We debate: Are the Dodgers too good for baseball’s own good?
Plus, trying to find Francisco Lindor's home opener culottes
I went to the Mets home opener on Friday and wore a mismatched oversized pink pantsuit from Me+Em. This is Hannah by the way, if you couldn’t already tell. Francisco Lindor was there as well. He aggressively stretched a single off the bat into a close-call double, scored, stole a base, did some other stuff I forget, and wore a very memorable outfit before changing into his uniform. Lindor arrived at Citi Field in pleated navy shin-length culottes, a voluminous cropped checkered double-breasted jacket, and baby blue sneakers that I assumed are New Balance. (Plus accessories, but I’m a clothes and shoes girlie.) It was striking and just the right amount of strange and consumed me so much that I spent a not insignificant amount of time trying to track down the provenance of the primary pieces.
Because he is a baseball player and not an influencer, I couldn’t find anywhere that Lindor or the corporate partner that sponsored his arrival (?) at the park (is this a thing??) credited the brands but I believe the jacket is Bottega Veneta (although in a slightly different colorway than I can find online) and the pants are (maybe? I’m less confident here) Lu’u Dan. I don’t have anything smart to say about those choices, if they are indeed correct, because I’m more of a fashion enjoyer than a fashion knower. But I believe Lindor to be both. In a recent feature, GQ credited him with “baseball’s keenest fashion sense” and, although he demurred, he supported that claim by throwing shade at guys who dress in flashy and expensive clothes without a true personal style.
Lindor loves fashion — which is precisely the kind of off-field multifaceted attribute that makes athletes more marketable, which can, in turn, make them stars. His eyeworm of an outfit, then, is both useful and genuine. That day, though, all I could think about was the confidence to dress exactly how you want to.
I like looking like a 5’4” Pepto-Bismol highlighter — except that sometimes I don’t want to be seen at all. This internal conflict has been particularly resonant for me lately. I want to dress in a way that feels like myself; I don’t feel ready to broadcast who that is right now.
There’s no reason to think that Lindor suffers from any such angst. Broad strokes: he’s done pretty well for himself. Small scale: presumably he knows his slow starts are often prelude to MVP-caliber seasons. And even if he did worry about being perceived, he’s going to get looked at — on the field, on TV, and anywhere else where people can see him, even if he’s not wearing a $4,600 jacket. But mostly he will be seen and not heard. Seen and not engaged with directly on an interpersonal level. How he looks is not incidental to what people think about him.
He could let the baseball speak for itself. Keep his head down and his pants a normal length and not attract extra attention. But he’s choosing to try to tell us more about who he is. Fashion can be vulnerable in that way. It’s an earnest effort to be seen as someone specific. I like that Lindor knows who that is and wants us to know it too.
Is the Dodgers’ degree of excellence a problem for baseball?
HK: I don’t like that I think the Dodgers are a problem for baseball. It feels like the kind of scandal-trolling, vaguely ignorant take you’d hear from a sports generalist reacting to the headlines on a daytime debate show. It also feels a little anti labor to say the big budget behemoth that just won the World Series did something wrong by accruing even more talent in the offseason.
The public version of this discourse does seem to break down along those lines: on one side, bombastic commentators who deal in broad strokes wondering if baseball is broken while smart ball knowers bring nuanced historical perspective and evidence of parity to counter.
And yet, I do feel we’ve perhaps crossed the Rubicon when it comes to concentrating advantages on one team. My fear is not strictly that the Dodgers have spent too much money on stars. The Mets, for instance, do not bother me. In fact, it’s the rookie salary Roki Sasaki is making that calcified this concern. They’ve become the preferred destination even when money is no object. They’ve become the darlings of an entire hemisphere where the league is actively pursuing growth. The confluence of those things gives them a unique pipeline to Japanese players. That, plus the deep pockets, is a problem.
It makes sense that Shohei Ohtani would sign with the Dodgers. And it even makes sense that he would agree to a contract structure that benefits his employer’s bottom line. But Ohtani is singular and his singularity has transferred to a team that now benefits from the perennial MVP, his marketing value, his recruiting cache, and the payroll room afforded by deferrals.
