The Dodgers signed Shohei Ohtani to a $700 million deal last offseason, among other big-ticket moves. They won the 2024 World Series. Since winning the World Series, the Dodgers landed two-time Cy Young winner Blake Snell and high-ceiling Japanese import Roki Sasaki, among several other important moves.
The aftermath, predictably, has been a lot of talk about how the big-spending Dodgers are “bad for baseball” or even “ruining the sport.”
Commissioner Rob Manfred has heard the complaints and seems to indicate he’s empathizing with some other fan bases, but he isn’t buying that the Dodgers are being bad for the sport.
“No,” Manfred said (via The Athletic). “I don’t agree with that. The Dodgers are a really well-run, successful organization. Everything that they do and have done is consistent with our rules. They’re trying to give their fans the best possible product. Those are all positives. I recognize, however, and my email certainly reflects it: there are fans in other markets who are concerned about their team’s ability to compete, and we always have to be concerned when our fans are concerned about something. But pinning it on the Dodgers, not in that camp.”
We’ve heard the complaints plenty, too. It was early December when I pointed out my opinion that the Dodgers are absolutely not bad for the sport and noted in late January that — while they look like the best team in baseball — they aren’t nearly good enough to draw this kind of response.
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Still, there’s an easy confluence of events to explain how we got here. The huge signings, the championship, and then more big signings are a good place to start. There’s also the payroll disparity.
Per Cot’s contracts, the Dodgers have the top “competitive balance payroll” in baseball at $389.1 million. The Mets are second at nearly $326 million and there are four teams over $300 million. The Marlins rank dead last at $89.1 million.
That is a massive gulf. There’s no doubting that, though there are plenty of arguments to be made that the lower-tier teams need to spend more instead of limiting the top-tier teams. Plus, as Manfred pointed out Thursday, payroll isn’t everything.
“There are a bunch of different ways to measure competitive balance,” Manfred said. “Repeat champions … our information in that regard is positive. I think it’s a different question to say, ‘Do people perceive that the playing field is balanced and fair and/or do people believe that money dictates who wins?’ Those are separate concerns from who actually wins on the field.”
I’ve pointed this out before, but it bears repeating: Salary caps don’t mean better parity. Here’s from my December write-up:
Major League Baseball has now had 24 straight champions since the last time a team repeated. Sixteen of the 30 teams have won the World Series in the 2000s. Only six of them have won multiple titles and of those, only the Red Sox (four) and Giants (three) have done so more than twice.
The NBA has seen a team win six titles (Lakers) since 2000 and three others have won at least three in that time period. The NHL has had six teams (Devils, Red Wings, Penguins, Lightning, Blackhawks and Kings) win multiple titles and account for 15 of the last 24. The Chiefs have won three of the last five Super Bowls and currently sport the best record in the league. The Patriots have six titles this century. If any of this stuff happened in MLB, it would be used as proof that the league desperately needs a salary cap.
There have been, again 16 distinct MLB champs in the 2000s. The NBA has 11, the NFL 13 and the NHL 13.
Every single MLB team has made the playoffs at least once in the last decade. Neither the NFL nor NHL can stake such a claim and MLB’s playoff field is the smallest of the bunch.
Latch onto that Chiefs note above and keep in mind they are playing for another Super Bowl title on Sunday — against an Eagles team that was just in the Super Bowl in 2022 (and won it in 2017).
Simply slapping a salary cap on the league and acting like that’s some big solution to bring parity to a league that already has the most parity doesn’t make a ton of sense, but it’s reasonable to worry about the spending gap increasing and where that might take us.
“I am a huge believer in the idea that there are always multiple solutions to a particular set of concerns,” Manfred said.
He’s right.
Something to watch: The current collective bargaining agreement expires in December of 2026. We know the players don’t want a salary cap, nor do the big-spending owners. The owners who don’t spend a lot are starting to chirp more and more. Will the owner side be divided, and, if so, how will that affect CBA talks?
It’ll be interesting and, very likely, frustrating for most of us to watch from the outside.
