Dodgers aren't beating the 'we broke baseball' allegations after another NLCS win

Sure, we all got our jokes off during the regular season. It was fun to watch the Los Angeles Dodgers flounder a little bit, for the best team that money can buy to be undone in increasingly implausible ways by a disintegrating bullpen and sheer entropy — the exhaust port in MLB's Death Star. After another offseason so jaw-dropping it had fans seriously considering blowing up the sport's entire economic model, L.A. was shockingly vulnerable during the regular season, winning "only" 93 games and settling for the No. 3 seed in the NL playoffs. Maybe all that hand-wringing had been misplaced; maybe baseball really was immune to attempts to impose order on its chaos.

... or, uh, maybe we were right all along. Because the minute the calendar flipped to October, the Dodgers have started looking exactly like the team everyone feared they would be back in February. Los Angeles won its sixth postseason game in seven tries on Tuesday, silencing the Milwaukee Brewers in a 5-1 win that sends the NLCS back to Dodger Stadium with the Dodgers up 2-0. And once again, it was starting pitching that carried the day: 24 hours after Blake Snell fired eight shutout innings in Game 1, Yoshinobu Yamamoto did him one better, going the distance while allowing just one run and three hits.

Not that anyone should be particularly surprised, of course. This is exactly the performance L.A. had in mind when it handed Yamamoto a whopping 12-year, $325 million contract two years ago, the longest ever for a pitcher. And when it handed Snell a five-year, $185 million deal this past winter, the second-highest AAV for a pitcher in baseball history (behind only Jacob deGrom).

The four starters who take the mound in this series — Yamamoto, Snell, Shohei Ohtani and Tyler Glasnow — have contracts that are worth more than $1.3 billion combined. Their salaries for the 2025 season (around $107 million) are worth more than the entire payrolls of six different Major League teams. The Dodgers just have more talent than everyone else, and right now, it's hard to see how anyone's going to stop them from a World Series repeat.

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Harsh reality of the Dodgers on full display in first two games of NLCS

This was, in fact, the point of all of this. That if you assemble enough great players, if you allow money to be almost no object whatsoever, you can weather whatever storms the baseball gods throw your way over the course of a 162-game season. If a certain mechanism fails, there's a backstop, and then another one after that.

It's certainly true that much of what gets framed as a lack of parity in MLB has more to do with the league's cheapest owners than anything else. Even if Rob Manfred could snap his fingers and institute a salary cap, it wouldn't make Bob Nutting any more likely to invest in a competitive team. There's certainly more than one way to win a World Series, and money is no guarantee.

Still, it was difficult to watch what went down in Milwaukee on Tuesday and not feel the disparity. This Brewers team had the best record in baseball during the regular season, thanks in large part to a relentless offense that worked counts, got on base and wreaked havoc once it did. But you can't unleash that havoc unless you're actually getting on base, and there's the rub: The Dodgers are simply running out pitchers who are better than the hitters Milwaukee has on the other side, a plucky group that became more than the sum of its parts but which has looked overmatched in this series — like they're largely young role players and journeymen trying to stay above water against some of the best arms on Earth.

The Dodgers have two more where those came from, and they'll send them out for Games 3 and 4 back in L.A. later this week. Maybe the Brewers will have an answer, and maybe Milwaukee will be able to make this a competitive series yet. The odds are stacked against them, though, as Andrew Friedman's grand design has been fully realized at the best possible time. There's not a lot you can do in the face of pure talent, and the Dodgers have spent the last two years buying up as much of it as possible.