Shohei Ohtani. Teoscar Hernández. Blake Snell. Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Rōki Sasaki. These are five of the biggest names the Los Angeles Dodgers have signed over the last two years. When the latter Sasaki announced Friday his intent to sign with the Dodgers, it prompted renewed discussion in the general public of the baseball community for Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred to step in and implement some kind of measure to prevent the Dodgers from building a free agent superteam, with the view that baseball will become uncompetitive as a result.
I should say--it is absolutely okay, in my view, to be frustrated by how much the Yankees, Mets, and Dodgers spend on players. Everyone loves an underdog, and this is not an article chastising you for not wanting the Yankees or Dodgers to win the World Series. As someone born and raised in Houston, one of the biggest joys in life is to see the Yankees fail. But the argument I'm about to make should not be viewed as conflicting with one's feelings towards high-spending teams. I hold all the views I'm about to lay out, and I still don't want the Dodgers to constantly win it all, largely on the basis of them having one of the highest payrolls in baseball.
First things first, I am a proponent of a salary floor. Exactly what it would need to look like in order to be effective, I am unsure. It would need to be much more nuanced in its application than just being a hard number that all teams need to reach or face severe penalties. The thing is, the current MLB Collective Bargaining Agreement already has the makings of a floor in place. The Athletics are not spending money this offseason out of the kindness of their own heart--that would imply that John Fisher has a heart, and we all know he doesn't--they're doing it because they collect revenue sharing money and if they don't spend some of that they face retribution from the Players Association. The Marlins are facing the same issue, and per Jordan McPherson at the Miami Herald they still need to raise payroll at least another $20 million in 2025. It will, obviously, be difficult to push a more extensive "floor" through in CBA negotiations.
I also believe that a hard salary cap in baseball, of any sorts, is a complete non-starter--and antithetical to the concept of a hard floor. There is a reason it's been a popular idea among ownership groups for as long as unrestricted free agency has existed, even among high-spending teams like the Yankees. It gives billionaires yet another excuse to cry poor as they negotiate yet another fan-unfriendly broadcast deal for their team's games to air exclusively on a channel that can only be picked up on a cable package that costs $300 a month. A salary cap is only going to bail out teams in large markets from being expected to spend the way a large market team is. The Rays are not going to suddenly start signing Junior Caminero and Carson Williams to long-term extensions because a hard salary cap is in place. It just artificially deflates the value free agents would command on a free, open market. If the players don't get the money, it's not going to suddenly go into, say, stadium repairs or community outreach, it's just going to sit in the owners' pockets.
Since baseball became an American institution, the New York Yankees have been vilified for their success through routinely having one of the top payrolls in baseball. From 2010 to 2023, the Yankees did not win a single American League pennant. They made the playoffs in all but one of that 14-year span, yes; but baseball inherently has parity built into it. There is extreme variance in every single baseball game. The rise in accessibility of data and analytics has insured that the 1927 Yankees are never going to happen again. Over a 162-game season, oftentimes, that variance is mitigated on a team-wide basis; the very top teams with the very best talents are usually going to make the Postseason, especially since its expansion. But Postseason baseball is not played over 162 games, it's played over series of, at most, seven games.
So what happened with the Yankees? Well, to lay things out, Aaron Judge dragged the team kicking and screaming into the playoffs in 2022, and then did it again with Juan Soto in 2024. Judge was a first-round pick of the team in 2013, but by the time he debuted in 2016, with hindsight being 20/20, he was surrounded in the Yankees farm system by very few future mainstay Major Leaguers. But they were a popular destination for free agents, signing Jacoby Ellsbury and Masahiro Tanaka, Mark Teixeira before that, and taking on most of Giancarlo Stanton's remaining contract from the Marlins even after Judge's 2017 Rookie of the Year campaign. Aaron Hicks and Luis Severino were each on extensions that would pay them over $10 million a year apiece once 2021 rolled around. Then they went out and got DJ LeMahieu, they signed Gerrit Cole after he left the Astros, Anthony Rizzo when he left the Cubs, Carlos Rodón when he hit free agency... year in and year out the Yankees had the pieces to, at the very least, make the postseason even when some of their other pieces weren't working, but they weren't developing the talent to have enough depth to back them up. Then guys started getting hurt. Stanton's legs and hamstring sapped his speed and fielding capabilities, then started keeping him out of the batter's box altogether. Anthony Rizzo developed post-concussion syndrome and the team didn't run the proper tests until he had played with it for a month. Carlos Rodón got injured immediately, and DJ LeMahieu's hitting and fielding both fell off after several stints on the shelf. By 2022, the Yankees were starting the empty husk of Josh Donaldson at third and an Isiah Kiner-Falefa that couldn't take the pressure of playing in the Bronx at short, while Aaron Hicks and Joey Gallo were splitting time in left field. Of course, that was the season Aaron Judge hit 62 home runs and broke the American League record. Over the course of 162 games, that plus 200 innings from Gerrit Cole and an All-Star campaign from Néstor Cortés was enough to get them to the dance, but in the Postseason a team's depth is challenged, and the Yankees were exposed once again. Free agent signings alone, it has shown, cannot get a team to the promised land. They made the World Series in 2024, but that was through trading for Juan Soto in his walk year (using largely established Major League talent; Yankees prospects, like Spencer Jones, have been far too unreliable to be worth a year of Juan Soto). Now that Soto is gone again, the Yankees' chances in 2025 are once again in question.
