Well, it happened. The Los Angeles Dodgers have just hoisted the 2025 World Series trophy over their stupid little heads. Again. This makes them the only baseball team in 25 years to win the whole thing in back to back seasons. And unlike the “Core Four” Yankees dynasty of the late 90s/early 2000s, they don’t even have cool pinstripe jerseys. In the wake of this national tragedy, a plethora of casual and dedicated baseball fans alike have emerged to collectively bemoan the objective superiority of a lineup that has been so sumptuously assembled over four tortuous years of free agency. Salary cap this, salary cap that. If you follow baseball or sports at all, you’re likely to be incessantly berated with this discourse for the next few years, so allow me to present a fresh perspective on these blue and white colored fascists. They have personally made my life a living hell.

I confidently believe that there is nobody on this campus, nay, in the entire Walla Walla County who hates the Los Angeles Dodgers as much as I do. As a lifelong San Francisco Giants fan, this ferocious rivalry dating back to the 19th century has been so soundly ingrained in my enjoyment of the sport since childhood. My father, devout Dodger fan that he is (we all have our flaws) would often turn off Giants games I was watching just to see every last second of a 32 year old Josh Beckett get shelled by the Rockies. As a matter of fact, over the last month of postseason, I have fervently hate-watched every single Dodgers game, hoping, praying that some heroic team would be brave enough to knock these guys off their high horse, topple the giant, slay the Goliath, to absolutely zero avail. My ardent disdain for this franchise and the rivalry that comes with it has been a substantial contributing factor for my love of baseball. 

With this in mind, I really don’t think the Dodgers are ruining baseball. At least not in the financial sense that seems to proliferate every last crevice of baseball discourse currently. Sure, this zeitgeist has some merit to it. They do have the highest payroll in baseball by a semi-substantial portion, paying more than 100 million more than their World Series opponent, the Toronto Blue Jays. Despite the 160-ish million they spent the offseason prior on free agents, half of those signings either (a) were so bad they didn’t even make the post season roster or (b) underperformed beneath the October lights to the point where the team would have been essentially unchanged in their absence (excluding Blake Snell). 

It‘s more than fair to criticize the monopoly they have created with their fruitfully reckless spending on free agent classes going forward. Why wouldn’t a talented player want to go somewhere that will both pay them handsomely and promise them almost certain success, if not complete victory? If lauded free agent Kyle Tucker signs a 10 year, probably 200 million dollar contract with those devils this offseason (and he probably will, who am I kidding?), expect baseball fans to bleat themselves silly about the authoritarian control Los Angeles holds over the entire sport. But how can you blame him? Not to mention the overwhelming grip the franchise now holds over Japanese players since they signed the admittedly otherworldly Shohei Ohtani in winter of 2023, my personal 9/11. At the end of the day, however, this reflects a more external problem with 29 other ownership groups more than it damns the folks in the Dodgers front office tirelessly committed to winning. Isn’t that the whole point?

One of the oldest and most virulent rivalries in all of sports, once akin to Yankees/Red Sox, Lakers/Celtics, Michigan/Ohio State, etc, has been reduced to a pathetic battle of ownership. Both teams can afford to spend. Their team does. My team doesn’t. While I still cling so tightly to those childhood memories of glory from the early 2010s (we used to be a dynasty, for God’s sake), observing in desperate futility as the bad guys in blue begin to create a dynasty of their own pains me deeper than anything. Watching the Dodgers collapse in the postseason of 2023 brought me far more joy than any single win, season or moment from my own team in the past decade. That is sad. It is very easy for me to lament the fact that Dodgers fans have and will continue to get to enjoy a starting lineup of back to back to back Hall of Famers while I’ve suffered through Brett Wisely at bats for the last three years, but it feels reductive to blame it all on them. Trust me, I’ve tried.