SIX YEARS AGO, when the world knew next to nothing of a gangly 17-year-old pitcher in Japan, a Los Angeles Dodgers evaluator sat in the stands at his high school games with a video camera to capture the splendor. Roki Sasaki’s fastball regularly reached 100 mph, his right arm a whirling force of nature. The Dodgers were smitten. Sasaki could eventually be the best pitcher in the world, team officials told one another. And when the time came for his inevitable move to Major League Baseball, they wanted to ensure he felt as strongly about them as they did him.

In the time since, the Dodgers have conquered baseball in nearly every fashion imaginable. Armed with immense wealth from their owners and buoyed by the largest local television contract in the game, the Dodgers have spared no expense in trying to win. Their major league payroll consistently ranks at the top of the game, yes, but other line items are best-in-class, too, from their technology infrastructure to their coaching staff’s compensation to the quality of the food they serve their minor league players.

When this winter arrived and Sasaki, now 23, declared his intentions to come to MLB, the Dodgers didn’t need a sales pitch because the allure for players is obvious: If you covet winning, come join a burgeoning dynasty. Since being sold to the Guggenheim Baseball Management group in 2012 following the disastrous ownership of Frank McCourt that led the team to file for bankruptcy, the Dodgers have remade themselves into conquerors: of the National League West (11 titles in 12 years), their October demons (two World Series championships in five years), and the Japanese baseball market (the signings of Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto for more than $1 billion guaranteed).

Every front office pined for the latest Japanese ace this offseason. Eight teams were granted an audience with Sasaki. Three became finalists. The Dodgers were one. The San Diego Padres, Los Angeles’ chief rival in the NL West and another team whose early scouting of Sasaki won favor, were the second. The third came down to the Toronto Blue Jays, Texas Rangers, Chicago Cubs and New York Yankees — four other teams whose years of work in Japan and history with Japanese players spoke to an understanding of Sasaki and his desires. The rapport built with Toronto’s international scouting apparatus won the Blue Jays the third finalist slot.

Toronto impressed Sasaki with its answer to a burning question: Why had his sizzling fastball lost velocity in 2024? The explanation from Frank Herrmann, a Blue Jays baseball operations staffer who had pitched in the big leagues and was Sasaki’s teammate with the Chiba Lotte Marines, and Sam Greene, the Blue Jays’ assistant pitching coach, blended a discussion of data, mechanics and feel that boosted their pursuit. Sasaki spent multiple days in Toronto, and as he departed, the Blue Jays were confident that whatever advantages the Dodgers might have, they were surmountable.

The visit to San Diego left the Padres similarly assured. Star third baseman Manny Machado held a gathering at his house, where a Japanese chef cooked familiar cuisine. Jackson Merrill, the Padres’ 21-year-old center fielder expected to blossom into a superstar in coming seasons, attended, as did Ethan Salas, the 18-year-old catcher seen as a linchpin in future seasons. And San Diego had an ace in the hole: Yu Darvish, the progenitor of modern Japanese pitching, whom Sasaki regards as a mentor with peerless knowledge.

The successful meetings put that much more pressure on the Dodgers, who hosted Sasaki Jan. 14 at minority owner Peter Guber’s Bel Air home and summoned an array of players, all locked up to long-term deals: superstars Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, catcher Will Smith, and super-utility man Tommy Edman. Ohtani, knowing Sasaki loves dogs, brought his Dutch kooikerhondje, Decoy, to the presentation.

With the international signing period opening Jan. 15 and the window for Sasaki to sign closing Jan. 23, the decision zone arrived and forced action. All three teams lined up trades to acquire more international bonus money to help their pursuit. San Diego was eliminated first. Toronto, attempting to demonstrate its willingness to go above and beyond for Sasaki, struck a deal with Cleveland to take on $11.75 million remaining on center fielder Myles Straw‘s contract along with an additional $2 million in international money even before Sasaki had made his decision.

Soon thereafter, he did — and it wasn’t the Blue Jays. What so many in baseball saw as a fait accompli — to the point MLB did a preemptive investigation into whether Sasaki had any sort of prearranged deal (and determined he didn’t) — played out. While some teams in meetings asked if Sasaki wanted to be Kevin Durant or Michael Jordan — to join a superteam or help build one — the allure of the Dodgers was impossible to ignore. All of their games are broadcast on national TV in Japan. The stores at Nippon Professional Baseball stadiums that include racks of Dodgers gear will now feature jerseys with his name on them. The Dodgers’ plan when they signed Ohtani — “One of our goals is for baseball fans in Japan to convert to Dodger Blue,” president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said — had borne fruit.

In executing that vision, the team has set off alarms inside the sport. The Dodgers’ signing of Sasaki for $6.5 million — a sum artificially deflated by MLB’s rules on international amateurs that offers Los Angeles hundreds of millions of dollars in surplus value — left front offices and fans alike gobsmacked. Watching the Dodgers pick off free agent after free agent with heavily deferred deals has built a wave of frustration. Seeing them land one of the most valuable contracts in the game — the sort typically reserved for the worst teams via the draft — reinforced something that has become increasingly clear.

