The Los Angeles Dodgers will face off with the Toronto Blue Jays in the 2025 World Series.
This World Series is expected to be competitive, as the Dodgers opened as a -210 gambling favorite to defeat the Blue Jays.
Unfortunately for most baseball fans, however, the 2025 World Series highlights everything wrong with baseball.
The Dodgers have the top payroll in baseball. The Blue Jays have the MLB’s fifth-highest payroll. Just what fans across America were hoping to see.
After punching their ticket to the Fall Classic following a sweep of the Milwaukee Brewers, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts delivered a controversial postgame speech.
“Let’s get four more wins and really ruin baseball,” Roberts exclaimed on the field after winning his fifth National League pennant as the skipper in Los Angeles.
Sure, Roberts was just trying to fire up a Dodgers crowd that just witnessed baseball history. But these comments came off as tone deaf and completely infuriated baseball fans across the country.
Two winters ago, the Dodgers made Shohei Ohtani the richest baseball player ever when they gave him a $700 million contract, with most of the cash deferred. They immediately won the World Series.
The Dodgers doubled down on their spending this offseason, constructing one of the most loaded starting pitching rotations, bullpens and batting lineups in the history of baseball.
Ohtani’s deferred contract allowed Los Angeles to pay big money to impact starting pitchers like Tyler Glasnow, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Blake Snell while being able to afford Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and Teoscar Hernandez to blast home runs.
While the Dodgers have certainly emerged as baseball’s evil empire, this isn’t their fault. MLB famously does not have a cap space and Mark Walter’s Guggenheim Baseball Management has exploited that.
The Dodgers spent 162 games playing with their food, seemingly flipping a switch earlier this October to have another easy path back to the World Series. The Cincinnati Reds, baseball’s 25th payroll, was no match. Neither were the Brewers, baseball’s 14th payroll, who were also swept.
Again, this is not just an issue with the Dodgers.
The Blue Jays were propelled to the World Series by George Springer’s towering home run against the Seattle Mariners in Game 7.
Springer isn’t even the highest-paid player on the Blue Jays but he still makes more than the two highest-paid players on the Mariners, Luis Castillo and Julio Rodriguez.
As the MLB’s collective bargaining agreement is set to expire after next season, there has been tension building between owners and players surrounding the pay discrepancy in baseball. Many fans, analysts and even MLB executives are bracing for a work stoppage due to a lockout next season.
The 2025 World Series is only magnifying baseball’s elephant in the room.