Contrast the Yankees' situation to the Tampa Bay Rays. The Rays don't have a Brian Cashman, who blindly throws money at the top players on the market, but even if they did, the team's owner, Stuart Sternberg, wouldn't let him. Sternberg "made" his fortune trading stocks, and a Google search tells us he's worth $800 million, owning a team worth just over $1 billion. That's no Steinbrenner, whose personal net worth is more than the entire Rays team and the Yankees are valued at over $7 billion, but it's more money than you or I will ever see in our lives. Regardless, the Rays don't have quite the same capital the Yankees (or the Dodgers, who are owned by a firm partnered with a group worth over $270 billion in total assets) have to spend on free agents, but they still spend money--just not on singular players. Most of the Rays' money goes heavily towards player development, equipping their minor league affiliates and development complex with the best possible technology and staffing them with the best possible analysts to squeeze as much potential as possible out of each and every one of their prospects. While it doesn't always pan out, it's not unreasonable to say the Rays' track record of always having the next top prospect or developing an elite relief pitcher out of seemingly thin air should be attributed to their coaching and development philosophy at all levels. The issue, then, is when it comes time to pay those players. The Rays traded 2021 American League Rookie of the Year Randy Arozarena at the deadline in 2024, recognizing that as he progressed towards free agency and through arbitration, they were going to have to pay him more and more in order to retain him. That's not something Sternberg is willing to do. The Rays' 11-year, $182 million extension given to Wander Franco was the biggest contract in team history, and even that seemed to be an underpay until he was suspended in August 2023 for alleged sexual assault of a minor and human trafficking charges. This makes the Rays roster a bit of a revolving door, not having too terribly much continuity between, say, one five-year period to the next, and it's made it difficult for them to succeed in the playoffs. The Rays are built to win in the aggregate, using the 162-game length of the season to squeeze as much value out of each of their players as possible, but once single games begin to rapidly increase in importance come October, they, too, lack the star power to consistently hit their way to a ring.
That leaves us with the Dodgers, who defeated those Rays in the 2020 World Series, and who defeated those same Yankees in the 2024 World Series, after coming close in 2017 against the Astros and 2018 against the Red Sox. The Dodgers didn't just stumble into Shohei Ohtani. It's not a coincidence they were able to land Blake Snell. And it's pretty clear why Rōki Sasaki opted to play there. For most of these players, the money is certainly a help. The common theme with the Dodgers this offseason has been deferring payments until after the contract is over. It doesn't reduce the CBT payroll hit that much, but it frees up some of the money allocated them by Guggenheim until later on. We're still not clear yet what the Dodgers will look like 5 or 10 years down the line when the deferrals are in full swing. But what the team has done goes beyond just signing free agents, or just developing players. They started developing players, supplemented them with shorter-term signings, traded for already-established star players using the prospects they developed, then signed those players to long-term extensions. They did it with Mookie Betts in 2020. They traded Josiah Gray and Keibert Ruiz to the Nationals to get both two months of Max Scherzer and a season-plus of Trea Turner in 2021. They grabbed Tyler Glasnow, who they immediately extended, from the Rays for Ryan Pepiot and Jonny DeLuca, neither of which likely had a role in Los Angeles' future plans. Even former top prospects who showed flashes of success but ultimately had no future with the team were flipped into big contributors: recent memories include sending Yency Almonte and Michael Busch to the Cubs for Zyhir Hope, who's rocketed up top prospect boards, and Jackson Ferris, who MLB Pipeline views as the fifth-best LHP prospect in baseball; and sending Miguel Vargas and a few other lower-level guys to the White Sox to get both Tommy Edman from the Cardinals and Michael Kopech from the Sox, both of whom had enormous moments in the Dodgers' run to the 2024 World Series title. Making savvy trades like this puts a team in position to extend those players if they're willing to pony up; the Dodgers did so to Tommy Edman earlier this offseason.
