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Whining about the Dodgers offseason is just sour grapes

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Los Angeles Dodgers Introduce Blake Snell
Photo by Harry How/Getty Images

The Dodgers have had a stellar offseason again, obtaining just about every item on their shopping list, demonstrating that the league is not like us.

Roki Sasaki is a Dodger and will be under team control for the next six years. Two years of labor in research and analysis led to a happy ending to this story, the proverbial dawn of a new day.

All I have to say in response is that’ll do.

Now for new business, let us break down the over-90-page complaint with regard to the feuding over the San Diego Padres—

The Sasaki signing is a farce, and there should be an investigation!

Ah, the shipment of sour grapes has arrived, and based on the invective, this batch looks quite tart. And the Dodgers have just signed Tanner Scott one day later in a move that can only be described as “Clayton Kershaw will never be allowed to step foot in the playoff bullpen again, barring baseball armageddon.”

I have already said the following sentence before, and I will likely say it again for the yokels: the Dodgers are not ruining baseball!

For those who have forgotten, this current era of Voltron Dodgers really kicked into gear last year. One need only look at the starting lineup of the 2017 World Series team to see the upgrades all over the roster. Austin Barnes starting? Chris Taylor leading off? Logan Forsythe on the roster?!? It seems almost quaint now.

It is true that the 2025 Dodgers have not won a single game yet in their title defense. But as learned helplessness for clicks and attention is en vogue, let us get to work.

Sasaki’s Homework

As we covered before the signing, 20 teams gave proposals to Sasaki, of which eight made it to the interview stage. Fabian Ardaya, Dennis Lin, Patrick Mooney, Ken Rosenthal, and Will Sammon of The Athletic published a feature-length essay documenting the final weeks of the Sasaki signing.

In this feature, the homework assignment was revealed in a single question: Why did Sasaki’s velocity drop in 2024? Ardaya and company reported that some teams saw the question as indicative of Sasaki’s mind. Other participants were less charitable.

“It was a little bit like, ‘Hey, man, you’re asking for some things that get beyond that line of proprietary,”’ said a decision maker for another club. “It did kind of get to that line a little bit where you’re like, ‘Really?’ But you got to make a decision and then kind of put your best foot forward.”

What the feature does not say is only implied: clearly, the Dodgers answered the question satisfactorily to make it to the final round of interviews. The Dodgers have already publicly said that the team will use a six-man rotation in 2025, which should theoretically lighten the load on the starting staff.

As Dodger Stadium is still being renovated, the final interview took place at part-owner Peter Guber’s home in Bel Air. A sushi chef was on-site, and Freddie Freeman, Mookie Betts, Will Smith, Tommy Edman, and Shohei Ohtani were in attendance, extolling the benefits of signing with the Dodgers.

In a process where the Dodgers had the least starting money to offer Sasaki, where the Toronto Blue Jays and Padres were prepared to max out their available international bonus pools, and Sasaki still picked to come to the Dodgers.

Sour Grapes, 2025 edition

For the second offseason in a row, the Dodgers have been ruthlessly efficient in the offseason. Committing $1.2 billion in player salaries in 2024 and committing $439.5 million (so far) in 2025 in new contracts and extensions will engender hard feelings to those who cannot or will not. The current economics of baseball is too nebulous for this essay, but we will cover it later this offseason.

Shortly after the Sasaki signing was announced on social media, Jim Bowden went on Foul Territory with his opinion that several teams would ask baseball to conduct an investigation into the Sasaki signing, alleging that there “was a pre-cut deal” between the Dodgers and Sasaki.

Anyone who has paid any attention to the Sasaki signing knows that this argument is, at best, specious and, at worst, insulting to everyone’s intelligence.

First, as we previously covered, there was no deal in place between the two parties before the signing. Second, the trades of Arnaldo Lantigua to the Cincinnati Reds and Dylan Campbell to the Philadelphia Phillies belie the existence of a secret deal because you do not need extra cap space if the fix is in.

Third, the talk of essentially collusion regarding an international signing is particularly rich coming from Bowden, the man who resigned from the Washington Nationals under a cloud of suspicion regarding allegedly skimming the signing bonuses of Latin American prospects.

Lastly, Jack Harris of the Los Angeles Times reported that MLB already did an investigation before authorizing Sasaki’s posting and found nothing wrong done by the Dodgers or the Sasaki team.

If things stopped there, we could move on, but unfortunately for the Padres, their general manager, AJ Preller, gave an interview to Sports Illustrated the day after the signing. No one would fault Preller for being disappointed. After all, the team bungled a 2-1 NLDS lead over the Dodgers into an early exit, and the consensus was that Sasaki was a lynchpin trying to get the current window open. But he kept talking.

“At the end of the day, we want players that want to be here,” Preller said. “We’ll move forward and look to add to a really talented roster.”

[emphasis added.]

For all of the Dodgers’ public relations team’s many faults, I cannot imagine a scenario in which Andrew Friedman, Brandon Gomes, or Dave Roberts say anything close to what Preller said. Maybe Preller was being innocuous; who is to say? Regardless, it is a terrible look for an embattled franchise, which leads to my next point.

“You did it to yourselves.”

Everyone delighted in making fun of the Dodgers when they were bounced in the NLDS in 2022 and 2023. If we are honest with ourselves, the Dodgers’ winning the World Series last year against the New York Yankees was not the predestined outcome that everyone is now treating it as.

If we are truly being honest with ourselves, the 2024 title was right there for the Padres or Yankees to grab, only to be stymied in instant-classic fashion by the Dodgers.

Heck, I had the Padres in 4 in the NLDS; failing to score a single run in two and a half games will make anyone look silly, duck or no duck. On a related note, a certain scene from Remember the Titans keeps running through my head.

The Dodgers have spent the past 13 years (and counting!) building an unstoppable money-making juggernaut designed to churn out money and baseball titles, delighting the fans of Los Angeles and the shareholders.

It took a little bit longer than expected to win a full-season championship, but let us not forget how this run as a baseball Voltron started.

It was the same way one eats a whale: one bite at a time. The following list is not comprehensive but should give any rival executive a cold sweat when laid out in sequence.

[Author’s note: It is the author’s firm belief that the Soto contract is dumb and should be mocked at every possible opportunity as a fundamental misunderstanding of how to win at baseball.]

If the rest of the league kept their houses in order, I would have infinitely more sympathy for them. Jarrett Seidler of Baseball Prospectus recently wrote that baseball is designed to handle a team with two of these traits: rich, cutting-edge, or going for broke. Per Seidler, the system breaks when a team has all three traits.

I politely disagree, as baseball either needs to adapt or die. The alternative is a Dodger golden age as the fandom chants Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us as an anthem for the foreseeable future.