Passan: The Dodgers built a superteam — but that doesn’t mean they’ll win it all
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Jeff Passan, ESPN
They’ve been plotting this for years. Plans, of course, fall apart all the time, whether they’re for dinner or a meeting or taking over the entire baseball world by signing the best player anyone’s ever seen to the biggest contract anyone’s ever received and then chasing that less than two weeks later with the largest deal a pitcher ever has gotten. For it all to line up so spectacularly for the Los Angeles Dodgers — for this superteam to assemble and take aim on the game — left the people around baseball dazed and woozy from the scale of it all.
First they guaranteed two-way star Shohei Ohtani a 10-year, $700 million contract. They followed Thursday by giving his Japanese cohort Yoshinobu Yamamoto, who has not thrown a pitch in the big leagues, $325 million over 12 years. After a brief moment of austerity — $50 million in free agency on only one-year contracts last winter — the Dodgers lavished more than $1 billion on two players. And now, in 2024 and beyond, they are going to be very, very good.
Their lineup features the reigning MVP, two more future Hall of Famers in Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, plus catcher Will Smith, center fielder James Outman and slugger Max Muncy. They entered the winter with Bobby Miller, a rookie this year, as the only lock for their 2024 rotation. Now they’ve got Yamamoto to start Opening Day against the San Diego Padres in Seoul and Tyler Glasnow, whom they acquired in a trade with the Tampa Bay Rays and signed to a five-year, $136.5 million extension, to pitch the second game of the season’s opening series.
They will, undoubtedly, be a force in the National League West, almost certainly its champion next year. Then come 2025, when Ohtani returns from his second Tommy John surgery and presumably joins the rotation, the Dodgers will be that much better. This causes understandable consternation for fans in smaller markets like Pittsburgh and Kansas City, whose entire franchises aren’t worth a whole lot more than the Dodgers guaranteed Ohtani, Yamamoto and Glasnow. The whole sport, frankly, is on tilt. Even the New York Yankees, New York Mets and San Francisco Giants, all of whom pursued Yamamoto with vigor, wound up jilted because they could not offer the combination of money, sunshine and rejoining Ohtani, who captained Yamamoto and the rest of Team Japan to the World Baseball Class title this spring and intends to replicate that many times over with the Dodgers.
Easy as it might be for anyone outside of Los Angeles County to panic, stew, lament, fret and bemoan the current state of affairs in Major League Baseball — to crown the Dodgers, bleat about the lack of a salary cap and swear off the game altogether — such frustrations do not reflect a reality about the modern game and the place of superteams in it.
Here’s the beauty of baseball: Simply put, these teams haven’t won in the wild card era.
For every successful superteam like the late-’90s Yankees — the last to win consecutive World Series — there are multiple cases of others that didn’t win at all (Cleveland in the mid-to-late-’90s), won far less frequently than they ought to have (Atlanta just once in its 14-straight-division-title run from 1991 to 2005) or saw their fortunes run inverse with their superness. The 1997 Seattle Mariners, with three Hall of Famers (Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Edgar Martinez) and another all-time great (Alex Rodriguez), won 90 games. Four years later, without Griffey, Johnson and A-Rod, Seattle booked an MLB-record 116 victories.
The sport’s playoff structure, now at 12 teams with a five-game series followed by a pair of seven-game series, makes the game almost superteam-proof. This is not the NBA, where three star players can breed a dynasty. This is not the NFL, where one elite quarterback can buoy a decade of championship aspirations. This is baseball, where the laughable disparity in payrolls hasn’t translated to the same teams vying for titles year in, year out.
Over the past decade, 14 baseball organizations have made the World Series and nine different teams have won — the most champions of any major men’s North American team sport. The NHL had one more team in the Stanley Cup Final (15) but one fewer winner (eight). Both were far better than the NFL (11 teams, seven winners) and NBA (10 teams, five winners). Go out a quarter-century and MLB continues to hold its own despite being the only uncapped league of the four. More baseball teams have won championships in that stretch (16) than the NHL (14), NFL (13) and NBA (11). And only the NHL has a higher percentage of teams that have competed for a title than baseball, which has seen 20 of its 30 franchises in the World Series over the past 25 years.
Just look at another attempted superteam of recent vintage: the 2021 Dodgers. They won a championship the year before, with Betts and Corey Seager in their lineup, a rotation with Clayton Kershaw, Walker Buehler and Julio Urías. And coming off that title, they struck at the trade deadline by adding all-world shortstop Trea Turner and future Hall of Famer Max Scherzer. It led to 106 wins in the regular season — and an October exit after six National League Championship Series games against eventual champion Atlanta. The next year, 111 wins and a 3-1 defeat in the division series to the San Diego Padres. Last season? A 100-win team that got swept in the division series by an 84-win Arizona team with barely half the payroll. The Diamondbacks rolled through the NL and ran into the Texas Rangers and Seager, who won another World Series MVP award.
