The Los Angeles Dodgers will face off with the Toronto Blue Jays within the 2025 World Sequence.
This World Sequence is anticipated to be aggressive, because the Dodgers opened as a -210 playing favourite to defeat the Blue Jays.
Sadly for many baseball followers, nevertheless, the 2025 World Sequence highlights every little thing unsuitable with baseball.
The Dodgers have the highest payroll in baseball. The Blue Jays have the MLB’s fifth-highest payroll. Simply what followers throughout America have been hoping to see.
After punching their ticket to the Fall Basic following a sweep of the Milwaukee Brewers, Dodgers supervisor Dave Roberts delivered a controversial postgame speech.
“Let’s get 4 extra wins and actually wreck baseball,” Roberts exclaimed on the sector after profitable his fifth Nationwide League pennant because the skipper in Los Angeles.
Positive, Roberts was just trying to fire up a Dodgers crowd that simply witnessed baseball historical past. However these feedback got here off as tone deaf and fully infuriated baseball followers throughout the nation.
Two winters in the past, the Dodgers made Shohei Ohtani the richest baseball participant ever once they gave him a $700 million contract, with a lot of the money deferred. They instantly received the World Sequence.
The Dodgers doubled down on their spending this offseason, developing one of the vital loaded beginning pitching rotations, bullpens and batting lineups within the historical past of baseball.
Ohtani’s deferred contract allowed Los Angeles to pay massive cash to impression beginning pitchers like Tyler Glasnow, Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Blake Snell whereas with the ability to afford Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and Teoscar Hernandez to blast house runs.
Whereas the Dodgers have definitely emerged as baseball’s evil empire, this isn’t their fault. MLB famously doesn’t have a cap area and Mark Walter’s Guggenheim Baseball Administration has exploited that.
The Dodgers spent 162 video games enjoying with their meals, seemingly flipping a switch earlier this October to have one other simple path again to the World Sequence. The Cincinnati Reds, baseball’s twenty fifth payroll, was no match. Neither have been the Brewers, baseball’s 14th payroll, who have been additionally swept.
Once more, this isn’t simply a difficulty with the Dodgers.
The Blue Jays have been propelled to the World Sequence by George Springer’s towering house run towards the Seattle Mariners in Sport 7.
Springer isn’t even the highest-paid participant on the Blue Jays however he nonetheless makes greater than the 2 highest-paid gamers on the Mariners, Luis Castillo and Julio Rodriguez.
Because the MLB’s collective bargaining settlement is ready to run out after subsequent season, there was stress constructing between homeowners and gamers surrounding the pay discrepancy in baseball. Many followers, analysts and even MLB executives are bracing for a work stoppage due to a lockout subsequent season.
The 2025 World Sequence is simply magnifying baseball’s elephant within the room.
