Opening Day 2026: Why MLB season revolves around the Dodgers
LET’S TAKE A tour of the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ spring coaching clubhouse. Walk in the entrance door and inside 5 steps sits Mookie Betts, a future first-ballot Hall of Famer. A fast look left and it is Kyle Tucker, the latest Dodger, signed for the low, low worth of $60 million a 12 months. Look again to the proper, a number of lockers down from Betts’, and there stands Shohei Ohtani, the best particular person expertise ever to put on a baseball uniform. A pair extra strides and it is Edwin Diaz, one other new Dodger, a three-time Reliever of the Year. Keep pacing about the room and it does not cease: Freddie Freeman (Hall of Famer-to-be), Yoshinobu Yamamoto (World Series MVP), Will Smith (three-time All-Star), Blake Snell (two-time Cy Young Award winner). The names, the bona fides, the cash, the sheer magnitude of all of it. It is, in a phrase, overwhelming.
Come to think about it, that applies to all aspects of the Dodgers, the axis around which the baseball world spins. Over the previous two years, as they’ve captured a pair of World Series championships, grown their annual income to greater than $1 billion a 12 months, signed free agent after consequential free agent, spent cash like few had ever earlier than, and accomplished their hostile takeover of the sport, these left in the Dodgers’ wake — the different 29 groups and their tens of tens of millions of followers uninterested in this behemoth working roughshod by the sport — discover themselves overwhelmed by the notion of one other season outlined by a single staff. Were it to indicate any indicators of abating, maybe it could not chap everybody in the method it does. Alas, it’s not receding. It’s solely rising.
Which leaves Major League Baseball, as the 2026 season opens with the New York Yankees visiting the San Francisco Giants, fixated on one franchise in a style unseen in additional than a quarter-century, an all-encompassing preoccupation. That, too, is overwhelming, the stranglehold the Dodgers have on the sport’s collective consciousness, the capability for one staff to function inside the identical boundaries that govern the remainder of the league and nonetheless so clearly separate itself, like a nugget of gold amid a pan of gangue.
The cognitive dissonance the Dodgers have created might effectively attain its apex this 12 months, as a result of it is the reasoning being peddled for house owners’ preparations to close down the sport when the present collective bargaining settlement expires in December ought to the gamers not comply with a wage cap. It is concurrently a handy excuse to protect the house owners’ actual motivation — management prices, juice franchise values — and a good evaluation of their fears that payroll disparity as we speak is bigger than at any level in the sport’s historical past.
It is, too, a surprising indictment of the short-sightedness of the sport’s stewards, a willingness to probably squander a second of recognition unseen in a long time in service of placing to a cease a corporation that does all the things a corporation is meant to. Ownership prepared to spend? Check (a clean one, seemingly). Stars aplenty? Indeed. Well-oiled infrastructure? Absolutely. Draft effectively, develop from the low minor leagues by the massive leagues, crush worldwide newbie acquisition, seize management of the Japanese market? (E) for all of the above.
When we final noticed the Dodgers, they have been about to lose the World Series to the Toronto Blue Jays. Then utility man Miguel Rojas hit a game-tying ninth-inning dwelling run, Smith pushed them forward together with his personal homer, Yamamoto went god mode, and L.A. grew to become the sport’s first repeat champion this century. More than the spending, than the deferred cash that sends social media right into a frenzy, than something, that is what perturbs the plenty: The Dodgers win. The New York Mets have spent multiples greater than half the league, and no person cares as a result of they have not. What the Dodgers are chasing this season occurs as soon as each quarter-century or so — the Yankees in the late Nineteen Nineties, the A’s in the early Nineteen Seventies and the Yankees twice extra previous to that with 5 straight titles from 1949 to 1953 and 4 in a row from 1936 to 1939. And their quest is a poison tablet for the sport. Make historical past — actual, spectacular historical past — and it solely serves to verify each damaging, cynical perspective of the Dodgers and the state of the sport.
Baseball’s sport-wide renaissance — in tv rankings, new-and-old fan curiosity and the World Baseball Classic — is fragile, all as a result of one staff sought to reply the query of what occurs when cash buys expertise and expertise catches as much as long-held, sound processes. As straightforward as it’s to forged the Dodgers as villains, this blinkered single-mindedness was a very long time coming. And it is why supervisor Dave Roberts, one other future Hall of Famer, relaxes in his workplace a number of steps from that clubhouse teeming with expertise and wears a smile when requested what he thinks about the ire educated squarely on Los Angeles.
