Los Angeles locked up its 13th NL West title in 14 years and heads into October as the only real favorite after adding Tarik Skubal at the deadline on top of back-to-back titles. One side says a payroll that can buy the best pitcher alive mid-pennant-race is breaking the sport; the other says every league needs a giant and nobody's stopping anyone else from spending. Pick.
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Add your commentI've been a Giants fan for 34 years and I genuinely cannot stand the Dodgers, but I have to be honest with myself: my hatred keeps me more invested in baseball than I'd be if they didn't exist. They're the team I love to hate and that's worth something to the sport whether I like it or not.
Hot take that will get me roasted: the Dodgers are better for baseball's INTERNATIONAL profile than any parity system could ever be. Ohtani, Yamamoto, Betts, Freeman — that roster is a global advertisement for the sport. You think kids in Japan or the Dominican Republic are tuning in to watch the Guardians? I'm not being mean, I'm being real. The Dodgers are baseball's biggest export right now.
The problem isn't the Dodgers specifically. The problem is a salary structure with no real ceiling. The luxury tax is a joke — it's not a penalty, it's a convenience fee for rich franchises. Until there's a hard cap, stop acting surprised when the richest teams just... buy championships. That's the system working exactly as designed.
I work in the front office of an NL team (not saying which one) and the internal conversations about the Dodgers are genuinely demoralizing. It's not envy — well, not just envy — it's that the gap in infrastructure, analytics staff, draft resources, and yes, payroll, is so wide that we're essentially playing a different sport. The rules say we're in the same league. The economics say otherwise.
It IS personal, that's the whole point of being a fan. The comment above mine basically just told someone their 40 years of fandom is invalid because they picked the wrong market to grow up in. Come on.
Okay but nobody forced other owners to pocket their revenue-sharing checks instead of spending them. I'm looking directly at the Pirates. DIRECTLY.
The Skubal trade is the thing I cannot get over. You're already the best team in baseball and you reach into the deadline and pull out the Cy Young frontrunner. That's not competing, that's just... tilting the table and watching the marbles slide your way. I don't even hate the Dodgers, I hate what it revealed about the sport.
I coached Little League for eleven years. You know what kills youth participation? Kids not believing they could ever reach the top level because it feels locked up by money before they even grow up. Parity matters for the pipeline, not just the product on the field. Nobody talks about this.
Every league needs a giant. The Lakers, the Cowboys, the Patriots in their run. Dynasties create casual fans who want to see them lose. Those casual fans buy tickets and watch games. The Dodgers are good for baseball's visibility even if they're bad for parity. Those are two different things and people keep conflating them.
Blaming Manfred is always correct regardless of context, he is the correct answer to every baseball question.
Genuine question for the "just spend more" crowd: what exactly should the Royals do? They're in a mid-size market, drawing okay attendance, spending what they can reasonably spend, and they're still roughly $200 million behind LA's payroll. The math is the math. If you disagree, explain how you square that with a sport that calls itself a fair competition.
To the Little League coach above — with respect, I think that's a stretch. Kids in small markets idolize players, not franchises. A kid in Pittsburgh dreams of being Skubal, not of the Tigers winning the pennant. The pipeline isn't broken by dynasty, it's broken by a dozen other socioeconomic factors that have nothing to do with the Dodgers.
The comment about international appeal is the most accidentally honest thing in this thread. Ohtani alone has done more for MLB's presence in Asia than thirty years of marketing campaigns. Like it or not, that's real.
I grew up in LA. Went to my first Dodger game in 1987. Sat in the bleachers with my grandfather. This team has meant everything to my family for decades. All I hear now is how my team is ruining the sport. We just like baseball. We just have a good team. That's not a crime.
someone explain to me how buying Skubal mid-race is different from the Yankees buying everyone in 2009. I'll wait. crickets.
If you actually work in a front office you probably shouldn't be posting this but also please keep posting this.
The Royals won the World Series in 2015 with smart drafting and development. They didn't spend their way there. The path exists, it's just narrow and requires everything to go right. That's... kind of what sports is?
This is the angle nobody is bringing up and it's actually really important. Kids stop dreaming about playing for their home team when their home team has no realistic shot. That's a long-term structural problem.
Hard cap would destroy small-market teams too because then you couldn't outbid for a young stud and keep him. The current system lets a team like Tampa develop and compete for a window. A hard cap closes that window faster than you'd think.
Nobody is saying it's a crime, we're saying the financial structure that allows it is unfair. Your grandfather's Dodgers and today's Dodgers are barely the same animal. Don't make it personal.
It's different because we lost!! (I'm a Tigers fan, this is not a real argument, I'm just sad)
At some point fans have to stop blaming the team and blame the commissioner's office. The Dodgers are playing by the rules. The rules are the problem. Blame Manfred. Save some energy.
The Dodgers have won back-to-back titles and people act like they've won seven in a row. The Yankees did THAT and nobody said baseball was broken then — oh wait, they absolutely did, and baseball survived.
Visibility ≠ health of the sport. The NFL is the most visible league in the world and it still has competitive balance debates every year. Visibility just means more people are watching one team dominate, not that everyone feels their team matters.
I'm a Cubs fan. We had our window. It closed. I miss it but I'd rather have had that one championship than have never had hope at all. Every fan gets a window if the org is smart enough. Some orgs are just run badly.
The Dodgers aren't bad for baseball. Fans in every city show up when their team plays LA. Villains sell tickets.
Look I was prepared to be mad at the Dodgers and this thread genuinely made me reconsider some things. The international argument and the luxury tax point are both more interesting than I expected from a sports forum at 11pm on a Wednesday.
The person above did NOT say their fandom was invalid, they said the financial structure is the issue. Reading comprehension is a skill.
Counterpoint: it felt different in the Yankees dynasty years because at least the Red Sox and others occasionally broke through. When was the last time anyone seriously threatened LA for the division?
So the solution to American baseball's fairness problem is... make it an international showcase for one team? That's your answer? Cool. Cool cool cool.
"just draft better" is the most exhausting take in sports. The Royals that won in 2015 are gone, that window closed in two years, and they've been rebuilding for seven seasons since. Not exactly a sustainable model.
nobody said it was a SOLUTION they said it was a REALITY these are different words
my dad cried when the trade went through. actual tears. he's been a Detroit fan since 1971.
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