If that’s not convincing enough, let’s talk money. Over the past 10 years, the Dodgers have outspent the next-highest-spending team in baseball, the Yankees, by a little more than $100 million total — and those two seeming juggernauts, with a combined outlay of nearly $5.1 billion during that decade-plus, won a grand total of one World Series championship between them. The Yankees didn’t make the World Series once.
In the same decade, the organization that spent the most money in free agency advanced past the division series just once. Similarly, the team with the largest disbursements over the winter — free agents plus re-signing their own players — missed the playoffs more often than they made it; only the Dodgers won the World Series, in the 2020 COVID-19 season. The list of disappointments is far longer. Between extensions and new additions last offseason, San Diego guaranteed $894.3 million, a sum not terribly dissimilar from the Dodgers’ this year. And for that, the Padres went 82-80 and sat out October. The New York Mets attempted to assemble a superteam this year. They flopped, moved six players at the trade deadline and finished 77-85 with the largest payroll in the game’s history.
None of this is out of the realm of possibility for the Dodgers. The deals for Ohtani, Yamamoto and Glasnow all carry significant levels of peril. Even if the deferrals in Ohtani’s deal limit the downside, the Dodgers still committed about $450 million in present-day dollars to a player whose value depends heavily on his ability to excel with a twice-repaired pitching elbow. The Dodgers guaranteed Yamamoto, 25, more than the Yankees paid for Gerrit Cole, currently the best pitcher in the big leagues. Glasnow’s career high for innings in a season is 120, and Los Angeles gave him frontline-starter money for half a decade.
What superteams generate in disillusionment they make up for in sundry ways. For fans of good baseball, they provide. For fans of good drama, they abide. As difficult a concept as it might be to reconcile, baseball writ large needs the sort of cultural resonance the Dodgers can supply.
They will fulfill that need for a villain, an enemy. Wins against the Dodgers mean that much more now with Ohtani, Yamamoto and Glasnow in the fold. The joy that comes from beating the Yankees exists because of their utter dominance in the first half of the 20th century: the best team ever in 1927, four straight World Series wins and six in eight years from 1936-43, five consecutive championships from 1949-53. The Yankees built themselves into one of the biggest juggernauts in sports by erecting generations of superteams — in the days when building a team that could win the pennant meant a direct path to the World Series.
The Dodgers, by comparison, have just one title in the past 45 years. But they have become a new kind of superteam, the best-run organization in baseball by a wide margin. They draft exceptionally well. They thrive signing international amateurs. Their player-development system is second to none. They crush analytics. They live on the cutting edge of performance science. And because they’re so good in all of those areas, it affords them the ability to take more chances in free agency than their moneyed contemporaries who aren’t as good.
After all, the Giants and Toronto Blue Jays were asked whether they would match Ohtani’s deal and said yes. The Mets offered Yamamoto the same terms as the Dodgers. Ohtani and Yamamoto chose this team for more than the might of its massive TV deal and all the other revenue it creates.
The Dodgers are a machine, and that they can take a 100-win team and upgrade it with players of this caliber speaks to how well-oiled the machine really is. And perhaps that’s why fans are so up in arms about Ohtani, Yamamoto and Glasnow. Already the Dodgers do everything well. And now they get these guys on top of that?
The resentment is understandable. Fairness is a carrying characteristic in sports, and something about one team handing out two of the biggest deals in sports history in the same month can leave an acrid aftertaste. But that’s where there’s solace in history, in numbers, in logic, in all of the things that prompt you to say maybe this is a superteam — and maybe that’s just fine.
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Greg Wyshynski
Boston Bruins forward Morgan Geekie can finish a Rubik’s Cube in under a minute.
“I mean, right now I’d be pretty rusty,” he said. “I’m not insane, like those kids that you see on TV, but I’m pretty good at them.”
When Geekie was around 10 years old, a cousin taught him how to speed solve the puzzle. While some have never found a way to line up that mosaic of colors despite years of trying, Geekie said it’s doable once one cracks the code. One summer at their lake cottage, his cousin wrote down its patterns. Geekie spent two weeks memorizing them and working out solutions while fiddling with the cube.
“It’s basically just all algorithms. You just do the same moves all the time once you get the pieces in the right spot. Once you do that, I mean, it’s pretty cut and dry. Everything goes in order,” he said. “I haven’t really forgot. It’s just one of those things that once you know it, you know it.”