The Dodgers are no longer just a team chasing championships. They are a stress test for the game itself.

THE ANGER — from disillusioned fans, from dispirited front offices, from owners made to look as if they don’t care — is very real. And it’s growing to the point that people at the highest levels of Major League Baseball acknowledge it concerns them. Most worrisome is the rhetoric that fans are done with the game. That what L.A. is doing is unfair. That the financial imbalance ruins the sport.

A villain around which people can rally is tolerable; an unbeatable monolith is not. An exemplar for how teams can operate is instructive; an extinguishing of hope is not. With every transaction pushing the Dodgers further from the former and more toward the latter, MLB faces growing cynicism that has reignited calls for a salary cap — and made collective bargaining discussions set to start a year from now, before the current basic agreement expires following the 2026 season, that much more fraught with peril.

Over the past 13 months, the Dodgers have morphed from a large-market, big-money jewel franchise that spent exceptional sums of money and didn’t have much to show for it into a referendum on the state of MLB in 2025. Because baseball is the last of the major North American professional sports leagues without a salary cap or floor, the difference between the Dodgers — who carry a payroll in the $375 million range — and the next-highest team, the Philadelphia Phillies, is nearly $70 million. That’s to say nothing of the gap between the Dodgers and the 30^th-ranked Miami Marlins: around $300 million. The $120 million or so the Dodgers are in line to pay in luxury tax penalties on top of their payroll is more than the projected Opening Day payroll of 10 teams.

In the past 411 days, the Dodgers have:

• Signed Ohtani to a 10-year, $700 million contract, with $680 million deferred

• Traded for right-hander Tyler Glasnow and signed him to a five-year, $136.5 million contract extension

• Signed right-hander Yamamoto to a 12-year, $325 million contract

• Signed Smith to a 10-year, $140 million contract extension, with $50 million deferred

• Signed two-time Cy Young winner Blake Snell to a five-year, $182 million contract, with $66 million deferred

• Signed Edman, acquired at the 2024 trade deadline, to a five-year, $74 million contract extension, with $25 million deferred

• Signed outfielder Michael Conforto to a one-year, $17 million contract

• Signed reliever Blake Treinen to a two-year, $22 million contract

• Signed outfielder Teoscar Hernández to a pair of deals totaling $89.5 million over four years, with $32 million deferred

• Signed Korean infielder Hyeseong Kim to a three-year, $12.5 million contract

• Signed Sasaki

• Signed closer Tanner Scott to a four-year, $72 million contract, with $21 million deferred

In total, they have guaranteed $1.778 billion — nearly half of it ($874 million) deferred. For a team that already had Betts and Freeman under contract — a team that over its six previous full seasons won at least 100 games five times — to turn over more than half its roster and add nearly a dozen impact players registered as baseball gluttony.

A day after Sasaki’s signing, Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts told 670 AM in Chicago that “it’s really hard to compete” with the Dodgers. Ricketts bought the Cubs for $845 million in 2009. They are worth around $5 billion now, according to a person who values professional sports franchises. The Cubs, according to Forbes, have the third-highest revenue in MLB, behind the Yankees and Dodgers. They are the epitome of a big-market, high-earning franchise. Ricketts said the Cubs attempt to break even every year. Forbes estimates they have earned more than $585 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization over the past decade in addition to the more than $4 billion appreciation of the team.

At the time, the Cubs were attempting to sign Scott, among the most coveted relievers this winter. The next day, with a final offer of four years and $66 million — $6 million shy of where the Dodgers landed — they lost. The $18 million-a-year salary Scott received fell in line with those of other elite closers.

This is not a chicken-and-egg situation. Teams like the Cubs and Boston Red Sox — should-be powerhouses — earn reputations quickly among players by not spending. When franchises show they care about winning, players take note. The flocking of talented players to the Dodgers is not a function of a willingness to overpay. The vast majority of the long-term deals handed out by the Dodgers are market price or club-friendly. Betts’, Freeman’s, Smith’s. Ohtani’s deal — with $68 million of his annual $70 million salary deferred for a decade — was proposed by him to the Dodgers as well as to the other teams that pursued him: Toronto, San Francisco and the Los Angeles Angels.

While the Dodgers are among the rare teams that can carry three $300 million-plus deals (and four other nine-figure pacts on top of that) without bleeding money, they also thrive in the middle market. They took advantage of Ricketts’ unwillingness to push — he has limited the Cubs’ budget this winter, even after trading for Kyle Tucker — and won the bidding for Scott. Any team could have pursued Hernández, whose deal this winter was at market value. Every team passed on signing Snell to a long-term deal in the 2023-24 offseason. Edman was widely available at the trade deadline.

Every MLB club, even those with the lowest revenues, can compete for that sort of talent. So many operate with unbending devotion to their computer models, though, that the simple act of spending has become an even greater advantage for the Dodgers. With a history of teams on limited budgets annually performing among the best in the game, those franchises could fare even better stretching themselves financially and investing in winning, at the very least proportionally to those who devote a higher percentage of revenue to payroll. The Dodgers’ willingness to spend in grand sums and success with it should motivate other teams to keep up, not preclude them from doing so.

