In his October 2024 introductory press conference as the new president of baseball operations of the San Francisco Giants, Buster Posey declared, "We're in the memory-making business." No matter any outsized belief in RBI, it was the strongest repudiation of the old Farhan Zaidi regime, an optimized, min-maxed platoon machine with a veritable lack of new dudes, which spent each year scuttling about trying to sneak into the Wild Card, caught lightning in a bottle in 2021, and—after showing prediction models who's boss—never broke .500 since. It doesn't matter if Matt Chapman never puts up another 7 rWAR season, or if Willy Adames is the ideal guy to drop a $182 million contract on—so long as the Giants' roster winds up with people to root for, year over year, Posey's team-building philosophy will readily outperform Zaidi's as a maker of memories.
Combine commitment to the memory-making business with an optimized, min-maxed machine, and you wind up with the Los Angeles Dodgers, who are, if you missed it, ruining baseball. Admittedly, signing a guy so fans and future fans alike will have someone to root for is a bit different from signing every guy on the market; the latter is, to simplify a bit, the Dodgers' approach to this past offseason. So far, Los Angeles has signed or extended, in a semi-rapid succession of long-term contracts: Blake Snell, Tommy Edman, Hye-seong Kim (a 25-year-old free agent with 37 career home runs in the KBO, who is not to be confused with cool Padres guy Ha-seong Kim), and then, in the span of one week, Roki Sasaki, Tanner Scott, and Kirby Yates.
Aren't you mad at that? Even if you're committed to believing any baseball front-office spending is good spending, you have to be a little bit mad at it. The Dodgers signed the biggest international free agent of the year in Sasaki, and then two days later signed the best closer on the market in Scott, and then two days after that signed the second-best closer on the market in Yates—as far as anybody knows, just for fun! What's next, Pete Alonso? The Dodgers won their World Series, and now they want to get better? Have some decorum!
The Dodgers have reached the point of being so good that it is now, apparently, their responsibility to be less good, for the overall health and well-being of the sport. Meanwhile, other teams are intent on ensuring that their fans don't get anyone to root for, at least for not too long. The Dodgers were always going to pick up Sasaki (see: Ohtani, Shohei), sure, but Scott and Yates? It's not like the Dodgers can't be outbid, especially with their luxury tax penalty. Any team that needed a closer could spend $72 million on Tanner Scott, who had an ERA under 2.00 last season, and even pay a little extra "sorry we aren't the World Series–or–bust Dodgers" tax on top of that. There's definitely more than one team that could use Kirby Yates, especially after Scott left the market. Demanding that the Dodgers not pay a fair-market price for their surplus of closers is effectively preferring they do collusion for the sake of other clubs' public image. That free agents are looking at the market and finding other teams either cheap or sleeping is not the Dodgers' problem. Nor is the financial bottom line of other teams; as Ken Rosenthal noted in his column, the Dodgers have massive road attendance numbers and are MLB's largest contributor to revenue sharing.
The Orioles have let Corbin Burnes and Anthony Santander go, and so far failed to bolster their struggling starting rotation. The Brewers, as one of five teams who haven't made any free agent signings so far (along with the Twins, Marlins, Cardinals, and the Padres' ownership imbroglio), remain committed to sleepwalking into an NL Central win, though perhaps the Cubs can shake it up this year, despite dropping in payroll season-over-season. The Mariners are poised to 54-percent themselves to the heat death of the universe. The Sacramento A's are the seventh-highest spending team so far this offseason. The Sacramento A's! If it's evil of the Dodgers to construct their roster with the grim belief that half of their pitchers will go on the IL, what do you make of everyone else?
Success begets success; not everyone can be the Dodgers, but after the Giants apparently lost out on Ohtani, Buster Posey ought to know more than anyone else that there's value in having something to play for. The good news for fans of competitive parity out there is that the structure of baseball abhors a dynasty even more than they do. The greatest equalizer is the arbitrariness built into a sport dictated by stringing together hot streaks, which, more than anything else, is how you wind up with things like even-year bullshit or multiple Dodgers playoff trainwrecks. Keeping score via payroll is exhausting and ultimately doesn't win World Series rings. And while that's true, perhaps the non-Dodgers front offices can consider getting into the memory-making business instead.
