THE LOS ANGELES DODGERS were supposed to break baseball. Instead, they just broke.
It’s easy to forget how terrifying the Dodgers looked when Major League Baseball’s 2025 season began six months ago, before the injuries that led to a major league-high 2,500-plus days missed by hurt players. Returning all their key contributors, the defending World Series champions had emerged from free agency with the best starter on the market, the best reliever on the market and the best pitching prospect in the world. They were not just destined for greatness; they were bound to be an all-time juggernaut, top to bottom, eons beyond any of their competitors.
Even the computers, by their nature conservative, bought it. The most well-known of the game’s projection systems, Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA, pegged the 2025 Dodgers for 104 wins. It wasn’t 117, even if the number to set the game’s single-season record seemed within reach, but it was nevertheless telling. Not since 2004 had PECOTA forecast a season win total so gaudy.
A season expected to be a coronation of the Dodgers has turned into something different altogether: a crapshoot. For the second consecutive year, only two teams in MLB won 95 or more games — and the Dodgers weren’t even one of them. And while a 90-plus win season culminating in a division title would be a successful year for most teams, it was far short of L.A.’s lofty preseason expectations. After starting the year with eight consecutive wins, they spent much of 2025 trying to find the best version of themselves and failing. More than $70 million of their record $500 million-plus payroll went to players during time spent on the injured list.
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The Dodgers spent more on those who weren’t playing than Miami did on its entire payroll — and finished only 14 games ahead of the Marlins. It was a stark reminder that for all the offseason consternation over payroll disparity and all the fears of a new superteam that would bring back the dynasty to a sport that hasn’t even seen a back-to-back champion in a quarter-century, baseball in 2025 offered far more individual excellence than it did team dominance.
And there the Dodgers did shine, with another MVP performance from Shohei Ohtani, a grand leap from Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a career year from Will Smith and a breakout from Emmet Sheehan. Yet they finished with a 93-69 record — five games worse than last year and eight behind their 2022 squad. This year, at least, the whole was less than the sum of its parts.
The Dodgers weren’t the only superteam to fail to launch: The New York Mets, after doling out a record $765 million to Juan Soto last winter, went on a 3½-month-long crash out that ended with the disgrace of an October spent at home. This season’s parity opens the door for the possibility of a wild month ahead. With a chaotic finish to the regular season and without a clear team to beat, the 2025 postseason is a blank canvas, primed for a team to deliver its masterwork. From the upstart Cleveland Guardians, seeking their franchise’s first title since 1948, to a Dodgers team still teeming with talent, anyone can win a championship.
This year’s balance does not eradicate the possibility of other superteams emerging in the coming years. Two consecutive seasons of the sport’s standings flattening out, though, does raise questions about whether there is some signal amid the noise.
Executives aren’t ready to kill the superteam just yet. Among the half-dozen high-ranking front-office personnel queried by ESPN, however, some version of the same question kept emerging: If the relationship between regular-season success and postseason success is statistically insignificant, what’s the point in even building a superteam?
PLENTY OF TEAMS used to be dumb. Some of the game’s best executives miss the days of large-market rosters bloated with production that doesn’t match salary. Today, for all but the richest teams, profligate spending is passé, particularly in an era when analytical models guide so many clubs’ contract offers. Because of the streamlined decision-making, one executive said, the capacity for a handful of teams to corner the market on the best talent is limited.
The lack of incentive to keep spending beyond the minimum it takes to build a playoff team doesn’t end there. Twelve of 30 teams make MLB’s expanded postseason. That’s a full 40% of the league. And while this year is something of an outlier, the fact that an 83-win Reds team is representing the National League — and by Wednesday will have had the opportunity to oust the Dodgers from the postseason altogether — is perhaps the best illustration possible of why simply getting to the playoffs matters more than anything.
Beating the Dodgers in a three-games series is by no means easy, but the Washington Nationals have done it this year. So have the Los Angeles Angels, twice — six games, six wins. The Pittsburgh Pirates swept a three-game series with the Dodgers. And from May 23-25, the Mets themselves — back when they were actually good — dispatched Los Angeles. The Dodgers’ season is littered with losses unbecoming of what they were supposed to be.
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The random nature of baseball’s postseason leaves every team, even the super versions, vulnerable. And only more so with every new format adding more teams to the mix. Since the playoffs expanded to include a wild card in 1995, the team with MLB’s best regular-season record has won the World Series eight times and lost in the division series 13 times.
Executives, particularly ones with frugal owners, see this as an opportunity. They don’t have to build a superteam; only a group good enough to reach the postseason. Owners almost always appreciate the more-with-less ethos espoused by so many — including big-market teams like the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. Even if they spend two to three times as much as lower-revenue teams, their austerity relative to what they’re capable of spending better reflects the reality they face.