THREE DECADES AFTER the longest work stoppage in MLB history, the inequity baked into the game’s financial system remains. MLB’s pursuit of a salary cap in 1994 led to the cancellation of the World Series that year. The rekindling of a cap conversation has already begun — particularly by owners peeved by the Dodgers’ spending and the sheer size of Juan Soto‘s 15-year, $765 million, no-deferred-money deal with the New York Mets. Proposing a cap in next year’s CBA negotiations would be tantamount to a declaration of war by MLB — and already those owners are prepared for commissioner Rob Manfred to lock the players out Dec. 1, 2026.

It’s clear, by now, that the punitive elements the most recent collective bargaining agreement put in place — the luxury tax, the qualifying offer system, draft-pick punishment — are anti-spending measures that just don’t apply to some. The Mets have spent exceptional amounts of money and been OK. The Dodgers clearly see money as a competitive advantage they’re willing to flaunt. There is room to incentivize other teams to spend without having to institute a cap and a floor.

For now, though, this is the game. These are the rules. Players overwhelmingly supported the collective bargaining agreement that governs baseball. Owners voted unanimously in favor of it.

The Dodgers are the symptom, not the cause.

Players will point out that a cap is not a panacea. Without one, baseball has found parity on par with or better than capped leagues. In the past quarter-century, the team with the largest payroll in baseball has won the World Series just four times. Over the past 15 years, it’s just twice. No team has captured back-to-back championships since the Yankees won three straight 1998-2000. MLB’s postseason this year featured teams from Kansas City, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore and San Diego. Perhaps most important: The randomness of baseball’s postseason typically serves as an equalizer, keeping even the most talented teams from their most dynastic aspirations.

As the Dodgers exceed the base luxury tax threshold of $241 million by more than 50%, it’s worth remembering that baseball has seen financial disparity like this before. There’s little solace to take in that this year, though, because the team the Dodgers have put together is genuinely great, extraordinarily deep, and prepared to weather injury, ineffectiveness and the other vagaries that would torpedo opponents’ seasons.

For all of the Dodgers’ advantages, it’s worth acknowledging the most overblown element of their approach. The deep misunderstanding of deferred money has painted it as a tool to avoid paying salaries for long periods of time and lessen a team’s luxury tax payroll. Neither of these is true.

Within two years of agreeing to a contract with deferred money, teams must place cash to cover future payments in an account and show statements annually to the league, according to the collective bargaining agreement. Deferrals are regarded by MLB the same way any business in any industry would: accounting for the time value of money. A dollar tomorrow is not worth as much as a dollar today. And a dollar 10 years down the road is worth much less than it is today. While Ohtani’s contract will ultimately pay him $70 million a year, its present-day worth is closer to the $46 million he counts against the luxury tax. This is not a loophole. It’s math. So is the fact that what they pay under luxury tax accounting — which uses the average annual value of a contract — exceeds the cash they’ll spend on payroll this year. The reality: They’re paying more in luxury tax this year.

An actual loophole does exist in the California tax system, incentivizing players who don’t live in the state to defer money and secure large signing bonuses, both of which allow them to skirt state taxes. This is nothing new for professional athletes across sports. Teams in Texas and Florida have been using a lack of state taxes to their advantage for decades. It’s not a particularly significant advantage — except for Ohtani, who California lawmakers said could avoid around $90 million in state taxes as they pursue legislation to fix the law.

What’s undeniable — and undeniably frustrating to fans and owners alike — is that despite the inflated dollar figure, Ohtani’s contract is the team-friendliest free agent deal in baseball history. Between his production and the revenue he helps the Dodgers generate, he is worth well over $100 million annually, not $46 million. And once the Dodgers were able to secure his services for the next decade, the franchise could still turn around and spend more than a billion dollars however it saw fit, perfectly content to pay the luxury tax.

Under McCourt’s ownership, the Dodgers were directionless underachievers. They became a fury-inducing juggernaut when they sought to maximize themselves, and that is the ultimate endgame of the stress test: Have they mastered this system to the point that it must be overhauled?

As the 2025 season unfolds and attempts to answer that question, they will wear the boos and the chirping and all of the nastiness in opposing ballparks. But this is not their fight. It is the commissioner’s and the owners’ and the union’s. Those stakeholders need to find an answer that isn’t just kicking the can down the road for five years but actually, actively changing baseball’s economic structure so players continue to make what they’re worth and fans see a tolerably fair system.

The greatest drug of sports fandom is belief, and right now, belief in baseball is waning. October has always been the great equalizer, a time when hot teams regularly beat more talented teams. If that happens to the Dodgers in 2025, the schadenfreude will be strong enough to part the Red Sea. Should the Dodgers become repeat champions, though, the chorus will grow louder and the distrust deeper. The stress test has arrived, and for all of the game’s resiliency, baseball’s future depends on its ability to navigate a situation of its own making.