If you ask baseball fans who aren’t Dodgers fans what they think of Los Angeles spending so much money to acquire some of the best players in the league, most of them will say it’s bad for the game. Most of them, however, aren’t former Major League Baseball players like Alex Rodriguez.
The Dodgers have five starting pitchers who will earn more money this year than 19 teams’ entire payrolls. They owe $1.1 billion in deferred payments to 10 players through 2047. They are also projected to pay a luxury tax penalty higher than the total player payrolls of 13 MLB teams.
None of that is bad for baseball, according to Alex Rodriguez.
“I have no problem with it,” Michael Kay said to Rodriguez during an interview on his show. “They’re they’re playing by the rules, Alex, and you know, people get mad. Well, why do they get all the players? Because they try for all the players and they can afford it. But do you think it’s good or bad for baseball?”
“I think it’s great. You and I both would be hypocrites if we said it’s not good when we saw what happened in the ‘90s here in New York, what happened in ‘09 when Hal Steinbrenner flexed his financial resources, and Randy Levine to go out and get Sabathia, Teixeira and A.J. Burnett and the year before we had Johnny Damon,” Rodriguez replied.
Alex Rodriguez is the second former Major Leaguer in the past week to say the Los Angeles Dodgers are good for baseball. Last week, former All-Star pitcher Shane Greene also defended the Los Angeles Dodgers and claimed they are making baseball better.
“Coming from somebody who’s been in that locker room, they’re doing the opposite of ruining baseball,’’ Greene said in a video he posted to Instagram. “They’re actually making it better, at least for the players.”
Shane Greene also raised the semi-valid point that spending a lot of money doesn’t always equal winning.
“Nobody’s talking about the Mets,” he said. “The Mets payroll, how much money they’re spending and they stink. … just because you spend money doesn’t mean you win.”
He isn’t wrong. The White Sox, Rays, and Brewers are currently leading their divisions. The problem is that the Dodgers have been in the World Series five times in the past nine years and have won it three times, including each of the past two years. If they win the World Series again in 2026, the complaints about their spending are only going to get louder and harder to ignore.