Even the Dodgers Can't Buy Their Way Out of 2025 Problems

This was supposed to be the year we learned exactly what a $500 million payroll could buy the Los Angeles Dodgers—and the answer was supposed to be everything.

Another National League West title? Well, obviously.

An all-time record 117 wins, if not even more? That seemed possible, too.

A second straight World Series championship? That seemed like a given, even if it has been a quarter-century since it last happened.

And yet, here we are midway through August, and the Dodgers aren't even on track to check the first of those boxes. After getting out to a 9.0-game advantage on July 3, their lead in the division shrank to zero on Tuesday and finally disappeared on Wednesday.

The San Diego Padres made the NL West theirs to lose by grabbing a 1.0-game lead with an 11-1 win to cap a sweep of the San Francisco Giants. Their chance to go for the kill is now, as they and the Dodgers will clash six times over the next 10 days.

To paraphrase an infamous post: One feels bad for the Dodgers, but this is tremendous content.

The Dodgers Tried to Find Out What Money Can Buy

Just for starters, that note about the Dodgers sinking $500 million into their payroll is not an exaggeration.

Here's how it breaks down, according to Spotrac:

Actual Payroll: $340.9 million
Projected Luxury Tax Bill: $157.8 million
Total Expenditure: $498.7 million

The tax bill alone is more than what half the league is spending on payroll in 2025, and the wild thing is that this isn't even bad business.

Last year's 98-win, World Series-champion venture resulted in $752 million in revenue for the Dodgers, according to Forbes. Why not put money back on the field in a quest for even greater glory in 2025?

Hence, their second straight huge offseason, and this time there was more variety than $1.25 billion worth of splashes on Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto:

• LHP Blake Snell: 5 years, $182 million
• INF/OF Tommy Edman: 5 years, $74 million (extension)
• LHP Tanner Scott: 4 years, $72 million
• LF/RF Teoscar Hernández: 3 years, $66 million
• LF Michael Conforto: 1 year, $17 million
• RHP Kirby Yates: 1 year, $13 million
• LHP Clayton Kershaw: 1 year, $7.5 million
• INF/OF Enrique Hernández: 1 year, $6.5 million
• RHP Roki Sasaki: $6.5 million (signing bonus)

The result was supposed to be an unstoppable team. Per MLB.com's preseason rankings, the Dodgers entered the 2025 season with the best lineup and pitching staff in the league. With a foundation like that, how could they fail?

Things were trending that way initially. They were 24 games over .500 on July 3, at which time their odds of winning the World Series peaked at 24.1 percent at FanGraphs.

Even now, various markers of dominance are still there. Ohtani leads the National League with a 1.021 OPS and 43 home runs, and has fanned 6.4 times as many batters as he's walked since returning to the mound. Yamamoto has a sub-3.00 ERA in 23 starts. Will Smith leads the NL in average and OBP.

And Now the Dodgers Are Learning What Money Can't Buy

So how does a team like this implode in going 12-21 since July 4?

From 30,000 feet up, the Dodgers' pitching (24th in rWAR) has been a huge disappointment, while their offense has merely been as good in 2025 (5.17 runs per game) as it was in 2024 (5.20 runs per game).

On the ground level, though, there are three lessons to be learned.

Lesson No. 1: Money doesn't buy better health

The Dodgers have 15 players on the injured list right now, and they have racked up a total of 1,955 days missed throughout the year. The most of any team in MLB.

It has been an especially painful year for the pitchers. They've lost 1,855 days to the IL, which is 678 more than any other team.

As the Dodgers also had major issues keeping pitchers healthy in 2024, it's a "the more things change..." sort of situation. Maybe it's just bad luck, but it's also getting increasingly difficult to separate their pitching injury woes from their organizational emphasis on stuff above all else.

As hard as it is to argue with the results—reigning champs, remember—a recalibration in favor of durability is in order. Especially, that is, for the sake of young guys like Yamamoto (26) and Sasaki (23), who have their whole careers ahead of them.

Lesson No. 2: Money doesn't buy protection from regression

It's been better so far in August, but part of the reason the Dodgers have slid down the standings is that their offense completely tanked in July. It ranked 28th in the league for runs scored.

It was an especially rough month for Mookie Betts and Hernández, who produced only four homers and a combined 70 wRC+, denoting them as 30 percent below average. And it's a story that applies to the whole year for the two of them, as they are among the biggest losers in offensive production relative to 2024.

The Dodgers could not have foreseen Betts' year starting out with a mystery illness that wrecked him physically. But given he and Hernández are both on the wrong side of the aging curve at 32 years old, some sort of regression should have been expected.

Lesson No. 3: Money doesn't buy your opponents' submission

This was true even before the season started, as it was clear the rest of the NL West was not going to let the Dodgers' attempt to dominate the division stand.

The Padres, Giants and Arizona Diamondbacks were all active during the offseason, with San Diego striking with a $55 million deal for Nick Pivetta and the latter two sinking a combined $392 million into Willy Adames and Corbin Burnes. And as challengers to the Dodgers, these clubs are a solid 1-for-3 this season.

The Padres were already sneaking through the cracked door the Dodgers gave them in the run-up to the trade deadline, and then kicked it wide open with a flurry of deals headlined by a blockbuster for ace reliever Mason Miller.

He's now a featured part of a pitching staff that has an NL-best 3.14 ERA amid a 14-3 run since July 26. Even the offense, which was not a strength beforehand, has had lifts from newcomers Freddy Fermin and Ramón Laureano to score the fourth-most runs in MLB for this span.

There's a Lesson Here for Everyone Else, Too

It's not just the Dodgers who are finding out that jacking up payroll does not guarantee great glory and further fortune.

The other big spenders of 2025 are the two New York clubs, and they have likewise encountered yawning gaps between expectation and reality. The Yankees and Mets have combined for 64 losses and 41 wins since June 13, and they are fighting for their wild-card lives.

What we are bearing witness to is the opposite of what happened last year, when these same three big spenders were among the final four teams left standing at the end of the postseason. It's the kind of correlation you'd expect.

This is not the first time MLB has entered into a Bizarro World between spending and winning, though. We saw something just like this in 2023, when the big spenders struggled early and never recovered. The Mets, Yankees and Padres had the highest tax payrolls, and all three missed the playoffs.

With the rich teams out of it, opportunity was knocking for everyone else. And among the teams that sought to take advantage were the Diamondbacks and Texas Rangers, each of whom made key trade deadline additions en route to meeting in the World Series.

The Padres clearly got the message, and they're not the only ones. The other big winner at this year's trade deadline was another mid-market team in the Seattle Mariners, whose deals for Eugenio Suárez and Josh Naylor have arguably made them the team to beat in the American League.

None of this is to imply MLB doesn't have a severe inequality problem when it comes to payroll. The Dodgers, in particular, aren't doing anything wrong by breaking payroll records, but MLB almost certainly wouldn't be threatening a salary cap if it weren't for them. Given the MLB Players Association's firm resistance to such a thing, it's hard to look into the future and see anything other than ugliness.

Even still, it's always nice to get a reminder that there are things money can't buy. And if the Dodgers can't recover, their loss will be a win for MLB's competitive balance, if nothing else.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.