And the real problem is, those advantages are self-perpetuating. Revenue from international broadcast rights and Ohtani jerseys is split evenly among all 30 teams, but that doesn’t mean the Dodgers don’t see a financial return from being the favorite team for all of Japan. The money they’ve spent thus far is paying dividends — on the field and as a growing brand — which means they’re well positioned to keep outspending the competition.
ZC: There’s no doubt the Dodgers are good to an extreme degree. Let’s get that out of the way. Ahead of the season, FanGraphs’ projections gave them a 23.2% chance at winning the World Series, Vegas oddsmakers came in at about 26%. That’s high, but it’s not out of range from other recent seasons and other recent powers, such as the 2024 Braves (22% at FanGraphs) or other, famously ring-less versions of these Dodgers. But, even after a 9-2 start, they’re not likely to win the World Series.
So what we’re really talking about with the Dodgers is not an actual stranglehold on MLB’s competitive outcomes, but about the perception they might have the resources to get there. Certainly, signing Ohtani with the massive deferred contract and convincing a series of high-profile Japanese players and free agents to choose them gives a whiff of world domination.
My feeling isn’t that the Dodgers will perform poorly, but that sustained dominance can be a good thing as long as it doesn’t overwhelm the sport’s thus-far-undefeated roulette wheel: the postseason. A powerful Dodgers team running as expected creates storylines during the season (could they threaten 116 wins?!) and during the playoffs (who can slay Goliath?). You remember the early 2000s Yankees-Red Sox battles right? Well, those New York teams had the second-highest payroll in MLB lapped by the same amount the Dodgers lead the ninth-place club this season.
There’s a gap, but at the moment it strikes a balance MLB should relish: It feels bigger than it is.
HK: I actually thought about countering this presumed counter as my primary point because I know the parity argument says no one team can get too far out ahead in MLB — if what we’re doing is counting rings. But I think the lack of relationship between regular season success and championships is not baseball’s best feature. The possibility or even probability that a team could win 120 games and still get booted from the playoffs in the first round is a whole other can of Discourse About Baseball’s Demise. Because that is what will happen if the reigning champs prove to be objectively superior this season only to falter early in October — we’ll spend the rest of the postseason still talking about the Dodgers, and how it’s obvious baseball is broken because they’re not in the World Series. Already, a week into the season we know, they will be the story no matter what happens.
And maybe that’s my main concern about the current iteration of the Dodgers. Not that they’ll bogart all the wins, but that they’ll monopolize the relevance. A Goliath is a worthwhile character if you’re consuming the sport as a whole, or if you’re rooting for the upstarts who are unexpectedly toppling them in that particular moment. But most of the time, fans of 29 teams don’t want to be rooting for supporting characters in a story about the Dodgers.
ZC: See, this feels like a sports fan version of response bias, a “say vs. do” problem. A lot of vocal smaller-market fans may say they have no hope and the Dodgers are ruining the sport, but caring deeply about their team and simultaneously having thoughts about the Dodgers is the best-case scenario for what they might do. They might talk about baseball! In a big tent way! Regular fans just don’t think of their team as supporting actors, no matter the circumstances. They see them as the protagonists, and where MLB sometimes lags is getting them to think about any other characters at all.
It’s why baseball gets dinged as a “regional sport,” and it’s part of the discontent that contributed to the league’s breakup with ESPN. Those shows that employ the bombastic commentators you reference? They don’t do it for fun. They do it because the masses devote attention to the Chiefs, to Tom Brady, to LeBron James, to the Cowboys. If the Dodgers are a lightning rod that can insert baseball into a broader conversation, it will bring more fans into the fold, even if the entryway seems obnoxious.
I know because that’s how I got here. When I was in elementary and middle school in Virginia, there were a couple prominent choices for a non-committed burgeoning baseball kid: Be a Braves fan, because the Triple-A team was in town and they were good. Be a Yankees fan, because it was the late ‘90s and lots of kids were New York/New Jersey transplants. Oh yeah, and they were good. Around the same time, the Red Sox got decent enough to make those Yankees-Red Sox rivalry games a constant presence on TV. I liked Nomar Garciaparra, and I really liked Pedro Martinez. But more than anything else, I loved having my chips down against the big, bad Yankees who drove every conversation at the lunch table. And I’d be lying if I told you otherwise.
