Those who would currently mourn the Los Angeles Dodgers are in the minority. They can spend $500 million on a roster all they want, but such money doesn’t buy sympathy when it’s on the brink of failure.
This is the story of the National League Championship Series. Do not confuse it with THE history. Despite costing a third of their opponent’s price, the Milwaukee Brewers been the best team, leading a Leading 3-0 to put themselves on the verge of winning the World Series.
The Brewers dominated the Dodgers in the first two games, wearing them out Tarik Skubal And Yoshinobu Yamamoto and allowing only one extra hit to Dodgers hitters. In the seventh inning of Game 3, Milwaukee made Dave Roberts pay for his lack of confidence in his bullpen, reaching Blake Snell for back-to-back game-breaking home runs as the southpaw approached 100 pitches.
It feels like the Brewers truly deserve to be crowned the best team in the National League. Go figure, after winning an MLB-best 103 regular season games.
And so, with apologies to JRR Tolkien, the Dodgers’ quest for a World Series three-peat hangs on a knife’s edge. They can and should blame themselves. The rest of us can and should credit the Brewers.
The Dodgers did this to themselves
When criticizing the Dodgers, you have to follow a certain ritual. This involves doing an awkward dance while recognizing that this is actually a well-run franchise.
It is impossible to separate their quality from the power of their resources. It’s also impossible to ignore questions about how team owner Mark Walter accesses these resources. Yet president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman is ultimately the architect here, and he gets high marks for using free agency, trades and player development to keep the machine running.
The Dodgers won the NL West 11 times in 12 seasons under Friedman. They are generally top five in the NL in runs scored and runs allowed. They hit a lot of home runs. They eliminate a lot of guys. It’s clearly a winning formula.
However, this formula has its limitations, as was evident even as the Dodgers reveled in their second straight World Series championship last October.
An offense that was aging and becoming less productive clearly needed to become younger and more dynamic. Fixing the problem should have been more complicated than just signing Kyle Tuckerand even his four-year, $240 million contract smacked more of hubris than common sense. A 29-year-old is more middle-aged than young these days, and he’s spent much of the last two seasons limited by injuries.
The bad season Tucker had this year was always a possibility, and his appearance (97 OPS+) doomed the roster to even more pain in the 36-year-old’s subprime seasons. Freddie Freeman (118 OPS+) and 33 years old Bets on Mookie (113 OPS+).
Shohei Ohtani could have saved the Dodgers, and he did so for a while hitting 30 home runs with a .949 OPS through August 18th. At some point, however, the pain in my left knee and right arm became an open secret. The Dodgers just let him keep playing…and playing…and playing.
The bill is due. The four-time MVP didn’t feel healthy even after a two-week stint on the IL in September, and now he looks worse than he lets on. Ohtani’s magnificent swing has devolved into bad performance art. No wonder he hasn’t hit a home run and has one RBI since August 19th.
It’s Ohtani’s track record, reputation and aura that keeps him in the lineup, at the expense of someone who is right there to give the Dodgers lineup what it needs. Jose De Paula is an elite prospect who posted a 1.081 OPS in a late-season cup of coffee, but Roberts can’t bring himself to bring him off the bench.
Thank goodness the Dodgers can still pitch, to the tune of a 3.55 ERA in the regular season and now a 3.39 ERA in the postseason. Yet, hidden here too is another story of pride.
Between Tanner Scott in 2025 and Edwin Diaz This year, spending big money on a free agent reliever in hopes of a quick fix for a constantly leaking bullpen has burned the Dodgers in back-to-back seasons. And while their midseason trade for Skubal had plenty of merit in its own right, it was a trade the Dodgers made not because they needed to, but because they could. Improve the offense or the bullpen? No, go get the best guy. It doesn’t matter that he’s another starter.
All of this puts the Dodgers on the brink. This may be a $500 million team, but that number doesn’t imply perfection so much as complacency. The Dodgers could afford to go bigger and better. They are about to have a legacy of leaving the job half done.
Brewers are simply better
To be clear, the Dodgers have a payroll of $340.6 million And $165.9 million in luxury tax penalties attached to their 2026 roster. That alone is more than the $143.7 million the Brewers are spending on their roster.
According to MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, this is important. It is so important that baseball has a salary cap so that teams like the Brewers can compete with teams like the Dodgers.
Yeah, we wonder how broken his brain is right now.
Even though the Brewers can’t buy talent like the Dodgers, their nearly decade-long excellence is finally poised to prove that identifying and maximizing talent can be just as effective, even if it’s significantly cheaper. Jake Bauerswhose 3.3 rWAR for this season brought his seven-year career total to 2.0, knows what’s going on.
“There’s a right way to play baseball, and if you can commit to it and get a whole team to commit to it, you can overcome a lot of things,” the veteran first baseman told ESPN’s Jeff Passan. “When it comes to salaries and all that, you still have to play the game. And all the talent and all the money in the world can’t buy the focus you need to win baseball games.”
Offensively, the average Brewer is almost four years younger than the average Dodger. But this is only an advantage in the abstract. What really matters is that the Brewers offense:
- Batting grinds, with lowest swing rate in MLB
- Gets runners going, with highest OBP in MLB
- Moves runners, with fifth most stolen bases and sacrifice bunts in MLB
- Hits in the clutch, with second-highest AVG and SLG with runners in scoring position in MLB
The San Diego Padres felt it in the NLDS, especially when Jackson Chourio took a dive Mason Miller in Game 2. Now it’s the Dodgers’ turn in the NLCS. Milwaukee’s offense I took out all his tricksn Game 2, chasing down Yamamoto after 2.2 innings and erasing not one, not two, but three deficits to win 7-4. Bauers contributed with a 12-pitch walk. What followed, an 11-pitch home run against Snell in Game 3, was even better.
On the other hand, the Brewers play clean defense in support of nasty pitchers. Jacob Misiorowski can throw 105 mph, but he’s just one of 11 of 18 Brewers pitchers (min. 20 IP) who have topped the league average of 94.7 mph on the fastball. This helps explain how they saw the Dodgers’ 3.55 ERA and raised them to a 3.51 ERA.
This also explains how the age of the Dodgers hitters became a subplot in the NLCS. The brewers’ pitchers were THE scenario, especially their enclosure. Milwaukee relievers have a 1.32 ERA for the series. Their average fastball? Try 98.5 mph.
Regardless of what happens next for the Brewers, general manager Matt Arnold feels like a candidate for executive of the year. Pat Murphy should also have a third straight NL Manager of the Year in the bag. He played the hand Arnold dealt him masterfully, whether it was new-school bullpen management or old-school scolding a rookie for violating team culture.
Perhaps it’s too simple to boil this NLCS down to the best team money can buy versus the best team the mind can imagine. However, it is more or less the truth. And whether the league likes it or not, the outcome of the game has a refreshing message for Major League Baseball’s broader fan base.
While it matters, there are some things money can’t buy.
Gn sports
