely a third of the almost $300 million advantage enjoyed by the Dodgers in the West.
“Your team could do this too.”
Ah, the frequent bleat of the Dodgers fan, to which I succinctly reply: bullshit. I refer you to Forbes’ Business of Baseball report, which is as good a resource as we have in regard to the finances of the thirty MLB franchises. Looking at the revenue column in the most recent report, there are precisely two other teams whose entire income would allow them to match the Dodgers’ salary bill for their major-league roster in 2026. The Dodgers’ TV deal alone ($334 million per year) is more than every penny the Diamondbacks make. Yes: if nobody at all ever went to Dodger Stadium or bought an Ohtani jersey, they’d still be richer than Arizona.
So the “Doing this too” approach would be a speed-run to insolvency, or require some benevolent billionaire owner to treat the franchise as a money pit, and hurl their own personal fortune into the coffers. Neither solutions are credible in the slightest. Even if we could, I’m severely unconvinced Kyle Tucker should be the recipient of such largesse. While the Dodgers were racking up most of the $2.11 billion they now have on the books in guaranteed salaries, most of the moves made sense.
But in what universe is Kyle Tucker worth $60 million a year? I mean, he is certainly a good player. But his 4.6 bWAR last year ranked him 33rd-best among position players. He did miss time with a calf injury, but had Tucker matched his career high, 5.5 bWAR would still have barely crept into the top twenty. Even using the increased $11 million per WAR figure, he’ll need that career high every year to justify the contract. In isolation, this would seem like a significant overpay for Tucker. If the D-backs has paid that much for Tucker, I’d not have been happy.
But this is the way the Dodgers now operate, with eight contracts on the books in excess of a hundred million dollars. The Diamondbacks have…. one. To steal a quote from Heathers:Veronica Sawyer: Why do you have to be such a mega-bitch? Heather Duke: Because I can be.
Make no mistake: this is all perfectly legal under the current rules. But Manfred has sat on his hands and watched as the only tool they can apply against luxury tax has been proven completely useless. It has become part of the cost of the Los Angeles Dodgers doing business, and MLB rakes in its share. The other teams and fans? Fuck ‘em.
Bring on the lockout
The game needs a hard salary cap, and I certainly agree, a salary floor. Though it’s probably going to be too late: there will likely be some kind of grandfather clause going on, allowing the Dodgers to keep running out a $400 million team until their current deferred salaries expire. That will be 2047, when Edwin Diaz – then in his mid-fifties – is scheduled to receive his final check from LA. But it’ll be better than nothing, which is in effect the restriction currently in place on spending. Looking at my current complete lack of interest in the 2026 regular season as a competitive endeavor, the sooner the better.
Because right now, the best hope the D-backs have of ever winning the division is probably… realignment. Unfortunately, most of the proposals I’ve seen involve Arizona remaining in the same division as Los Angeles. More games with Dodgers’ fans invading Chase Field is clearly sub-optimal. There ain’t enough Raid available for that. But there was this one, in which we end up with the Angels, Padres and Athletics. That would work. Of course, the ideal scenario would be to put the Dodgers in their own division, by themselves, so nobody has to play them until the post-season.
But while we’re thinking radically, why not realign things by payroll? These days, with jet travel the norm, geography is far less significant than it was. So why not get each club to submit their total payroll budget at the start of the year, rank them, and organize divisions that way? For example, the Super-Platinum Division right now would be the Dodgers, Mets, Phillies and Blue Jays; the Balsa Division would be the Marlins, Rays, Indians and White Sox. That way, teams would compete against others with similar payrolls and it would be a much more equitable test of skill. Or do it fantasy baseball style: every team gets exactly the same budget.
There are options, for sure. Though getting the player’s union to agree might be a different matter. But it is worth noting that, while the average baseball salary passed five million dollars this season for the first time, the median salary – the point where half the players earn more and half earn less – dropped to $1.35 million. It’s $300K lower than it was a decade ago, and that’s not including inflation. Just as with team totals, individual salaries are become increasingly more top-heavy, and indicates the record-setting level of money in the game is not floating all boats equally.
