Nearly two months into the 2025 MLB season, the Los Angeles Dodgers remain the betting favorite to win the World Series.
But while the Dodgers might be one of the league’s most high profile teams, there’s also reason to believe that MLB is rooting against a second straight championship season in Los Angeles.
Earlier this week, ESPN’s Jeff Passan appeared on John Ourand’s podcast, The Varsity. And during a discussion regarding the impending MLB labor negotiations and the prospective of a potential salary cap, the MLB insider noted the role that the Dodgers’ recent success could play.
“We’re going to be talking a lot about the salary cap or a [potential] salary cap. And it’s part of the conversation right now in the way that it has not been in past labor negotiations that I’ve covered. It’s being bandied about because of the Dodgers and the Mets,” Passan told Ourand. “Every sport needs a baseline level of perceived fairness. And in baseball right now, the perceived fairness for a number of small market teams doesn’t exist because of the payroll chasm.”
“Now, you very clearly can win without having the sort of payroll that the Dodgers do. We see teams like the Tampa Bay Rays and the Milwaukee Brewers and the Cleveland Guardians — like good teams — year in and year out. But that doesn’t matter when the Dodgers are going out winning championships. And to me, that is going to be the ultimate litmus test of this season: if the Dodgers win the championship, the first team since the 1998-2000 Yankees to do it in consecutive seasons, it’s going to be a real problem for MLB I think. And it’s only going to potentially make those calls for a salary cap that much louder.”
Passan’s theory certainly makes sense.
While baseball’s payroll disparity has been a source of criticism for decades now, the league has always been able to point to the perception of parity as a defense. Sure, the Yankees, Red Sox and Dodgers have combined to win one-third of the World Series titles since 2004. But the other two-thirds of champions over the course of the last two decades help provide hope that you can win a World Series without buying one.
That argument, however, has been weakened in recent years, with the Dodgers favored to win what would be their third World Series in six seasons while combining with the Mets to seemingly hoard every big-name free agent in the sport. As such, it’s only academic that MLB would be rooting against a Dodgers dynasty, knowing the role that increased calls for a salary cap could play in a potential — if not inevitable — labor strike.
