PHOENIX — The Los Angeles Dodgers opened Saturday’s game against the Arizona Diamondbacks at Chase Field with their top three hitters in the batting order–Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman–smacking homers.
It was the first time in the club’s history that’s happened dating back to the days in Brooklyn even before Ebbets Field was opened in 1913.
It should come as no surprise. The Dodgers invested $1.23 billion in long-term contracts for those three players and hoped to earn that dividend.
Dave Roberts, the Dodgers manager, acknowledged he’s fortunate to work for an organization willing to make that kind of investment.
“You have good players, and they have to perform,” he said. “They earn a great salary and some of these guys are stars for a reason. It’s up to those guys to lead us and that’s what they’re doing.”
Increasingly, if franchises want to win over the long haul of a 162-game season, they have to spend the money. As we hit Labor Day with less than a month to go in the seemingly endless six-month Major League season, six of the top spending teams this year are either leading their divisions or in the playoff hunt.
The New York Mets, Dodgers, New York Yankees, Atlanta Braves, Philadelphia Phillies and Houston Astros have spent a combined $1.8 billion cash in an attempt to be the only one among them to win an increasingly elusive World Series title, according to figures amassed by Spotrac.
The Dodgers, at 82-55, have the best record in Major League Baseball.
The D-backs went to the World Series last year spending $154 million–19th in MLB–and lost to Texas, which spent nearly $100 million more. This season, Arizona increased its spending to $215.8 million, but it seems like the D-backs are just spinning their wheels in comparison to the Dodgers, who have $30 million worth of players on the injured list and can afford to pay about $35 million to guys no longer on the team.
“It is a lot of money,” D-backs manager Torey Lovullo said about the Dodgers payroll in general and the money paid to their top three hitters in particular. “It’s a total I can’t even imagine.”
But while things balance themselves out during the course of the long regular season, they don’t during the playoffs with four rounds, six wild-card teams and all those short series. As Billy Beane, the architect of those Moneyball Oakland A’s teams once surmised, analytics and a low payroll can succeed during the regular season, but during the smaller sample size of a postseason series that approach doesn’t usually work.
Take the National League West, for example. The Dodgers have dominated during the regular season and should win the division title for the 11th time in the past 12 seasons. But they haven’t won the World Series after a full season since 1988 despite all their spending under Guggenheim Baseball, the outgrowth of a multi-billion dollar hedge fund with deep pockets. They did win the World Series after the pandemic-shortened 60-game season in 2020.
The Dodgers just continue to spend, and the expectations of winning are very intense. “It takes the fun out of it a little bit,” Roberts said.
Ohtani was the top free agent this past offseason and the Dodgers signed him to a 10-year, $700 million contract with most of that money deferred. He’s about to play in the postseason for the first time. In 2020, they traded three lower end players to Boston in the deal that brought Betts to L.A., and then subsequently inked him to a 12-year, $365 million deal. Only catcher Connor Wong still remains with the Red Sox from that trade. And when Freeman was on the market after his Braves defeated the Astros in the 2021 World Series, he went to L.A., too, for six years, $162 million.
Juan Soto, starring for the Yankees right now, will be the top free agent on the market this winter and his agent, Scott Boras, is expected to be asking in the $500 million range on a long-term deal. The Dodgers will be in on that bidding as well.
They print money at Dodger Stadium. The franchise value, according to Sportico, has increased to a second-in-MLB $6.3 billion behind the Yankees at $7.93 billion, an increase for the Dodgers of 20% over 2022. The club’s revenue of $637 million is also second behind the Yanks, up $32 million from 2022. That’s just under double the club’s current No. 2 cash payroll of $323.7 million, according to Spotrac.
What’s a division rival to do?
“We just know we need to be better in certain areas to compete,” Lovullo said. “We embrace that challenge. We live in that space.”
The D-backs, San Diego Padres and San Francisco Giants have tried to remain competitive with the Dodgers as the Colorado Rockies sit on the sidelines. The other three teams have spent money on player payroll, but they have a lot fewer resources than the Dodgers. It shows right now in the standings.
Heading into a four-game home series against the Dodgers, the D-backs trailed them by four games, prompting Lovullo to say that if he’d been told when the season opened that his position would be thus on Labor Day, he’s take it.
This after the D-backs upset the Dodgers last year by sweeping a three-game NL Division Series, the second postseason in a row in which the Dodgers were eliminated in the NLDS after winning the regular season comfortably. The Padres did it in 2022.
The Dodgers won the first two games of the series by a hair and lost big on Sunday. They head into Labor Day leading the D-backs and Padres by five games and the Giants by 14-1/2. The D-backs and Padres will spend the rest of the month battling the Braves and Mets for the NL’s three wild-card spots with the Giants, Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals still on the periphery of that race
Once the playoffs start with the best-of-three Wild Card Series, all bets are off.
Roberts is well aware of this, saying “We have to do better. We’re just trying to win as many games as we can and figure it out from there.”
One key difference: The last two postseasons, opposition pitchers shut down Betts and Freeman. But then the Dodgers didn’t have Ohtani as part of that $1.23 billion trio.
