Sick of the Dodgers Signing all the Free Agents? Well, Get Off Your Butt and Do Something About It.

The Dodgers won 100 games in 2023. Then they signed the top two free agents in that year’s class: Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a pair of unicorns the likes of which aren’t available every offseason. In 2024, the Dodgers had the best record in baseball. Then they won the World Series, and along the way made the last two rounds of the playoffs look pretty easy. Ohtani won the NL MVP award.

And then they signed a bunch of new players and brought back a few more! Blake Snell! Roki Sasaki! Tanner Scott! Hyeseong Kim! Michael Conforto! Kirby Yates, probably! Teoscar Hernández! Blake Treinen! Kotaro Matsushima! (OK, Matsushima is a rugby player — I included him to see if you’re paying attention.)

MLB needs a salary cap, say two thirds of the 36,000 respondents to a much-circulated poll on MLB Trade Rumors. More jarring are the results to question no. 2: Almost exactly half of some 27,000 respondents would be willing to lose the entire 2027 season if it meant MLB instituted a salary cap.

I think the tenor of some of the anti-Dodger rhetoric this offseason is a bit much, but I empathize with the sentiment undergirding it. Just to give one example: The poor Blue Jays have tried all offseason to make a free agent rich beyond his wildest dreams but kept coming up empty. I like Anthony Santander as much as the next guy, but Toronto’s column on the We Tried Tracker looks like a box of crayons and reads like an Olivia Rodrigo song. In that vein: Everyone wanted Sasaki, to say nothing of Yamamoto and Ohtani last year, and it sucks to watch the object of your affection choose someone else.

But personal disappointment isn’t a good enough reason to change the rules.

I’ve been reluctant to address this topic in column form for two reasons: First, it’ll never happen. A salary cap is the MLBPA’s line in the sand. Don’t even say “salary cap” out loud within earshot of Tony Clark unless you want him to summon the ghost of Mikhail Bakunin to haunt you into a state of madness. (I suspect this is what happened to Dick Monfort, and would go a long way toward explaining what happened to the Rockies.)

The MLBPA might consider agreeing to a salary cap only after anyone within the union who’s ever met or read about Marvin Miller is either retired or dead. Until then, it’d be a more productive use of your time to speculate on whether an alien invasion could peg back the Dodgers.

The second reason I kept putting off this topic is that it’s stupid.

I guess being stupid doesn’t exactly disqualify an idea from being popular, and online polls aren’t worth the paper they’re not printed on, but more than 13,000 people said they’d be OK with losing an entire season in order to get a salary cap. I know it’d take a long time for me to drive to each one of their houses and slap them in the face with a fish and ask them if they have trouble remembering to breathe in and out, but I think it’d be worth the effort.

Because I remember the damage done in 1994-95, the last time ownership really tried to break the union and institute a salary cap. It scared everyone within the game to death for more than 25 years. More to the point, it didn’t work; the union held the line.

And that generationally scarring event pales in comparison to what happened to the NHL the only time a major North American sports league gave half of MLBTR’s audience what it wanted. Hockey lost close to two seasons across three lockouts in 1994, 2004-05, and 2012-13, causing self-inflicted damage to the league’s finances and profile from which it still has not come close to recovering.

But at least the NHL, with its hard salary cap, is a bastion of competitive balance. That’s why it’s had two repeat Stanley Cup winners in the past decade, while the last successful World Series defense came in 2000, even though hockey is the only sport with a more chaotic playoff structure than baseball. If you’re convinced that the Dodgers are doing some accounting magic trick by deferring money in Mookie Betts’ and Ohtani’s contracts, you’re going to love griping about the financial tricks the Vegas Golden Knights and Tampa Bay Lightning have played in order to assemble their Cup-winning rosters. Has the salary cap turned Winnipeg into a hot free agent destination? And what are the Arizona Coyotes up to these days? I haven’t heard from them in a while.

The bigwigs in every sport want a salary cap. Formula 1, which is run by Liberty Media, the company that owns the Atlanta Braves, got a spending cap for the first time in 2021. The same driver has won the championship every season since the cost cap came into force, and one team, Red Bull Racing, won 35 out of 38 races from July 2022 to April 2024. That run includes the least competitive season in the sport’s history, 2023, when Max Verstappen alone won 19 of 22 races and finished lower than second once.

The Dodgers might make the playoffs every year, but the playoffs are a different story. They’ve won two titles total in the time since Verstappen’s dad was driving in F1. Plus, if you want to see them lose, they do that at least once a week, like all baseball teams. Imagine if the Dodgers went on a winning streak that lasted five months.

The salary cap is an ineffective solution to a problem that doesn’t even exist. As Rob Mains wrote for Baseball Prospectus yesterday, baseball’s competitive balance is actually well within historical norms at the moment. If you actually want every team to have an equal shot at winning a title every year, regardless of foresight or teambuilding ability or financial commitment, maybe “sports” isn’t your thing after all. Might I interest you in checkers instead?

Can the Dodgers offer top free agents more money than anyone else? I guess. At the very least, the Mets, with their so-rich-it-should-be-illegal owner, can keep up financially. But that’s not why the Dodgers are landing most of these free agents.