Almost every front office, in every market, uses the same data and interprets it through only slightly different methods. Multiple executives pointed to this sort of groupthink as the likeliest reason the 2025 season landed in a fairly narrow band of win totals, despite payroll disparity that’s near its highest levels in the game’s history. To complement the two teams with 95-plus wins, only three finished with fewer than 70 wins. Certainly the Reds and Houston Astros and Texas Rangers would have stood to benefit from a few extra million dollars spent if that meant a postseason spot. Tens of millions, though? Or $100 million?
“At that point,” one baseball operations staffer with a successful small-market team said, “it’s the law of diminishing returns. I don’t care if we win 85 games or 105 as long as we get our ticket to the dance. If we can win and operate with some sense of financial restraint, we’re killing two birds with one stone.”
THE BEST TEAM in MLB this year plays in the game’s smallest market. Its payroll of around $115 million ranks 23rd of 30 teams. A second baseman with an OPS below .800 has been its best player. Not a single one of its everyday players, who combined to score the third-most runs in MLB, made the All-Star team.
“There’s nothing super about us,” said an executive with the Milwaukee Brewers, and he’s right. They’re just excellent at recognizing the limitations of their situation — owner Mark Attanasio has never spent in any sort of significant manner in free agency — and adapting to overcome them.
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The Brewers can’t drop $765 million on Juan Soto; Milwaukee’s combined payrolls for the past seven years total less ($759 million). In the absence of the ability to spend, they’ve deployed resources to other areas: bulking up a Latin American operation that ranks among the five best in the game; prioritizing player development to continue the pipeline of Brewers farmhands who become excellent big leaguers; and identifying trade targets who are either underperforming or capable of unlocking plenty more with a few tweaks.
It all added up to a Brewers season that didn’t include a losing streak longer than three games since April, practically unheard of in this era. Detroit, for example, had the best record in the AL at the end of April, May, June, July and August. On July 9, the Tigers were 59-34, a 103-win pace. They proceeded to lose six straight, win one, then lose six more, including a sweep at Pittsburgh. Detroit is 28-42 since the first six-pack of losses, blew a double-digit AL Central lead and scrounged to make October a reality.
Teams lost five or more games in a row 93 times this year, tied with 2004 for the most ever in a big league season. Superteams, as a general rule, do not so profoundly founder. The 2018 Red Sox’s longest skid was three games. The 1998 Yankees dropped four in a row once. The Brewers are the only playoff team this year that limited their longest skid to four games, and that sort of consistency is hard to come by with any team, super or not.
Milwaukee still doesn’t cut the figure of a team barreling toward its first championship in more than a half-century of existence. The Brewers are still regarded as inferior to the Dodgers — by pundits and the oddsmakers — despite finishing four games above them in the standings because superteam potential is impossible to quit.
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The disappointment in the Dodgers this year stems from expectations and how they’ve played compared to the organization’s past incarnations, not their peers today. If the superteam blooms late — if the right version of the Dodgers shows up in October — no team is beating them. They’ve got Ohtani back at full strength at the plate and on the mound, and they complement him with Yamamoto, Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow on the pitching side and Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman on offense. They are experienced, well-prepared and deep. Yes, the Dodgers’ bullpen is a mess, but they’ve got so many live arms it could quite easily grow into a strength.
Standing in their way, for now, are the Reds. After that it’s the Phillies, with Games 1 and 2 at the house of horrors that is Citizens Bank Park. And should the Dodgers survive that, a rematch of the 2018 NLCS with Milwaukee that stretched to a seventh game could be in the cards.
Thing is, it could also be the Padres or Cubs, each of whom is plenty capable of a deep run, or the Mariners or Yankees or Blue Jays or Guardians or Red Sox or Tigers, because, yes, the AL does exist, and even if it’s inferior as a whole, baseball is not the sort of sport that discriminates against champions of lesser pedigree. The World Series two years ago featured a No. 5 seed vs. a No. 6 seed. The 2021 World Series champion Atlanta Braves had the fewest wins of any playoff team that season. The 2019 Washington Nationals needed to win a one-game wild card before their championship blitz. Modern baseball history is littered with less-talented teams that got hot at the right time.
Superteams are entertaining, sure, but they are a guarantee of nothing. And, for now, they’re showing no signs of a permanent return in baseball. There are super players everywhere in the playoffs — Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Cal Raleigh, Kyle Schwarber, Tarik Skubal, Garrett Crochet — but cobbling together a dominant roster with bat after bat, arm after arm, is that much more difficult when valuation methods are so similar.
In this year’s field, every team comes with warts — and, funny enough, they’re what make the 2025 postseason so attractive. Watching teams in real time excise their ugliness is captivating, and as much as having a superteam in the field would provide an instant villain, sure, the postseason doesn’t need anything manufactured. Its organic self is plenty compelling.