Perhaps Geekie just knows how to score goals now, too.
That’s the simplest rationalization for the 27-year-old’s unexpected transformation into one of the NHL’s premier goal scorers. Through 34 games, Geekie is second in the NHL with 24 goals, trailing only the dominant Nathan MacKinnon of the Colorado Avalanche (28). Going back to the start of last season, Geekie is tied for 11th in goals scored (57).
Geekie scored 33 goals in 2024-25, which is 16 more than his previous career high set two years ago with the Bruins. He shot 22%, which obliterated his previous career best of 13.1% set in 2023-24.
There’s always an offensive player whose unexpected scoring surge in one season makes him the consensus choice for regression the following season. Entering this season, that player was Geekie.
He was the first player listed on ESPN’s rundown of regression candidates, with the expectation that he would top out at 26 goals. Sports Illustrated did the same thing, writing that his “offensive numbers are set to dip next season.” Daily Faceoff wrote that Geekie’s shooting percentage was “a strong indication that his performance isn’t sustainable, at least at this level” for the Bruins.
Geekie gets it. He called the predictions “a fair statement” given that he was scoring less than 10 goals in a season with the Seattle Kraken just a few seasons ago.
“I see it all. It’s an easy cherry to pick to be like, ‘Obviously he’s shooting 22%, it’s going to go down.’ It didn’t bother me at all,” Geekie said.
Rather than regress, Geekie has progressed this season. Through 34 games, he is shooting 28.2%.
“I mean, it’s got to go down at some point,” he said, with a laugh. “Like I said, I don’t really pay attention to that and I’m not somebody that has 10 shots a game, so I just try to make the most of my opportunities when I get the puck.”
GEEKIE IS AMUSED by the focus on his shooting percentage, because he feels there are easy explanations for it. The first is that he doesn’t believe he shoots the puck all that much. Over the past two seasons, David Pastrnak averaged 3.79 shots per game in 110 games. Geekie averaged 2.11 in that same span. Only Sidney Crosby (2.45 shots per game) has a lower average than Geekie (2.48) among the top 10 goal-scorers this season.
“I feel like I’m a big quality over quantity person,” he said.
His first season in Boston, coach Jim Montgomery stressed the need for Geekie to get chances from deep inside the attacking zone.
“I think a high-danger chance is better than just shooting it from the wall. That’s kind of the mentality that I’ve had always. I’m not trying to waste shots that aren’t good for anybody,” Geekie said. “Unless I’m trying to create something off it, I’m honestly not trying to put it on net. Maybe that’s why I end up where I end up.”
Pastrnak recently said the Bruins were reminding Geekie to shoot the puck more often. In fairness, Geekie is shooting more this season. Pastrnak said Geekie is “definitely trying to be a little more selfish to take them” when he fights into high-danger areas of the ice. But Geekie acknowledged there are sometimes philosophical differences between his striving for quality over his team’s desire for quantity.
“I think it’s a push and pull,” he said. “It’s like, I don’t think I need to be shooting this, but other people think that it still gives us an opportunity to create a chance. So I just try to keep that in mind when I have the puck”
This is Geekie’s seventh season in the NHL. He was selected by the Carolina Hurricanes with the 67th pick in the 2017 draft as a goal-scoring forward with the WHL Tri-City Americans. His first two seasons as a pro were mostly spent in the AHL with the Charlotte Checkers, before playing 36 games with the Hurricanes in 2020-21.
That summer, the Seattle Kraken held their expansion draft as the NHL’s newest team. Geekie was left off Carolina’s protected list. At the time, it wasn’t expected that former Hurricanes GM Ron Francis would select him for the Kraken, with options like defenseman Jake Bean and forward Nino Niederreiter available from Carolina. But Geekie was the choice, a player whom Francis had drafted while with the Canes.
Geekie had 22 points in 73 games in his first season in Seattle, skating 12:36 per game with just seven goals. His second campaign saw him jump to 28 points in 69 games, but with even less ice time (10:27).
He was a restricted free agent after the 2022-23 season. Francis attempted to re-sign him before the deadline for submitting qualifying offers, but Geekie and his representatives declined it. The two sides couldn’t find common ground. Rather than go to arbitration, where the Kraken weren’t keen on Geekie potentially setting the terms of his next deal, they chose not to qualify him, making him an unrestricted free agent.
“With Morgan, we did make what I felt was a pretty fair offer,” Francis said at the time, via Sound of Hockey. “It didn’t work out, and he has the right once we don’t qualify him to go elsewhere.”