So, nearly two thousand words into this piece, if you're still reading, you're asking me: how could any of this possible relate to the Nationals failing to put together a compelling core since the 2019 team fell apart and the 2021 June of Kyle Schwarber collapsed into a 97-loss season? The fact of the matter is that the Nationals have failed to develop enough impact prospects to start making Washington attractive for anyone other than players looking to sign one-year deals to reestablish themselves in the Majors and get traded to a contending team at the deadline. Josiah Gray, even pre-Tommy John, had his velocity crater and never had particularly convincing pitch shapes to begin with. Carter Kieboom failed. Yasel Antuna's never going to make the Major Leagues. Rizzo actually cooked pretty hard with Wil Crowe and Eddy Yean for Josh Bell, even if Bell never got the opportunity to play in meaningful baseball games in his initial stint in Washington, because he was the second piece of the Padres' return in the Juan Soto trade that brought over James Wood and Dylan Crews among others. But scrolling down the list of Nationals top prospects in 2020 or 2021, they're not evoking anything like what the Dodgers have been able to do: trade high-level prospects for established talent, then go back to developing more players into high-level prospects. That left them with a losing team at the start of the decade, with very little to be excited about coming down the pipe. Even before then, they were unable to bring Harper back in in 2019, unable to lock down an extension with Trea Turner, and by the time came to try to extend Juan Soto, there was no world in which he would have even considered $600 million to stay on a team that had no future. It's the same reason nobody wants the Blue Jays' money now: the Nationals had no plan, much like the Blue Jays have no plan for the future. Trading Soto was necessary, but it could have been a different story if they had been able to secure their top guys before Soto. The Dodgers secured their top guys, and that's why Rōki Sasaki chose them--they started sowing the seeds, making Los Angeles the most attractive place to sign, long ago.
The Nationals do not have the financial resources the Dodgers have. But that does not stop them, or any other team for that matter, from doing what the Dodgers do, even if just on a smaller scale. Baseball America recently evaluated the Nationals as the worst organization in baseball at identifying talent. Consider Anthony Banda, the National, versus Anthony Banda, the Dodger. It's little things like Dodgers assistant pitching coach Connor McGuiness transforming Banda's slider grip into one of the best pitches on the team mid-season last year. The Nationals have to bring in coaches and scouts that are going to be able to identify talent as well as how to unlock it. It's well documented how far behind the analytical curve the Nats are, and they're not going to be able to get the best out of their players, Major or Minor League, until they catch up. If and when they do, it will enable them to start turning success stories like Jake Irvin's 2024 or Josiah Gray's 2023 into versions of players that will actually have lasting success and be more replicable.
2025 is going to be a make-or-break point for this team's future in several ways. The top young guys need to break out and prove that they can be relied upon going forward. Mike Rizzo needs to make the most of the rentals he signed at the deadline; he's been good about that over the last couple years, especially with the return for Jeimer Candelario. And if all that goes to plan, the most difficult part comes up: Mark Lerner and his family need to start investing money into Major League players like the billionaires they are. Only then will the top echelon of free agent talent start to once again view the DMV as an attractive landing spot for someone who wants to win, like they did when the team was on top of the NL East in the mid-2010s.
Yes, the Dodgers have eclipsed a level of competitive balance tax payroll that will cost them over $100 million in taxes to the rest of the league. Yes, it's going to be obnoxious to listen to Dodgers fans pretend they're underdogs when they need to acquire another starter at the deadline. Yes, they are going to win the NL West and it makes baseball a little more boring when yet another playoff spot is guaranteed to a team before Opening Day is even here. But this has to be a wake-up call; not to institute a salary cap, but to enact measures throughout baseball, whatever those look like, that require owners around the league to dedicate money towards the improvement of their team's on-field product. We're mad about the Dodgers now, but it's not just going to be the Dodgers. Other teams will follow suit, albeit not to the tune of a payroll 25% greater than the next highest, and they will find similar success. The Nationals' window is emerging, and they have the ability to be on the forefront of that revolution. Whether they will act on that is admittedly unlikely, but if they don't, they will fall from a team with greatness in their sights, to the 2019 Reds, to the 2024 Rockies. A plan needs to be in place for this team's long-term success.