Dynasties can be good for sports. Having a common enemy can unite fans towards a common goal of striking down an opponent. If a singular team is so much better than the rest of a league’s landscape, it can bring casual fans into the sport by giving a clear path of involvement and an obvious team to root for or against.
For baseball, dynasties can be a sensitive subject. In football and basketball, there are clear financial guardrails explicitly designed to ensure teams play on even grounds—the NFL has a hard salary cap that you cannot go over, and the NBA has sharpened the teeth on its tax thresholds to sway teams into building through the draft over buying a crowded roster.
But for baseball, building a dynasty can come down to resources over shrewdness or sharpness. If a team has more money, the path to buying out their problems becomes much easier; more payroll to fall back on means more room for error when building out a roster. If a contract ends up being bad for the team, big markets can cut their losses with fewer consequences. And because they have the budget for it, they’re able to give more chances to big contracts that could end up working in the end.
The New York Yankees spent the better part of the 21st century as the “Evil Empire”, grabbing top free agents left and right by reaching into their wallets for players who seemed more interested in the team’s branding and exposure than any logistical baseball-related reason. Even if they were guaranteed a playoff appearance.
But over the past few years, the Yankees and the Steinbrenner family have been more shrewd in their spending habits and haven’t gone around buying names left and right, even when they’ve had the resources. There’s no misnomers, they still get big contracts. Just not in the comical way they did ten years ago.
In the meantime, the Dodgers have gone in the opposite direction and have bumped their payroll, spending, and acquisitions, both in quality and quantity. Sometimes veering on almost a psychotic extent, one that has fans questioning their negative influence on the competitiveness of the game.
They gave Shohei Ohtani the largest contract in the history of sports at the time before being beaten by Juan Soto. They tagged Japanese phenom Yoshinobu Yamamoto along and ended up winning the 2024 World Series in dominant fashion. How did they follow it up? By having an offseason that would have made non-contenders into solid playoff teams: Tanner Scott, Teoscar Hernandez, Roki Sasaki, and Michael Conforto.
The phrase “big market teams” goes around a lot when talking about market disparity in baseball. But the Dodgers have separated themselves in a way that almost seems to supersede the circumstances they rely on. Teams like the Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies, New York Mets, Houston Astros, and Texas Rangers can’t seem to climb up to the same heights as the Dodgers when it comes to spending, putting all except LA in their own tier.
And until we get proposed ideas like salary restrictions or guardrails on deferred money, those tiers will continue to exist or even expand.