“I like it,” Roberts mentioned.
No, no. That’s not proper.
“I love it.”
OVER A 15-YEAR stretch between 1999 and 2013, the New York Yankees entered each Opening Day with the highest payroll in baseball. Some years the hole between them and the next-highest staff was minimal. Most years have been comically imbalanced. In 2005, the Yankees went into the season with $208,306,817 value of contracts on their books. The second-highest payroll, belonging to the Boston Red Sox, was $123,505,125. Only the New York Mets joined them over $100 million. At the backside, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays spent simply $29,679,067 on payroll.
It’s straightforward to say, with the Dodgers’ luxury-tax payroll at present over $400 million and their complete outlay with penalties set to exceed $500 million, that baseball has been right here earlier than. They have been easier instances, twenty years earlier than the Dodgers made “deferrals” a slur, however it’s instructive to do not forget that baseball actually does not change, simply the characters in its tales. And with the Yankees over the previous decade evolving into their austerity period, the function of huge unhealthy villain was there for the taking, one thing the Dodgers gladly snatched and are not inclined to relinquish anytime quickly.
It’s not that they significantly take pleasure in being seen as the embodiment of exorbitance. That’s simply the worth of greatness in 2026. And that, greater than something, is what infuriates the legions that need Los Angeles to fail virtually as a lot as they need their staff to succeed: Everything the Dodgers do is particularly educated on discovering, securing and unleashing greatness.
Take the signing of Díaz. He opted out of his contract with the Mets to check free company. He might have discovered a four- or five-year contract. The Dodgers refused to budge past three. They would give him a fats signing bonus and the all-time highest per-year wage for a better. He weighed this, consulted together with his brother Alexis and countryman Kiké Hernández — each performed for Los Angeles final 12 months — and emerged unable to shake the thought that the Dodgers have now implanted into any dialogue of them.
“They’ve won back-to-back World Series, and they keep adding players,” Díaz mentioned. “That tells us they want to win. If any player had the chance to come here, I think they would because they show everyone they want to keep winning.
“Kyle might’ve gone to different groups, too, like me. He determined to come back right here. This staff received higher once I signed right here and with him received even higher. I believe if all people stays wholesome, we have a extremely good probability to win once more.”
They do, and not just because of the stars. The Dodgers’ depth is Cousteauvian. They will start this season with Snell on the injured list, a litany of relievers sidelined for months (Evan Phillips, Brusdar Graterol, Brock Stewart) and their two greatest utility males coming off offseason surgical procedure (Tommy Edman and Hernández). And yet they find themselves with an embarrassment of starting pitching, a bullpen still loaded with powerful arms and a cache of every-day players so voluminous that Hyeseong Kim, whom they guaranteed $12.5 million last winter, will start the season at Triple-A.
Every advantage imaginable resides in the Dodgers’ laps, and though plenty are of their own making through superior baseball operations skill, it’s easier — it’s more satisfying — to bemoan the monetary might they wield. Those advantages are real, and to ignore them would be whitewashing a fundamental part of this Dodgers era.
The penalties in the collective bargaining settlement designed to maintain groups from spending excessively in contrast with their friends are virtually all financial. The Dodgers, with a wellspring of money movement in a sport the place house owners usually lament their lack of it, discovered that spending cash to enhance their main league roster made them much more. With cash no obstacle — buoyed by a local-television deal that due to a bankruptcy-court settlement permits them to maintain a better proportion of income than different large-market groups and larded with income streams from Japan alone greater than some groups domestically — they’re untethered, unbound and unapologetic.
It is the most overwhelming a part of the Dodgers. Everything about them is massive and right here and now, like a black gap inviting all that dare enter its orbit. In the National League, the Phillies, Cubs, Mets, Braves and Brewers all enter the season hoping that they are often the one to dethrone Los Angeles. In the American League, the Blue Jays are again, the Yankees nonetheless potent, the Mariners lastly able to make — and win — a World Series for the first time of their existence, the Red Sox thirsty so as to add to their tally of the most championships this century. Everyone is coming for the Dodgers. And that is what Roberts loves most.
“Because it forces you to bring out your best every night,” he mentioned. “Whether we face a young team or a veteran-laden team, a young pitcher or a veteran pitcher, they’re bringing their best to beat us. And so for us to not get embarrassed, we’ve got to bring our best. We’re used to people coming after us every single night, and it prepares us to sustain this through the whole season. We’re the beneficiaries of people coming after us every single night, because it makes us tougher.”
