Stop blaming the Dodgers. They’re not ruining baseball. The people ruining baseball are the owners who sit on piles of cash, collect revenue sharing checks, and refuse to spend a damn dime on their own teams. The Marlins, the Pirates, and now the Tigers are the real problem. They don’t try. They don’t invest. They just exist to collect free money from the league and then act like victims when other teams actually spend to win.

MLB made around 12.1 billion dollars in revenue in 2024. The game is thriving. The money is there for everyone. So when teams are cutting payrolls or refusing to extend their stars, that’s not a market problem. That’s an ownership choice. If revenue is up and your team’s product is garbage, blame the owner who would rather pocket profits than pay players. The Dodgers are at the top of the payroll charts because they actually spend. Their 2025 payroll is somewhere between 300 and 400 million dollars depending on how you calculate deferred payments and benefits. The league average payroll sits around 175 million. That’s not the Dodgers’ fault. That’s them playing to win.

Then you look at the bottom. The Miami Marlins are rolling into 2025 with a payroll around 66 million dollars. That’s embarrassing for a major league franchise. The Pittsburgh Pirates are sitting somewhere between 50 and 62 million depending on what source you look at. Those numbers are a joke. These owners aren’t broke. They’re billionaires who choose not to spend because they’d rather keep the money. Every owner in the league could easily afford to be competitive if they wanted to be. The small market excuse is dead. This is not about city size. This is about ambition.

Now you have the Tigers. Tarik Skubal was arguably the best pitcher in baseball this year. He was dominant. He had elite ERA numbers, top of the league in strikeouts, and one of the highest WARs among pitchers. And now Detroit might actually let him walk because they’re reportedly 250 million dollars apart in contract talks. Two hundred fifty million. That’s not a small disagreement. That’s ownership telling their fans winning doesn’t matter. Skubal is a homegrown ace and they won’t even pay him what he’s worth. And you just know what will happen next. The Dodgers will swoop in, give him the contract he deserves, and everyone will whine about how the Dodgers buy talent. What are they supposed to do? Offer less money so another team can get him? Come on. They’re playing by the rules. They’re supposed to make their team better. That’s literally the job.

The Dodgers are smart about it too. Look at Shohei Ohtani’s 10 year 700 million dollar deal. It sounds insane until you realize most of that money is deferred. The Dodgers pay him a fraction now and the rest later, which makes their competitive balance tax number much lower. It’s completely legal and completely strategic. They’re using the rules as written. If you don’t like it, change the rules. But don’t act like they’re cheating for being smarter than everyone else.

Meanwhile, teams at the bottom are cashing free checks. The MLB revenue sharing system is supposed to make things fair. Big market teams pay in, smaller market teams get help. But it doesn’t work because nobody enforces anything. Teams are required to spend at least 150 percent of the revenue sharing money they receive on payroll, but there are so many loopholes it means nothing. They move money around, count things differently, and never face consequences. That’s how teams like Miami and Pittsburgh can take those checks and still run 60 million dollar payrolls. They’re not trying to win. They’re running a business, not a baseball team.

The league even started handing out extra money to teams that lost their TV deals. Up to 75 million dollars total and some teams got as much as 15 million each. That was supposed to keep them stable, but all it did was reward bad management. The league is raking in record revenue, yet the same owners cry poverty every year. They don’t care about fans or players. They care about their profit margins.

Now there’s talk of another lockout because owners are already complaining about needing a salary cap. Jeff Passan wrote about how the Dodgers being dominant might trigger that argument. But a salary cap doesn’t fix the problem. It just protects the teams that don’t want to spend. MLB already has a competitive balance tax at 241 million in 2025. That’s a soft cap. The Dodgers go over it and pay the tax because they want to win. A hard cap would just let every cheap owner hide behind a fake excuse for being bad. It would hurt players and protect the same guys who refuse to open their wallets.

The league doesn’t need a cap. It needs a floor. Make every team spend a minimum percentage of their revenue on payroll. If they take revenue sharing money and don’t spend it, take the checks away. Audit them. Punish them. Make them show where the money goes. The solution isn’t to handcuff the teams that try. It’s to expose the ones that don’t.

The Dodgers aren’t the problem. They’re the standard. They’re using the system the way it’s written. They’re not breaking rules. They’re following them better than everyone else. If that bothers you, fix the system. But until that happens, the real villains in baseball are the owners who refuse to compete. Tarik Skubal’s situation shows it. The Marlins and Pirates payrolls show it. MLB’s 12.1 billion in revenue shows it. The game doesn’t need to punish teams for spending. It needs to force the lazy ones to care.

The Dodgers aren’t ruining baseball. The teams that don’t spend a dime while cashing checks are. That’s where the blame belongs.