Win or lose, the new super-charged Dodgers will be interesting — and that’s a good thing for baseball.
They’ve been plotting this for years. Plans, of course, fall apart all the time, whether they’re for dinner or a meeting or taking over the entire baseball world by signing the best player anyone’s ever seen to the biggest contract anyone’s ever received and then chasing that less than two weeks later with the largest deal a pitcher ever has gotten. For it all to line up so spectacularly for the Los Angeles Dodgers — for this superteam to assemble and take aim on the game — left the people around baseball dazed and woozy from the scale of it all.
First they guaranteed two-way star Shohei Ohtani a 10-year, $700 million contract. They followed Thursday by giving his Japanese cohort Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who has not thrown a pitch in the big leagues, $325 million over 12 years. After a brief moment of austerity — $50 million in free agency on only one-year contracts last winter — the Dodgers lavished more than $1 billion on two players. And now, in 2024 and beyond, they are going to be very, very good.
Their lineup features the reigning MVP, two more future Hall of Famers in Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, plus catcher Will Smith, center fielder James Outman and slugger Max Muncy. They entered the winter with Bobby Miller, a rookie this year, as the only lock for their 2024 rotation. Now they’ve got Yamamoto to start Opening Day against the San Diego Padres in Seoul and Tyler Glasnow, whom they acquired in a trade with the Tampa Bay Rays and signed to a five-year, $136.5 million extension, to pitch the second game of the season’s opening series.
They will, undoubtedly, be a force in the National League West, almost certainly its champion next year. Then come 2025, when Ohtani returns from his second Tommy John surgery and presumably joins the rotation, the Dodgers will be that much better. This causes understandable consternation for fans in smaller markets like Pittsburgh and Kansas City, whose entire franchises aren’t worth a whole lot more than the Dodgers guaranteed Ohtani, Yamamoto and Glasnow. The whole sport, frankly, is on tilt. Even the New York Yankees, New York Mets and San Francisco Giants, all of whom pursued Yamamoto with vigor, wound up jilted because they could not offer the combination of money, sunshine and rejoining Ohtani, who captained Yamamoto and the rest of Team Japan to the World Baseball Class title this spring and intends to replicate that many times over with the Dodgers.
Easy as it might be for anyone outside of Los Angeles County to panic, stew, lament, fret and bemoan the current state of affairs in Major League Baseball — to crown the Dodgers, bleat about the lack of a salary cap and swear off the game altogether — such frustrations do not reflect a reality about the modern game and the place of superteams in it.
Whether it’s a free agent deal that changes the course of a team’s future or a blockbuster trade that has the league buzzing, our experts are ready to weigh in.
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Here’s the beauty of baseball: Simply put, these teams haven’t won in the wild card era.
For every successful superteam like the late-’90s Yankees — the last to win consecutive World Series — there are multiple cases of others that didn’t win at all (Cleveland in the mid-to-late-’90s), won far less frequently than they ought to have (Atlanta just once in its 14-straight-division-title run from 1991 to 2005) or saw their fortunes run inverse with their superness.
