Fresh of winning the 2024 World Series championship, the Los Angeles Dodgers seemed to only get stronger this past offseason.
After piecing together their starting rotation through much of their postseason run, the Dodgers took big swings in free agency, inking two-time Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell to a five-year,$180 million deal and bringing in Japanese superstar Roki Sasaki. The bullpen also looked to be improved with the signings of left-hander Tanner Scott (1.75 ERA in 2024) and Kirby Yates (1.17 ERA), and the club re-signed slugger Teoscar Hernández and postseason hero Tommy Edman to their potent offense while adding outfielder Michael Conforto.
Sixty games into the 2025 season, however, and it’s hard to declare any of these signings a success. The oft-injured Snell made just two starts before landing on the injured list with a shoulder injury, and Sasaki and Yates later joined him after disappointing early-season performances. Scott, meanwhile, has remained healthy but has seen his ERA balloon to 4.55 and blowing five saves in his first 26 appearances. And while Hernández has been his usual productive self aside from a brief stint on the injured list, Edman has posted a .584 OPS since April 19, and Conforto has been a disaster all season long.
It’s rare to see a team as well-run as the Dodgers whiff on so many marquee additions, which is why Kerry Miller declared them the “biggest losers” of the offseason.
No one is going to shed a tear for the reigning World Series champions, who are sitting 13 games above .500 with a total payroll (including their aforementioned $156 million tax bill) of $562 million that more than exceeds the combined $494.5 million payroll of the five stingiest teams: the Pirates, Athletics, Rays, White Sox and Marlins,” Miller wrote. “But, man, their big offseason moves have not gone according to plan.”
To be fair to the Dodgers, some of their minor moves, like the signing of Korean Baseball Organization star Hyesong Kim, have paid early dividends, and the performance of superstars Shohei Ohtani, Freddie Freeman, Will Smith and Yoshinobu Yamamoto have kept them atop the National League West. Yet if the Dodgers want to hold off the San Diego Padres and compete with the juggernaut New York Mets, Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago Cubs, they will need to get far more production from their collection of imported stars.
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