The $430M Dodgers Have Problems Even Their World Series Odds Can't Hide

The Los Angeles Dodgers are supposed to be MLB's apex predator. They are not merely a big fish; they are a great white shark in a small pond that otherwise has only guppies and minnows.

But are they really?

Simply posing this question feels like asking for trouble with Freezing Cold Takes, but it feels unavoidable. Though the Dodgers still enjoy a 7.5-game lead in the NL West, losses in eight out of 11 have certainly dulled the edge of their alleged dominance.

As of Wednesday, the Dodgers wouldn't even have a first-round bye in the playoffs. And after hitting an absurd pinnacle that coincided with the Tarik Skubal trade, FanGraphs has dialed back the Dodgers' World Series odds:

• August 1: 31.4%
• August 11: 23.1%

If these numbers are good for anything, they're for capturing real anxieties for Dodgers fans who are holding out hope for a World Series three-peat.

The Dodgers' List of Concerns Isn't Short or Sweet

Even if the Dodgers weren't The Dodgers!, the Skubal trade would still have been a shock simply on this account: It paired a back-to-back Cy Young Award winner with one of the league's best starting rotations.

Presently, Dodgers starters rank fifth in MLB with a 3.56 ERA, even though their rotation is still not at full strength. That day will come when it's not just Skubal and Yoshinobu Yamamoto leading the way, but with Shohei Ohtani, Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow providing support.

To this end, Snell finally returned on Tuesday after surgery to remove loose bodies in his left elbow. He struck out 10 and allowed one run in six strong innings against the Kansas City Royals. Glasnow is also due back from back spasms this month. The hope is that Ohtani can return to pitching for the playoffs as he recovers from knee and biceps issues.

The Rotation Actually Has to Stay Healthy, Though

The Dodgers are banking on good health from three pitchers who don't have healthy track records. Last year alone, the trio of Snell, Glasnow and Ohtani made a grand total of 43 starts.

Skubal's own injury history is not spotless. He had major surgeries on his arm in 2017 and 2022, and his heavy workloads in 2024 and 2025 caught up with him in May, when he also had surgery to remove loose bodies in his elbow.

The Dodgers have since been learning something that was already apparent to the Detroit Tigers after Skubal returned in June. His 3.08 ERA in 11 starts is not exactly the dominance that everyone had gotten accustomed to. He's also down about 1 mph on the fastball relative to 2025, and he's allowed 10 home runs in his last 64.1 innings after giving up just two in his first 43.1 innings.

Where Has the Dodgers' Mighty Offense Gone?

While the starting pitching is more of a hypothetical shortcoming, the problems the Dodgers are having at the plate are very real.

They're scoring a sturdy 5.02 runs per game for the season, but that rate has plummeted to 4.14 runs per game since the All-Star break. They collectively have a 97 wRC+, which puts them three percent below league average.

And no, narrowing the focus to the regulars doesn't make the picture prettier:

Player	Total PA	1st Half wRC+	2nd Half wRC+	Difference
Andy Pages	508	120	106	-14
Shohei Ohtani	500	156	127	-29
Freddie Freeman	497	138	133	-5
Kyle Tucker	459	102	115	+13
Max Muncy	410	131	101	-30
Mookie Betts	346	93	56	-37
Teoscar Hernández	327	95	98	+3
Dalton Rushing	245	123	119	-4

The only notable improvement belongs to Kyle Tucker, and it's a case of a $57 million-per-year player going from "mediocre" to "decent." That isn't worth Mookie Betts simultaneously going from "decent" to "bad." And with Dalton Rushing having joined Will Smith on the injured list, what had been a major strength at catcher is now a notable weakness.

More broadly, the vibe is of a lineup that is slowing down for what may be obvious reasons. At an average of 30.7 years, the Dodgers have the oldest offense in the league. And after back-to-back World Series runs, it may be like Indiana Jones once said: It's not the years, it's the mileage.