Right now, there are two places teams can find performance for a bargain: First, at the very bottom of the market, where pay is constrained by amateur bonus caps, the draft, and the arbitration system. Second, at the very top. The Yankees are paying Aaron Judge and Gerrit Cole a combined $76 million in 2025, which is a massive amount of money. But would you rather have those two at that figure or, say, Joc Pederson and Matthew Boyd for a combined $33 million AAV on their multi-year contracts?

The difference in performance — and, more importantly, reliability — between those two duos is huge. But so is that extra $43 million. You could do a lot with that amount of money. Like sign Aaron Judge.

The thing is, the Dodgers aren’t massively outbidding their competitors, at least not all the time. The Scott signing might’ve been about money, sure, but the Dodgers weren’t the only team willing to pay Ohtani $46 million a year after deferrals, nor were they way out in front on Yamamoto, Sasaki, or Kim. I imagine that when the details on Yates’ contract drop, we’ll see a fairly pedestrian headline figure.

In the NHL and NBA, the maximum individual salary is set out in the CBA. That means top free agents — the basketball or hockey equivalents of Ohtani, Yamamoto, Snell, and Freddie Freeman — are making decisions about their future based on considerations other than money.

The Dodgers are the most consistently competitive team in the league. They have a reputation for turning Quad-A guys like Max Muncy and Chris Taylor into All-Stars. Their leadership, from ownership to the front office to the manager, is as well-regarded as you’ll find in the sport. They play in the most glamorous city in North America, where it’s warm and sunny all year round. If you want to move the Dodgers, well, that’s happened before. (Which is more than you can say for a salary cap.)

If money didn’t matter, what on Earth makes you think the Dodgers would be less successful in attracting talent? Don’t blame the CBA, blame Randy Newman.

Not every team can offer the same combination of money and lifestyle the Dodgers can. (Me? I’d rather live in Baltimore or Milwaukee than L.A., but I hate hot weather and I’m not a rich, handsome 28-year-old.) What they can do is build up other parts of their organization, so they can offer something the Dodgers can’t.

First of all: Playing time. The Dodgers might have an inexhaustible need for pitchers, but their position player pool is extremely crowded. In the Darwinistic free market paradise of European soccer, Manchester City is the best-resourced team in the richest league in the world, with Emirati owners who could buy and sell Guggenheim Baseball Management 10 times over. They have the best-regarded coach since Béla Guttmann and win the league most years. (Not this year, but most years.)

So they also attract the top young English prospects to their academy. And then, time and again, those stars in the making — Jadon Sancho, Cole Palmer, Morgan Rogers — discover that if they don’t leave Man City they’re never going to see the field, and find their way elsewhere. Some players might prefer to throw middle relief for a playoff team, but others might want to close or start for a dark horse club.

Or how about the reason the Dodgers have all those openings for pitchers: Their pitchers keep getting hurt. Forget player payroll, the Dodgers are surely spending millions of dollars on cadaver ligaments. The Mariners have managed to equal the Dodgers’ pitching results while keeping their starters healthier; how hard would it have been for them to persuade Washington native Blake Snell to come home if they’d made a competitive offer?

Cleveland has a great track record for developing pitchers; the Guardians could put their achievements in recruiting material if the financial components were even close. The same with the Orioles and hitter development. “Sure, we might be an underdog, but we can make you a better player than they can,” can be a compelling pitch if the financials are close.

Building a world-class player development system is hard, but when an injury-prone starting pitcher goes for $15 million a year, cameras and trainers and math Ph.Ds and fancy machines look incredibly cheap. It’s certainly within the financial grasp of all 30 teams to build such a training center. It’s just a matter of want-to.

Ironically, the so-called small-market teams only made their lives harder by restricting the amount that could be spent on amateur talent. The Angels didn’t make the highest initial bid to Ohtani when he came over from Japan; they signed him because they promised him he’d be able to play both ways. Imagine if they could’ve gone to Adley Rutschman and said, “We promote our prospects faster than anyone — do you want to get jerked around in Triple-A for 18 months or do you want to be on our big league roster by Labor Day?”

Here I return to the Formula 1 example. Red Bull has dominated the cost cap era because they came into it with the best car. And while the cost cap kept Red Bull from overspending to retain that advantage, it also hamstrung its competitors. With artificial scarcity imposed on design and construction resources, a gap that could’ve been closed in months persisted for two years. Cheaper and more competitive are not connected attributes of a sport, but ownership will promise the latter in order to get the former anyway.

I find this to be an odd moment to panic over the Dodgers’ supposed dominance anyway. Because the richest contract in baseball history got signed this winter, and the Dodgers weren’t even in the running. Going by our Top 50 free agent list, they’ve signed the no. 6, no. 19, (presumably) no. 39, and no. 44 free agents; re-signed no. 11 and no. 20; and lost (presumably) no. 8 and no. 24.

Their most expensive free agent, Snell, has less guaranteed money coming to him than either the Giants’ or Diamondbacks’ top free agent signings. And the best player the Dodgers signed — and the one whose absolute attraction to the Dodgers should be most troubling to the other 29 teams — was Sasaki. That had nothing to do with money and everything to do with environment.

Money isn’t just an incentive, it’s an illustration of institutional want-to. As much as free agents love money, they love want-to just as much. The Dodgers have it easier than most other teams, it’s true. But that advantage is not so great that the other teams couldn’t do something about it if they tried. Trying… now that’s a novel idea I can get behind.