It wasn’t easy, but Major League Baseball’s financial behemoth made history.
The Dodgers completed a comeback to win the World Series over the Blue Jays, capturing Games 6 and 7 on the road in Toronto and becoming the league’s first repeat champion since the 1998–2000 Yankees.
Los Angeles was armed with a $416.9 million luxury-tax payroll, the largest in MLB history, and had been expected to steamroll through the season after the team buttressed last year’s title with several major offseason acquisitions, such as Japanese pitcher Roki Sasaki.
But the 2025 season had plenty of struggles for the Dodgers. The club’s 93 wins marked their lowest full-season total since 2018, and Los Angeles often looked vulnerable despite a star-laden roster that included former MVPs Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman. The club spent most of April and brief parts of August out of first place in the National League West division.
After a four-game sweep of the Brewers in the NL Championship Series, the Dodgers dropped two of three home games in the World Series to the Blue Jays.
That required the Dodgers to become the first team since the 2019 Nationals, and just the ninth in league history, to win Games 6 and 7 of the World Series on the road to claim the title.
At home, though, fans turned out in force, as the Dodgers set a franchise record in attendance and became the first MLB team since 2008 to draw more than 4 million.
What’s Next for MLB’s Biggest Spenders
It’s quite likely the Dodgers’ repeat World Series win will be used, at least in some corners of the game, as a signal of the growing financial and competitive imbalance in MLB, and the heightened need for more radical change.
The club’s payroll is nearly five times the level of the bottom-dwelling Marlins, and the breaking of the quarter-century streak of no back-to-back winners ends one of the sport’s biggest arguments for its competitive balance.
Both MLB commissioner Rob Manfred and MLB Player Association executive director Tony Clark have sought to distance the Dodgers’ success and spending from the core issues in upcoming labor negotiations that could be fractious. It’s almost impossible, though, to separate the two as the Dodgers now have furthered their dominance over the sport.
“The economic problems are still there … The same things we talked about a decade ago still exist,” MLB commissioner emeritus Bud Selig told Front Office Sports last month.
Before the World Series, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts leaned heavily into the Dodgers’ perceived villain status, saying, “Let’s get four more wins and really ruin baseball.”
Next year’s labor negotiations will help show whether that’s really the case.