The Bullpen Has an Edwin Díaz Problem

Not to be overlooked is the other problem that has come knocking for the Dodgers. Their bullpen has a 4.89 ERA since the break, ranking 23rd out of 30 teams.

Granted, that number overstates how weak Dave Roberts' corps of relievers actually is. Tanner Scott is still shoving, and Evan Phillips has come around since a difficult start out of the gate following his return from Tommy John surgery.

The Edwin Díaz-shaped elephant in the room is hard to miss, however. Following his own surgery to remove loose bodies from his elbow, the Dodgers' $69 million closer has allowed two homers and five runs in 5.0 innings. His fastball is down to 96.2 mph, the lowest of his career.

The Dodgers Might Be Ruining 'The Dodgers Are Ruining MLB!'

After the Skubal trade, anti-Dodgers hysteria predictably reached a fever pitch. Heck, even The New Yorker has gotten in on it more recently.

Yet as their World Series odds dropped over the last 10 days, a dozen other teams have seen theirs rise. This is obviously more of a consolation to some teams than it is to others, but at least the elevator pitches for those teams as Dodgers killers are straightforward:

• Milwaukee Brewers (10.4%): Elite pitching paired with MLB's most versatile offense
• New York Yankees (9.1%): Also elite pitching, plus an offense that hits a ton of home runs
• Tampa Bay Rays (8.8%): Sort of like the Brewers, but better defensively
• Atlanta Braves (7.7%): They have Chris Sale, an awesome bullpen, and a bunch of sluggers
• Boston Red Sox (6.7%): Also Brewers-lite, with MLB's best bullpen
• Chicago Cubs (6.5%): The best offensive team of any likely playoff qualifier
• Philadelphia Phillies (6.4%): As many as three aces, plus the Bryce Harper-Kyle Schwarber-Trea Turner trio

A Dodgers defeat at the hands of any of these teams would represent Goliath falling to David. Not one of them is remotely near the Dodgers in terms of payroll. In fact, they're going to spend more in luxury-tax penalties than the Brewers and Rays are spending on their payrolls.

If this comes off as a blatant attempt to threat-wash the Dodgers, well, maybe it is. There's certainly no blindness around here to the general freakout around them becoming MLB's center of financial and competitive gravity, or the implications for the upcoming labor fight between the MLB and the MLBPA. If a lockout in 2027 wasn't already a given, the Skubal trade seemed to do the trick.

But now more than ever, both the league and the union need to ask themselves if the Dodgers are so dangerous as to warrant blowing up a whole season.

That could happen to the 2027 campaign if MLB doesn't budge on a salary cap, but seeing that as the only way to rein the Dodgers in—it wouldn't hurt their No. 1-ranked farm system, you know—requires a lack of imagination. There simply must be other ways, whether it's cracking down on their liberal use of deferred money or helping other teams get access to resources. To the latter, revenue-sharing adjustments seem like a lay-up.

Doing nothing to check the Dodgers' dominance doesn't seem likely, but it also wouldn't be beyond the pale. It would, in effect, be MLB and the MLBPA trusting that even the Dodgers can't keep a dynasty operating forever.

The Houston Astros couldn't do it, and the Yankees teams of the early 2000s offer an example of how even an uber-rich team can struggle to maintain a throne. Their failure to win a World Series between 2001 and 2008 was largely a case of real ingenuity giving way to an impulse to just throw dumb money at problems, resulting in bloated, aging rosters that were hard to fix.

The Dodgers' toe is starting to dip into those same waters. Betts (33) and Hernández (33) have aged out of their primes, and the same might be said of Snell (33) and Glasnow (32). Ohtani (31) and especially Freeman (36) can't keep theirs alive forever. And even at the time, it felt like the Dodgers signed Tucker (29) and Díaz (32) not because it was a good idea, but simply because they could.

It's not a fallen empire yet. But if nothing else, it might be a sneak peek at how empires inevitably do fall.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.