Root for the Dodgers
It's the only remaining just outcome...
It is has become fashionable to refer to the Dodgers as baseball’s new “evil empire,” and there is some truth to this: They are the defending champions, currently in their fifth NLCS in the last six years. They lead the league in payroll, and have been at or near the top of the payroll charts for the last decade. This year, they went out and made one of the biggest deadline deals ever, adding Max Scherzer and Trea Turner to a team already loaded with talent. They won 106 games in the regular season, and while that wasn’t enough to win the NL West, they then topped their biggest rivals in a thrilling Division Series.
So it is tempting for casual baseball fans to root against the Dodgers in the playoffs. Atlanta’s walk-off wins in the first two games of this series have the veneer of a charming underdog upset. But I am here to tell you that, if you care about social justice, worker dignity, or economic inequality, you must root for the Dodgers, not only to come back in this series, but to win another World Series. As Margaret Thatcher would say, there is no alternative:
Why You Can’t Root for Atlanta: The most immediate reason to root for the Dodgers right now is that rooting against them means rooting for Atlanta, one of the most villainous teams in sports. For one, at a time when Cleveland is changing its name to the Guardians so as not to offend indigenous people, and even the Washington Football Team has finally ditched its racist moniker, Atlanta is still somehow getting away with being “the Braves,” and shows no inclination to change. On top of the name, its fans still do the fucking Tomahawk Chop during games.
But perhaps you are inclined to excuse the name as merely an unfortunate tradition the team is stuck with. Well, Atlanta is a villain for other reasons. For one, they don’t actually play in the city of Atlanta, ditching it for the nearby suburb of Cobb County in 2017 so they could build a stadium with more parking. So Atlanta plays in a testament to white flight and environmental degradation. On top of that, they also signed their star player, Ozzie Albies, to one of the most exploitive contracts in baseball history. Finally, they are the only team owned by a publicly traded corporation, so a victory for them would be a clear victory for capital.
Why You Can’t Root for Houston: Unfortunately, the remaining options in the American League are not much better. The Houston Astros rival the Dodgers in recent success—this is their fifth straight League Championship Series. And, of course, they have achieved this success at least in part by cheating.
But I am not even really concerned about the cheating. That has been litigated to death. The reason fans cannot root for the Astros is that the team was built through tanking. Between 2011-13, the Astros lost 324 games. In that time, they built the core of their current team, drafting George Springer, Carlos Correa, Lance McCullers Jr., and the prospects they would trade for Justin Verlander and Zack Greinke. When Brady Aikens, one of the #1 overall picks they got in the lean years asked for too much money, they refused to sign him and used a compensatory pick on Alex Bregman.
This kind of model for building a team is bad for baseball, regardless of cheating. Ever since the Astros (and, to a lesser degree, the Cubs and Royals) employed this method, teams have adopted tanking with an openness and zeal that is one major cause of the labor strife in the game right now. If the Astros win the World Series going into the next round of CBA negotiations, it will only entrench the owners’ ridiculous demands.
Why You Can’t Root for Boston: If the Astros are one dangerous model for building a successful baseball team, then the Red Sox are arguably even worse. Houston was more open and aggressive about doing something that had been done before: making a bad team intentionally terrible for the sake of draft picks. But Boston took a good team and made it mediocre for the sake of saving money. I wrote last offseason about what a horrible and nearly unprecedented development the Mookie Betts trade was.
But now, even worse, it appears to be working! Not working in terms of making the team better—this team’s Expected W-L record was nearly identical to its 2019 Expected W-L. But they did so with a 20% lower payroll, which only benefits the owners and their bottom line. The Red Sox were able to sneak into the postseason with a mediocre team in a down year for the AL, and now they are three wins from the World Series.
It is often said that baseball’s playoff system is a crapshoot that rewards teams that get hot. This is, for the most part, not true. Aside from some famous exceptions (the 2011 Cardinals, the 2014 Giants), the teams that win the World Series are typically teams that do very well in the regular season. As the league has polarized in recent years, we’ve seen an unusual run of 100+ win World Series winners: the 2016 Cubs, the 2017 Astros, and the 2018 Red Sox. (For reference, the last time there were three consecutive 100-win champions was 1975-1979.) In last year’s shortened season, the Dodgers played at a 116-win (!) pace. Even the 2019 Nationals, who are often thought of as a fluke team, played at a 107-win pace after the first 50 games of the season.
But if this Red Sox teams wins, then teams may decide it is no longer worth it to try to win as many games as possible. Why bother trading for Justin Verlander or Max Scherzer, when instead you can cut your payroll by 20% and make the World Series from the wild card game?
It’s not that I think wild card winners are inherently illegitimate—fluke winners are good now and then to keep the playoffs exciting. But the way Boston did it is alarming. It’s one thing for the wild card to exist as an enticement for mediocre teams to get a little better, but another if it exists as a fallback option for owners trying to save money.
Any of these three teams winning the World Series would be an ominous development for baseball, so that leaves Los Angeles… Go Dodgers!