Key Points
Bullet point summary by AI
- The Mets and Dodgers once seemed locked in a decade-defining rivalry after their 2024 NLCS battle.
- Two years later, one franchise has transformed into a championship contender while the other struggles with declining talent and miscalculated bets.
- The gap grew through starkly different approaches to player development, free agency strategy, and revenue generation that now define their trajectories.
Less than 24 months ago, the New York Mets and Los Angeles Dodgers met to determine the champion of the National League. L.A. prevailed in six games, en route to the first of what would become two straight World Series titles, but even in defeat Mets fans left that NLCS feeling like this was merely the beginning of a years-long rivalry.
It turns out that dream lasted for all of a few months. The last two years in Flushing have been a long, slow slide toward irrelevance, from a second-half collapse all the way out of the playoffs in 2025 to a 2026 season that blew up on the launch pad. The Dodgers held up their end of the bargain; the Mets, on the other hand, are nowhere near contending for pennants.
Which, as the two teams kick off a weekend series at Citi Field on Friday night, begs the question: How did this happen? How did what seemed like a decade-defining matchup become a rout in less than two years? Here's how Los Angeles lapped their East Coast rivals in four simple steps, and what the Mets can do to get up off the mat.
Player development
Go back and look at some of the biggest pieces of that Mets run in 2024. Beyond the twin stars in Francisco Lindor and Pete Alonso, the rest of the everyday lineup consisted of either veteran role players (Jose Iglesias, Starling Marte) or homegrown players like Brandon Nimmo, Jeff McNeil, Mark Vientos and Francisco Alvarez.
Flash forward 18 months or so. Nimmo and McNeil fell off such a precipitous cliff that they were dumped to the Rangers and A's, respectively, this past offseason. Vientos and Alvarez both looked like key parts of the future in Flushing in the 2024 postseason, but both of them have failed to take a step forward since — Alvarez continues to be dogged by injury and might not be a catcher long term, while Vientos is barely playable at this point.
And the guys who were supposed to step up alongside those two as the Mets' previous core aged out of its prime, players like Ronny Mauricio, Brett Baty, Luisangel Acuña, Ryan Clifford, Jonah Tong, David Peterson and Tylor Megill, have all collapsed in value since. As bad as things have been for the big-league club this year, it's been almost as ugly in New York's farm system, which has left holes all over the roster for David Stearns to try and fill.
Compare that with Los Angeles, which, despite its (well-earned) big-market reputation, has remained a development machine. Andy Pages is now one of the best all-around center fielders in the game. Will Smith gets injured? Here's Dalton Rushing to fill in expertly. No Blake Snell or Tyler Glasnow? Justni Wrobleski can come out of nowhere with an All-Star season. And the farm system remains arguably the deepest in the sport, ready to supplement the big-league roster via promotion or trade at a moment's notice. Hate them all you want, but few organizations identify and nurture talent like the Dodgers.
A totally different approach to free agency
That has downstream effects that manifest in free agency, where the Dodgers can be more targeted in their pursuit because they know they have a foundation of talent to fall back on. Los Angeles essentially never stops throwing serious money at its rotation: While Snell and Glasnow have been hurt for much of the 2026 campaign, they were integral in each of the team's title runs,
There's a reason why the Dodgers shop at the top of the free agent market, while the Mets spent the winter taking risky upside bets on guys like Luis Robert Jr., Jorge Polanco and Marcus Semien — bets that were risky at the time and have backfired spectacularly. And even when the Dodgers' investments don't pan out — like, say, with Kyle Tucker and Edwin Diaz — they have the ability to find wins on the margins to compensate. When the Mets whiff on someone like Bo Bichette, on the other hand, it leaves a gaping hole.
Shohei Ohtani is a cheat code
Of course, the Dodgers also have more margin for error because of their unique ability to keep on printing money. Ohtani is a singular player in baseball history, but he's also a singular economic engine, a nigh-unprecedented source of transcontinental revenue who has already paid back his contract many times over. Given Ohtani's popularity not just in the States but in Japan, Los Angeles can have a lot more confidence in its baseball operation as a self-sustaining business moving forward, which in turn affects how aggressively Andrew Friedman and Co. can invest.
The Mets can't cry poor by any means. But for as substantive as Steve Cohen's net worth is, there's a difference between net worth and cash flow — just as there's a difference between net worth and baseball revenue. Ohtani is generating profit that can be pumped directly back into the team around him. Every time New York wants to add, on the other hand, it's coming out of Cohen's pocket, which goes a long way toward explaining why the Dodgers have thrown their weight around on the open market more consistently despite the relative wealth equality between their two ownership groups.
2024 gave Mets fans a false sense of how close their team really was
And yet, all of the above still isn't sufficient to explain the gap that's emerged between these two teams since they met 18 months ago. Which is probably because that gap was always much wider than that NLCS matchup suggested.
The Dodgers entered the 2024 campaign as World Series favorites after adding Ohtani to a squad that won 100 games the year prior despite an injury-ravaged pitching staff. The Mets, on the other hand, went 75-87 in 2023 and sat at 28-37 in the middle of June 2024. The ensuing Grimace-fueled run was something out of a fairy tale, but that doesn't mean it should've told us much of anything about the viability of this core moving forward.
David Stearns clearly thought as much, given how willing he was to blow that core up. And the thing is that I'm not even sure that was an incorrect decision: New York didn't have the horses to compete with the likes of the Dodgers and Brewers at the top of the National League, and now they've at the very least cleaned up their future books a bit. But how close they came two years ago served to create an inflated sense of expectation among an already success-starved fan base, which has made the ensuing decline all the more painful.
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