Since the year 2000, no major league ball club has repeated as back-to-back World Series champions. The last team to do so were the 1998-2000 Yankees led by icon Derek Jeter, who clinched three titles in a row before being denied a fourth consecutive win by the 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks.
On Tuesday, the Dodgers reportedly acquired 2x CY Young award winner and 2018 All-star Blake Snell on a five year deal. This will see the left hander spend the last years of his prime in LA after being picked up in free agency, coming off a good 2024 season with the San Francisco Giants.
Signing Snell serves as a serious statement of intent from The Guggenheim Baseball Management Group, the consortium that owns the Dodgers fronted by Mark Walter, and featuring former Lakers star Magic Johnson and current Chelsea FC owner Todd Boehly. They want to run it back, badly.
With Ohtani expected to return to the rotation, Yamamoto with a season of big league experience under his belt and Tyler Glasnow continuing to dominate hitters, there may not be a ball hit against LA until mid-August. Add to this the fact that LA are the favourites to sign freshly posted Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki, opposing batters might as well get used to seeing zeros on the scoreboard now.
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| Blake Snell on the mound for the San Francisco Giants, where he has spent the past two seasons (AP Photo/Jeff Dean) |
As one golden protocol droid once put it ‘This is madness’. And he would be right. In the last free agent window, the Dodgers spent north of a billion dollars on free agents. ONE BILLION DOLLARS. That was enough for them to win their first full season World Series since 1988, and Walter, Boehly and co. does not look to be curbing spending this year.
The ugly the truth of the matter is that, like all sports, winning titles typically follows money. Never has that been more evident for baseball than the 2024 postseason. The billion dollar Dodgers had to beat the team with the highest payroll in the league, the New York Mets, in the NLCS just to reach the fall classic, where they’d face the second highest payroll in baseball, the New York Yankees.
For the statheads, the underlying data supports this too. Since 2003, World Series winning teams, on average, have started the season with a payroll 29% higher than the league average for their respective season. There have been bucks to the trend on occasion, the 2015 Royals and 2003 Marlins significantly underspent their competition and came out on top. But in baseball, as in life, money talks.
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| Dodger's players celebrate on the field after bearing the New York Mets to advance to the 2024 World Series (MLB.com) |
This is all to say that Dodgers ownership are not resting on their laurels, in the dugout or in the front office. Because there is another truth about baseball, given a good enough look, teams will figure you out. Change is necessary, and that’s exactly what the Dodgers are looking to achieve with the signing of Snell and the pursuit of Sasaki.
Sasaki has one of the most electric fastballs anywhere on the planet and has an astonishing mound presence for a young pitcher. Snell is a veteran that has survived this long in the league by following the old adage of adapt or die. Both of these players make the Dodgers harder to beat than last year, and that is exactly the point. To get better when you are already the best is a task that will always look absurd to people who don’t have to do it.
Aside from the 29 other franchises that populate the out of town scoreboard, there is one major hurdle for the Dodgers to clear in their pursuit of greatness. The luxury tax.
The luxury tax, for the uninitiated, is MLB’s way of maintaining some sort of competitive balance across the league. Once a team spends a certain amount on payroll, any amount above that is ‘taxed’ and redistributed to those less fortunate teams. To give them a fighting chance.
In reality, the luxury tax in baseball is really only an excuse for dearer owners not to spend, and a request for fairer owners to put their money where their mouth is. To paraphrase a classic Nicholas Cage film: ‘the tax on one million dollars is two million dollars’. That does not matter if you have three million dollars, or a billion dollars in the Dodgers case.
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| Dodgers ownership group member and Chelsea FC owner Todd Boehly takes in a game at Dodger stadium against the Detroit Tigers in April 2022 (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill, File) |
The bottom line is really this: Baseball is like a vinyl record, just looking at it from afar provides a simple picture of cause and effect. Drop the needle in the grooves and get a tune. Spend a billion dollars and win a World Series. But look closer and the imperfections start to become clearer, the notches and dips in the groove start to paint a more intricate picture of things falling just right to get the right sound.
Freeman’s injury keeps him out of the World Series? Changes the tune. The bottom of the line-up doesn’t catch fire when needed? Different pitch. The Yankees don’t make THREE errors in one inning? Different song entirely. The Dodgers will need to keep a very difficult tempo if they want to hang another banner this time next year, and they look willing to take up that challenge.
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