And so he went to Boston, signing a two-year deal worth $4 million in total.
While he wasn’t seeing much time with the Kraken, Geekie felt he was improving as a player. He said a “integral part” of that development was thanks to Jonathan Sigalet, a skills coach who improved all facets of his game.
“When I first started working with him, he was adamant that he wasn’t going to try and make me play like I’m on the first line,” Geekie recalled. “He said, ‘We both know that trying to do things that you do on the first line on the fourth line is going to get you in the press box.'”
He said working with Siglet slowed the game down for him. He started to see the game differently. He began to see “little tendencies” that all of the NHL’s good players share. Geekie also appreciated having a “third party” assessment for his play, apart from that of his coaches and his own.
Geekie was immediately given an opportunity to thrive in Boston in 2023-24, playing 15:21 in his first game with the Bruins. He ended up averaging 15:25 per game, with 17 goals and 22 assists in 76 games. He earned time with Pastrnak and Pavel Zacha on the Bruins’ top line.
His follow-up season didn’t start well. Geekie scored one goal in his first 17 games and was a healthy scratch early in the season. Some trade whispers started about him as a pending restricted free agent. He had eight goals by the end of the 2024 calendar year.
How did he end up with 33 of them? With one of the greatest goal-scoring heaters this side of Alex Ovechkin: Geekie scored 14 goals in his last 20 games of the season. His chemistry with Pastrnak was undeniable — the Bruins scoring ace assisted on 21 of Geekie’s 33 goals last season.
Geekie expressed a desire to stay with the Bruins. The feeling was mutual, as GM Don Sweeney in June handed him a six-year, $33 million contract for a team-friendly $5.5 million annual cap hit.
WHEN GEEKIE SIGNED his new contract, he decided he wanted to join in the tradition of NHL players celebrating a windfall with their teammates. It’s usually a dinner or something of that nature.
But Geekie wanted to do something different.
“Everybody’s eating at the same restaurants in every city. And I’m sure they’d remember it for a little while, but I think it would be just one of those things like, ‘Hey, thanks for dinner.’ So I wanted to do something a little more nostalgic,” he said.
Geekie is a huge baseball fan who played competitively until his late teens. He was in the process of designing a personalized baseball glove for himself through a company called 44 Pro Custom Gloves when his wife, Emma, suggested that he design ones for all of his teammates as a gift.
Geekie started the process in July, sketching out what he wanted on the gloves for 30 teammates — including players that were on the bubble for the Bruins’ roster this season. He had the biographical information for them, from their birth cities and countries to their schools to where they played junior hockey.
“Honestly, for probably three weeks, I just sat in front of my TV watching baseball and I would just draft gloves up. I thought it was so fun,” Geekie said. “My wife got sick of me for a little while.”
He would FaceTime his brother Noah, a coach at Okotoks Dawgs Academy in Alberta, to bounce the designs off him and get input. He was cognizant of having the designs as unique as possible, despite some of the school colors being similar for his teammates.
Before a practice in October, Geekie delivered the gloves to the locker room stalls of his teammates. It went over well.
“Baseball is not that big in Sweden, but it’s obviously cool to have,” center Elias Lindholm told the Bruins website, having received a glove with a Swedish flag on it. “Hopefully, when my kids get a little bit older, we can play a little game or something. For now, it is just going to be at home, resting.”
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Morgan Geekie nets goal for Bruins
Morgan Geekie nets goal for Bruins
While the gloves were a chance to celebrate with his teammates, there weren’t many celebrations anticipated for Boston this season. The Bruins were trading players away at last season’s trade deadline, sending mainstays like captain Brad Marchand (Florida), center Charlie Coyle (Colorado) and defenseman Brandon Carlo (Toronto) elsewhere. They had an incoming first-year coach in Marco Sturm. At best, it was supposed to be a transition year for the Bruins.
But through 34 games, Boston is second in the Atlantic Division with a 20-14-0 record, within a point of division-leading Detroit in the crowded Eastern Conference.
Many around the NHL were surprised. Geekie wasn’t.
“We underperformed. Last season was like the perfect storm of bad events with our kind of discombobulated training camp and then having a coaching change and just kind of everything that could have went wrong went wrong,” Geekie said. “The core group we have is just too good to be written off. But I understand why people had doubts about us.”
But defying doubts is what Morgan Geekie’s all about, whether it’s his team’s predicted finish in the standings or his own predicted regression as a scorer.
“He has everything to score 50 in this league,” Pastrnak said. “He has a heck of a shot. He has the goal-scoring instincts. He is going to get it one day.”
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