Dodgers’ exit proves that spending doesn’t ensure titles
By KEN ROSENTHAL / THE ATHLETIC
What MLB does not want to discuss, as it portrays its sport as a broken landscape of haves and have-nots, is that big-money teams can sustain success for only a finite period, if they achieve success at all.
The Milwaukee Brewers’ shocking sweep of the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series, which concluded Thursday night with a come-from-behind 6-4 victory, will not change the team owners’ quest to negotiate a salary cap and floor. It will not change whether they lock out the players when the current collective bargaining agreement expires in December. It might not even change public perception, because fans are dug in to their positions.
But the truth is, there’s a cyclical nature to all this, even for the wealthy Dodgers. Andrew Friedman, the team’s president of baseball operations, said as much in March 2022, shortly after signing first baseman Freddie Freeman as a free agent.
“There are a lot of cautionary tales of large-revenue teams that have had a period of success and then kind of fallen off a cliff and had to take time to rebuild,” Friedman said then. “And we’re doing everything we can to stave that off and to maintain this level for as far as we can see out.”
The Dodgers did a pretty darned good job of it, losing in the division series round to lower-revenue rivals the next two years, then winning back-to-back World Series. But even in their championship years, they nearly got knocked out, first by the San Diego Padres in 2024, then by the Toronto Blue Jays in 2025.
Of all clubs, it was the Brewers, from baseball’s smallest TV market, that slew the dragon.
The Dodgers looked old, tired, unathletic. They might even have lost the edge that defined them for so long. Brewers manager Pat Murphy was too dismissive of the Dodgers’ proven grit when he said: “They may have a bunch of Hall of Famers, but we’ve got a bunch of gamers. And the gamers won this week.”
But Dodgers manager Dave Roberts conceded: “Those guys in the other clubhouse, they’re not afraid. They’re hungry. They’re tough. They were starving, actually.”
The Brewers, heading to the World Series for the first time since 1982, seemed not only hellbent to avenge the sweep the Dodgers inflicted upon them in last year’s NLCS, but also to prove they belonged among the sport’s elite.
For the Dodgers, becoming the first team since the 1998-to-2000 New York Yankees to win three consecutive World Series would have been cool. Their players worked feverishly to make it happen. But in the end, Dodgers third baseman Max Muncy said, “the train ran out of steam.”
Muncy and other players referenced a possible carryover effect from the rigors of the team’s two championship years — 2024 started in Seoul, South Korea, and ended in New York, 2025 started in Tokyo and ended in Toronto. Both times, the Dodgers played longer seasons and traveled more air miles than virtually every other team. A small price of success, but a price nonetheless.
Did it all simply catch up with them? One by one, the Dodgers’ most expensive players wilted in the NLCS.
Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, playing on combined guarantees of more than $1 billion, went a combined 7 for 42 with one extra-base hit against the Brewers. Ohtani, physically compromised, delivered the one extra-base hit, an electrifying three-run homer in the second inning of Game 4 that gave the Dodgers a 4-0 lead.
Tarik Skubal, whose acquisition at the trade deadline sparked a fresh wave of anti-Dodgers sentiment, took the loss in Game 1. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, whose $325 million guarantee is the largest for a pitcher — at least until Skubal negotiates his free-agent deal — lasted 2 2/3 innings in Game 2.
Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow, playing on guarantees of $182 million and $136.5 million, could not hold down the Brewers in Games 3 and 4. To top it all off, both of the Dodgers’ highly paid closers, Tanner Scott at $72 million total and Edwin Díaz at $69 million, allowed home runs in Game 4, accounting for the Brewers’ go-ahead and insurance runs.
It’s baseball. As the New York Mets, in particular, can attest, spending big guarantees nothing. Yet for the Dodgers, the loss to the Brewers very well could be the start of a decline.
For the fourth consecutive year, their position-player group was the oldest in the sport. Almost all of those players will be back next season. The only ones not under contract are infielder Miguel Rojas, who is retiring, and Kiké Hernández, a utility man headed for free agency.
Roberts disputed the notion that age was a factor in his team’s defeat, especially after the Dodgers earned a bye and had five days off before playing — and beating — the Atlanta Braves in a division series.
“We got beat,” Roberts said. “There’s no ‘because we’re too old’ or whatever. Every facet of the game, if you kind of unpack it, we were bested.”
Perhaps, but two other top-five payroll clubs, the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies, are in similar positions to the Dodgers, getting older but not necessarily better.
The next collective bargaining agreement should include significant measures to address payroll disparity. The team owners’ preferred cap-floor system, however, is not a reasonable solution if it results in a prolonged work stoppage — a virtual certainty, given the players’ opposition, at a time when the sport in many ways is booming.
That’s one kind of cliff. The one the Dodgers might be nearing is another. Freeman is 37, Muncy 36, Betts 34, Ohtani 32. Ohtani told reporters it’s “hard to tell” if he will need knee or biceps surgery this offseason, adding he plans to pitch again in 2027.
Then again, it’s difficult to know which starting pitchers the Dodgers can rely upon, even if they re-sign Skubal. With the exception of Yamamoto, their rotation is not exactly teeming with workhorses.
Muncy, though, pushed back on the notion that Los Angeles soon might spiral.
“Part of what has made us so successful is what we’ve created in terms of a work ethic. A habit of work. A culture of work. A culture of preparation,” Muncy said.
“Whether that’s young guys from the minor league system or whether it’s free agents we bring in, it doesn’t matter. The pillars are already set. It’s hard to knock down those pillars. As long as some of us are still here, those pillars are going to be standing strong.”
It’s difficult to argue, given the Dodgers’ track record. But cracks showed in a number of those pillars this season. And those cracks only figure to grow wider as the pillars erode.
MLB’s portrayal of the Dodgers as baseball’s boogeymen never made sense. The stunning outcome of the NLCS laid the flaws in the league’s argument bare.
No matter how much money the Dodgers spent, no matter how many stars they collected, their reign was going to last only so long.
