Per usual, I feel like what I said in my video speaks for itself, but there are a few things I just wanted to add to what is already a very divisive topic across Major League Baseball. Will I be rooting against the Dodgers this year? Yes, I probably will because I’m petty. But I am not one of those people who’re going to say that the Los Angeles Dodgers are ruining baseball. I think that it’s simplistic to believe that there’s one particular team or ownership group that is responsible for destroying the sport of baseball. As I said in the video, the system has been broken for decades. The Dodgers are simply taking advantage of a broken system, and as far as we know, they are playing within the rules. We can get frustrated with the way they do it and all the deferred payments. Shohei Ohtani is going to make $2 million this year, which is a little bit cheap. I understand all of that, but just because you’re finding loopholes doesn’t technically mean that you’re breaking rules.
Ironically, the entire world was rooting for the Toronto Blue Jays in the World Series last year. I was one of those people, but I find it very funny that any team that isn’t the Los Angeles Dodgers is viewed as the scrappy underdog nowadays. The Blue Jays had the fifth-highest payroll in the entire sport. This wasn’t exactly a team that lived in the poorhouse. And there lies the problem. We can try to use all kinds of small-market analytics and assemble front offices capable of doing more with less, but at the end of the day, the teams that find themselves in the Fall Classic every year are the teams that spend. I understand that there are occasional exceptions to this rule (e.g., the 2015 Royals), but statistically, one championship doesn’t necessarily equal a trend. This is a big boy game, and the big boy teams make it to the World Series and win the World Series.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t assemble a team on a shoestring budget and make the postseason. God knows we’ve seen the Tigers do it each of the last two years. But I support a team that was one swing away from being one of the final four teams left in the Major League Baseball playoffs a year ago, and there wasn’t a second where I legitimately thought that they could win the World Series. There was always a final boss at the end of this video game. If it wasn't the Blue Jays, it would've been the Dodgers.
I’m not sure how this is all going to end. Given previous negotiations and their ability to last as long as possible, I’m inclined to believe that we’re going to be in this for the long haul, but I also think that this is a pivotal moment for the sport. The power dynamic is a major reason many fans get sour on this game. At the end of the day, you want a team that you feel like, at some point, and have a realistic shot of winning a championship, and there’s a heavy majority of the fan bases in this league that do not feel that way. You can blame the owners for that, but at the end of the day, they’re not gonna change their ways. The league needs to adjust.