Key Points
Bullet point summary by AI
- The Los Angeles Dodgers have transformed into an overwhelming force, exploiting MLB's current financial system to build an unstoppable roster.
- Their relentless success and high-profile signings have fueled growing calls for a salary cap to restore competitive balance across the league.
- With tensions rising over potential labor disputes, the Dodgers' dominance forces a fundamental question about the future of Major League Baseball itself.
In sports, calling something a “Death Star” often refers to an overwhelming suite of options, a sort of “too big to fail” situation or an embarrassment of riches. But that’s all wrong: In Star Wars, the Death Star is a metaphor for the nuclear bomb, the galaxy having developed the capacity for total, unequivocal self-annihilation. It raises questions about existence, about the future, about the need to resist or the desire to give in.
In Major League Baseball, we have our own Death Star: the Los Angeles Dodgers, ready and willing to blow this whole thing up by exploiting everything that is busted about the league by three-peating and causing a cataclysmic lockout. Deep breaths.
The Dodgers are so good it might be unfair
The Dodgers are good. I know, this is the type of analysis you look for in high-quality baseball writing. But the Dodgers are so generally good that it might be the best word for it. The only things we could point to as a weakness in 2025 were defense (potentially a weakness, depending on whom you ask) and the bullpen (definitely a weakness, as we saw in the postseason). Now, no matter who you ask, neither of those things are an issue.
Their starting pitching has been injured, and it’s still great. Roki Sasaki was the only blemish, and he’s now figuring it out. Shohei Ohtani started slow at the plate, but now he’s joined the rest of their hitters in being-super-good land and feels all but guaranteed to win his fifth MVP. Andy Pages is eighth in the Majors in WAR. Who allowed this?
I find this image of NL West Playoff Odds amusing pic.twitter.com/hFFL3BGMgF
— Oliver Fox (@oliversfox) June 3, 2026
Oh right, Major League Baseball did! Never in a million years should the Dodgers be blamed for exploiting the system to their ultra-benefit, a point I’ve heard Jeff Passan eloquently make a number of times against accusations that all those deferred-money contracts are stupid. The reason other leagues have financial restrictions is because, if you don’t, a big-market team that is competently run will create pipelines of talent and desirability that become impossible to combat. The Dodgers have become irresistible and unstoppable, and now, everything will have to stop.
Most discussions I see in the MLB press and public right now center around whether or not we will have baseball in 2027 due to a prolonged strike, one that feels increasingly certain to cost us at least a chunk of actual baseball games. Earned or not, the Dodgers are the reason for this sudden push, since their relentless ability to sign every cool and fun free agent not named Juan Soto and their back-to-back (and-potentially-to-back-a-third-time) championships have soured public attitudes toward free-market baseball. But with so much anxiety about 2027, I rarely see media people actually engage with the question of “do I/we want a salary cap”?
The MLB financial system is not built for teams like the Dodgers
But with the Dodgers, like with a nuclear bom—er, Death Star, we have to ask the big question about whether we actually want to go on living with this … thing in our midst. Or if we need to send a proton torpedo through a two-meter exhaust port, blow this thing and go home.
Personally (and I hope this doesn’t get me on some list), I am willing to miss some baseball games in 2027 if it means instituting a salary cap. Yes, the genesis of the calls for a cap are based on greedy billionaires wanting yet-more billions of dollars, but it is simply healthier, more competitive and more interesting if MLB adopts one and actually prevents teams like the Dodgers from existing in the future. The team that signed Shohei Ohtani should not be able to sign Kyle Tucker two years later. And it really should not be able to sign Tarik Skubal in a few months.
Even if the MLBPA and MLB owners all get scared enough of destroying their collective good will with a protracted strike to just run into each others arms and keep up some version of the status quo, tell me — why we don’t just do this again in five years? The Dodgers are the most absurdly bankrolled team in baseball history; why would they suddenly start scaling back? If we leave everything to the invisible hand, it just gets worse for most fan bases. The Dodgers are showing us how dark the true depths of non-competitive baseball can be; that is the grandest compliment I have. And to the great credit of their players, coaches and organization, I’m over it.
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