The Dodgers’ success in balancing the vagaries of a 162-game slog with the urgency of an October dash is certainly one of their best successes. Money provides them stars, sure, however simply as a lot it provides choices. If a participant just isn’t taking part in effectively, or is damage, or must spend time understanding kinks, he can with restricted interruption to the remainder of the staff. Starter Roki Sasaki, the Dodgers’ bonanza signing out of Japan in January 2025, spent most of final season determining his mechanical deficiencies earlier than returning in the postseason to spend a month moonlighting as a dominant nearer. It was quintessential Dodgers. And it is why whilst Sasaki has regressed once more and enters the season with questions on his capability to stay in the Dodgers’ rotation, there is not panic. They’ve received six months to get him proper.
NOBODY EMBODIES WHAT the Dodgers are greater than Ohtani. He is 31 now, nonetheless firmly in his prime, able to pitch a full season for the first time since 2022, when he completed fourth in Cy Young voting. He will proceed to DH daily he does not pitch, and so long as he is wholesome, he’ll win his third consecutive NL Most Valuable Player Award and his fifth in 9 main league seasons, and that is not a guess or prediction as a lot as it’s an acknowledgment that he does issues no person else has, can or will.
The world sees Ohtani by these accomplishments as a result of it is all he permits. He provides his expertise, and that suffices. As a lot as anyone needs to detest the Dodgers, an goal view of Ohtani reveals the type of marvel that is inconceivable to dislike. The issues he does, the methods he does them — they’re plain, inimitable, baseball apotheosis.
“I think he enjoyed baseball because he wanted to be the best player to ever play,” Roberts mentioned. “I think now he’s having fun playing the game. The skill set, the intentional work, the ability to kind of compartmentalize like no one I’ve ever seen before — all that stuff is still in play. But I’m telling you, he’s just — even like this one example. He wins the MVP in the NLCS, and he gives it to the team.”
Coming off a sweep-clinching victory through which he threw six innings, struck out 10 and went 3-for-3 with three dwelling runs, Ohtani took his NLCS MVP trophy and added a bootleg placard to the entrance. TEAM EFFORT, it learn, an acknowledgment from the man himself that the Dodgers aren’t simply Shohei Ohtani or Mookie Betts or Freddie Freeman or Yoshinobu Yamamoto or Will Smith or Blake Snell — or, now, Kyle Tucker and Edwin Díaz. As unlikely a math equation as this is likely to be, the entire actually has been higher than the sum of its elements.
And with the complete of the Dodgers’ roster including as much as a lot greater than their rivals that they’ll coast into the playoffs as they did final 12 months, the common season, so significant for the remainder of the league, seems like little greater than a precursor to answering the query of will they or will not they make historical past this fall.
There is one thing thrilling about that — about each October collection forcing Los Angeles to attract from these challenges different groups posed throughout the common season. The Dodgers have been favorites in 2023, too, and received swept by the Diamondbacks. And winners of 111 video games in 2022, just for the Padres to spoil their coronation. The Braves did it a 12 months earlier than that, sending dwelling a 106-win squad. As did the Nationals to a different 106-win staff in 2019 and the Red Sox in dominant style in 2018 and even the dishonest Astros in 2017. Before Ohtani arrived and spurred the building of the machine, the Dodgers have been these mid-2000s Yankees groups: costly and ringless, exterior of a 2020 championship even they side-eye as we speak.
“What I’m proudest of is the consistency of winning and how we go about it,” Roberts mentioned. “There’s not a person that’s familiar with baseball or successful businesses that says we’re not doing things the right way. To do something over a long period of time — that’s stuff that I appreciate. It’s what keeps the fire burning to sustain it. Knowing everyone is chasing you, wants to knock you off. How can you be honest with yourself and the organization on what your shortcomings might be to continue to keep that competitive advantage? That’s what I’m obsessed with, what our front office and our players are obsessed with.”
The obsession commences anew this week, with the starting of certainly one of the most anticipated seasons in years. The coming labor battle provides it much more exigency, as a result of if issues break unhealthy — they usually definitely might — it is going to be the final Major League Baseball for an indeterminate chunk of time. Rather than ruminate on that, it is best to understand the 12 months forward and never get overwhelmed by the Dodgers’ place at the heart of it. The sport types itself out, and no matter how good they’re, dominance at all times has an expiration date. The subsequent seven months will inform whether or not that is now or later.