HK: Hmm. Okay. As I just texted you: good counter. I’m compelled by the argument that debates just like this one are good for baseball and the Dodgers’ dominance is fodder for such debates. Although that does feel a little like a tautology — by that logic, can anything be bad for baseball if people are talking about it being bad for baseball?
But I wish I could enjoy the possibility of baseball demanding more air time on Hot Take TV without worrying about the labor implications. As a ~bandwagon~ fan, I like watching a lot of the super talented players in Dodger blue and don’t personally mind that they frequently appear alongside one another (the 10 p.m. ET start times are tough, I want the record to reflect that is bad for baseball). And yet, I am afraid of what will happen if they win another title. I don’t want to have to root against Ohtani, and Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman, and Tyler Glasnow, etc. etc. for the sake of forestalling a lengthy lockout.
My argument is more one of scale than anything else. I like the Astros seemingly always being in the ALCS. Or the Braves being the team to beat in the NL East for a decade at a time. And I know what you’re saying about the Yankees in the late ‘90s and early 2000s is true. Perfect parity would be boring. The right competitive environment is a delicate balance between establishing year-over-year storylines and introducing new characters. I just worry the Dodgers have eked out a little too far in terms of business advantage and it’s in danger of toppling the whole operation.
They’ve made MLB’s lack of a salary cap conspicuous. I don’t want MLB to have a salary cap, and the Dodgers — if they continue to dominate on the field — are bad for that goal.
ZC: Fun fact: When I used to edit Hannah, I argued that readers didn’t understand what a tautology was. Anyway, I don’t think this debate is good for baseball. I think all the people who have this debate fall into one of two camps. They are 1) like us — pot committed and not going anywhere, or 2) owners of teams who want to have their money and their baseball team and not have to use as much of the former to be proud of the latter. (As Bryce Harper eloquently put it, “only losers complain about what they’re doing.”)
The reality is the Dodgers’ on-field results won’t change the oncoming train of a labor battle one iota. If they win, they’ll be used as a reason for a salary cap. If they go out in the Division Series, they’ll sign someone good in the offseason, and that will be used as a reason for a salary cap.
In the grand scheme of the sport, the Dodgers team currently assembled could be a burgeoning dynasty, and failing that it could still be a narrative device that allows years worth of disparate stories to have one common thread.
People who might fall in love with the sport, or people who are perhaps open to engaging with the sport on a deeper level, they sometimes need a hook that will be there no matter which game they turn on when, no matter which baseball fan they meet at the bar. The Dodgers are a hook. We shouldn’t let ourselves be convinced that’s something to shy away from.
What we’re chatting about
Update to Friday’s newsletter: Extension season is still going strong. Reports indicate the Blue Jays have finally agreed to a (very) long-term extension with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — 14 years, $500 million. It is the third-largest contract in MLB history by total value, and puts Guerrero in the top 10 of current contracts by average annual value, a major step up for a first baseman. —ZC
Mets booth thinks the balls are juiced – but are they? From 2022-2024 in March and April specifically, there were 94 balls hit with roughly the same launch angle and exit velo as the Pete Alonso homer. Alonso’s traveled 377 feet, the average distance for balls hit with similar specifications was 384 feet. –HK (that’s right! Hannah did that … with Zach’s help.)
When people complain about the modern aesthetic of baseball and the prevalence of three true outcomes, the most valid aspect of those critiques is the homogeneity of the modern game. Baseball has mechanisms to reward a range of skill sets and we want to see those displayed and celebrated! If, for instance, you’re looking to root for game-breaking speed, consider Rays prospect Chandler Simpson. He stole 104 bases last year across High-A and Double-A, the first time a player has eclipsed the century mark in steals since 2012, but I especially like this highlight of him beating out a ground ball hit to the first baseman for a single. —HK
The New York Times has a Q&A with Rob Manfred from a non baseball-specific reporter (i.e. it’s incredibly broad in scope). If you’re reading this, you probably know how he feels about rule changes and robo umps but if you’ve ever wondered what Manfred would say in response to a question that asks, in part, “Did you think, oh man, I’m getting old?” click through! –HK
Jinxes don’t exist, but calling attention to statistical outliers does run a high risk of calling attention to the moment they end. –ZC
