Hell has officially frozen over as the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series, becoming the first team to win back-to-back championships since the New York Yankees from 1998 to 2000.
It’s never as much fun when the season-long favorites from the beginning of the season end up winning it all compared to an underdog, or any other slightly worse contender; that’s why The Underdog Effect exists. Now, after the Dodgers have reached the pinnacle of baseball again, fans online have been quick to say that the team is ruining baseball, but the Dodgers shouldn’t be the ones to blame.
The win marks the third championship in six years for Los Angeles, and it’s safe to say that baseball has a new dynasty. Since those Yankees teams from the late 90s, the closest we’ve come to having a dynasty was the San Francisco Giants from 2010 to 2014. Dubbed the “Even Year Giants,” San Francisco had won the World Series in 2010, 2012, and 2014, all even-numbered years, though failing to make the playoffs in 2011 and 2013.
But during that time, nobody was calling out the Giants for potentially ruining America’s favorite pastime, so what makes the Dodgers different?
The most common complaint with Los Angeles is their extremely high payroll of $350 million, the highest in MLB history. The average payroll of all MLB teams in the 2025 season was $179 million, barely above half of what the team is paying for their roster. The phrase fans have been using to describe the situation is that the Dodgers are “buying championships.”
Unlike most teams, nearly all of the players in Los Angeles’ lineup came from either free agency or through trades. Looking at the lineups the team used during the World Series; the only players that were drafted by the Dodgers were catcher Will Smith and outfielder Andy Pages. That’s it.
The pitchers’ origins are slightly better than what their lineup offers. Using the same roster from the World Series, Jack Dreyer, Edgardo Henriquez, Clayton Kershaw, and Emmet Sheehan are all Dodgers for life. However, the four different starting pitchers used during the World Series—Tyler Glasnow, Blake Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Shohei Ohtani—are all from outside the organization.
It’s easy to justify how fans say the Dodgers are ruining baseball. The team is able to routinely sign top free agents each year without ever seeming to run out of money. Look at Ohtani and Yamamoto in the 2024 offseason, or Snell and top closer Tanner Scott last offseason, as recent examples.
But as I said earlier, this isn’t a problem that comes from the Dodgers. Instead, should the finger be pointed at the teams that are afraid to pay their players and be active in free agency?
To answer that, we have to first ask: Why do star players want to leave their teams when they can stay with the team they’ve always been with?
This can be addressed in two ways. The first being that owners don’t want to pay their franchise players.
The average MLB player’s career is very short-lived, lasting around a little over five years. Between that fact, many teams often delay when players can finally enter free agency through service time manipulation. Service time manipulation happens when teams limit the amount of playing time a player has during their rookie season. The result is that teams have longer control over players before they are eligible to enter free agency and can be paid less.
Obviously, players want to get paid what they are worth, especially if they’ve been with a club for a long time, and will get frustrated if their team doesn’t want to work out a deal.
We can observe this when looking back on Dodgers outfielder Mookie Betts’ 2020 offseason fallout with the Boston Red Sox. After spending his whole career with Boston to that point, in which he was named to four All Star games, won four Gold Gloves, three Silver Sluggers, an American League MVP, and World Series ring, Betts was looking to secure a big payday. But after the team failed to match Betts’ asking price by around $100 million, they swiftly traded him to the Dodgers, who handsomely paid him $365 million over 12 years.
If Boston had just ponied up more money for the face of their franchise, they wouldn’t have had to get rid of him. It certainly seems they learned their lesson when it came time to pay former third baseman Rafael Devers. When teams get cold feet about paying their players, there will always be big spending teams like Los Angeles who aren’t afraid to open up the checkbook.
The second problem with star players wanting to leave their teams for contenders—like the Dodgers—is that their old teams aren’t doing enough to compete.
Ohtani is the easiest example to point to when talking about this. The two-way superstar started his career with the often forgotten second team from Los Angeles, the Angels, which is funny because the team is actually located in Anaheim, Calif. The red-headed stepchild of Los Angeles baseball had already been wasting the career of three-time MVP Mike Trout, so when you add Ohtani, another MVP, you would figure the team would become playoff contenders, right?
Wrong, the Angels still haven’t made the playoffs since 2014, the longest active playoff drought in MLB. That’s all you need to know.
Rather than getting paid a boat load of money to be on a terrible team for the rest of his career like Trout, Ohtani let his rookie contract run its course and became a free agent for the 2024 offseason. Now, Ohtani is getting paid an even bigger boat load of money than Trout to be on the best team in baseball and just won back-to-back MVPs.
Does MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association need to step in and introduce a salary cap and floor to prevent teams like the Dodgers from spending so much, and teams like the Athletics from spending so little? Maybe. Do they also need to stop teams like the Dodgers from deferring so much of the money they sign players to? Probably. But at the end of the day, people need to realize and respect that the Dodgers are playing a completely different game that nobody else can match.
