Did the Dodgers buy a Pennant ?

Fact: The Dodgers have the highest payroll in baseball. At $265,149,292, it holds the number one spot by a wide margin of 40 million more than the second highest team.

But can we please stop pretending they bought their way to the World Series? It’s only been a couple days since the Dodgers clinched their NL pennant and this narrative has already popped up. When I checked my phone Friday morning, the Bleacher Report headline read, “$265M Dodgers Finally End 29-Year Pennant Drought.” This headline is appropriate I guess because it states the truth but jeez does it sound like the Dodgers’ accomplishment was diminished. I mean, this is the same Dodgers team that finished with 104 wins, was on pace for a historic amount of wins at one point, and has won their division in each of the past five years. People bring up the 29-year pennant drought yet they don’t mention that this really good run of Dodger teams has been due for greatness for some time now, and they’ve finally achieved it.

The Dodger payroll is certainly ridiculous but to say it’s the cause of their success is misleading. $57.53 million is split between Adrian Gonzalez, Andre Eithier, and Scott Kazmir. All those players are very talented, and they also played in 71, 22, and absolutely zero games respectively. They are paying $21.86M for Carl Crawford (yikes) and $7.5M to Alex Guerrero to not even play on the team anymore. If there’s a group of guys that led the Dodgers to promised land, it’s their young guys. As in, the young guys who are pre-arbitration and make less than a million, such as Chris Taylor, Austin Barnes, Kike Hernandez, and especially Cory Seager and Cody Bellinger. They've become quite the team at making trades as well.

There isn’t a single player on the team that you could accuse the Dodgers of “snatching” away from other teams like we saw all throughout the 2000’s with big market teams. In fact, Zack Greinke was snatched away from LA themselves by Arizona. The Dodgers, like most teams, spend a big chunk of their payroll re-signing players. Players like Miguel Cabrera, Justin Verlander, Joey Votto, and Giancarlo Stanton have earned their massive contracts through extensions proposed by their own team. Yoenis Cespedes, CC Sabathia (the second time), and the list goes on for big dollars to re-sign players when they reach free agency. The Dodgers are no different. Their highest paid player (also the highest in all of baseball) is Clayton Kershaw, whose contract extension had him making $33 million this year. The Dodgers got out-bid—crazy, I know—this past offseason when trying to re-sign Kenley Jansen and Justin Turner, yet the two returned anyway.

So the Dodgers didn’t buy a good team. What they do have are the luxuries of being able to make a few financial mistakes, being able to make trades to acquire high-dollar players, and affording whatever it takes to resign and extend their own players. This really isn’t different from the other winning teams in baseball. The Yankees, my beloved Evil Empire, are being praised right now for their development of their young players. These Yankees are undoubtedly carried by the “baby bombers” but they still have the second largest payroll in baseball, inflated by big contracts for low-value ($21.14M for Jacoby Ellsbury, $21M for A-Rod to not play) plus the $25M for the last year of CC Sabathia’s contract. For the Red Sox, it’s the same story; Betts/Bradley/Benintendi leading the young core with Sandoval/Ramirez/Price bringing up the payroll, which is only a couple million behind New York. All these big market teams have the privilege of spending money; the Dodgers aren’t any more special.

The 2015 World Series was the only Fall Classic in this decade where both teams, the Royals and Mets, were below-average in payroll. The average payroll in 2017 is $152,327,084. Lots of teams spend lots of money. I could go on about how money affects winning but just know this: The Dodgers are like any other winning team and aren’t as evil as you think.

-Michael Zeolla