Living in La La Land
At the moment, baseball fans of every team other than the Los Angeles Dodgers are upset with the Los Angeles Dodgers. This is because the Dodgers have “ruined” baseball, splashing out ridiculous amounts of money to build a super franchise.
This may be true, at least the super franchise part—after all, the Dodgers have won back-to-back World Series and currently sport the best record in baseball. Then, over the weekend, the rich got richer, as the Dodgers traded for the best pitcher on the market, picking up two-time Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal from the Tigers.
Watching the Dodgers dole out ridiculous amounts of money in free agency the last few years has been frustrating for fans of every other baseball team. The Dodgers have the money to spend in large part because of an imbalance that stems from a legal loophole allowing the Dodgers to keep a disproportionately large chunk of their large TV deal.
Dodgers fans will argue that you’re hating the player, not the game. Yes, the Dodgers have an advantageous financial situation. Yet the Dodgers are still subject to the same financial team-building penalties as everyone else, which leaves them with a luxury tax bill higher than the total salaries of 18 different teams. They’ve figured out a way to defer some of their salaries, which works in the short term but will presumably be punitive down the road.
But what makes the Dodgers different is they have an ownership group willing to pay those penalties. There’s also something to be said for the Dodgers’ player development systems, which have allowed them to build arguably the strongest minor league system in baseball. If you want to go get players on the trade market, you need to have the capital to do it. The Dodgers had the capital to get Skubal.
The Skubal acquisition is just the latest blow. Many people have argued that any team could have put together a comparable offer for Skubal; that the Dodgers actually did just underscores their commitment to excellence. I wonder if maybe every other team just didn’t want to give up three prospects for a guy who will be a free agent in three months, who is most likely to sign a new contract with the Dodgers anyway. Also, I understand Skubal has been awesome, but he’s also had three arm surgeries before the age of 30, which would seem to be problematic.
Would it feel more fair if the Dodgers had a few more guardrails around their spending? Sure! But I suspect baseball’s team-building rules will be altered, perhaps as soon as this winter, as an extended labor divide seems inevitable (and disappointing). The Dodgers’ luxurious TV deal will run out in a decade, and their aging cornerstone players (Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani) will all probably be retired by then. Also, what perhaps gets overlooked is that despite their general greatness, the Dodgers haven’t been completely dominant—the Dodgers were just a pitch or two away from losing the last two World Series.
What is certain is that the Dodgers have built a juggernaut, under the same rulebook every team had available to them. They now wear the black hat as baseball’s biggest villain. Now it’s up to everyone else to figure out how to topple the evil empire.
Good luck with that.
