If the Los Angeles Dodgers were a pit full of intimidating sharks last season, then, to borrow from Dr. Evil, they just got friggin’ laser beams attached to their friggin’ heads.
The defending World Series champions signed star pitcher Trevor Bauer to a three-year, $102 million contract in mid-February, cementing their status as unquestionably the deepest and most talented team in MLB. A quick rundown of their roster will leave you shaking your head in disbelief: a pitching staff anchored by Bauer, young ace Walker Buehler, and veteran Clayton Kershaw and a murderers’ row of a lineup led by former MVPs Cody Bellinger and Mookie Betts, to say nothing of last year’s breakout star, World Series MVP Corey Seager.
PECOTA, which sounds like a guerilla offshoot of PETA but is actually a sabermetric system that predicts baseball performance, anticipates the Dodgers to win 102.9 games this season. That is by far the best preseason projection in the algorithm’s nearly 20 years of existence, and it highlights just how potent the team’s concoction of talent really is.
Despite an admirable attempt to catch up in the arms race by their NL West rival, the San Diego Padres, everyone knows the World Series runs through Chavez Ravine. Perhaps the hardest problem Dodgers fans will face this year is deciding the color of the “NL West Champs” shirt they’ll inevitably buy in September.
We all assume the Dodgers will be standing at the top of the National League mountain at the end of the season. And while you may not think so now, that’s actually a great thing for baseball.
It’s been a while since we’ve had an MLB superteam to root against, and it sure isn’t going to be the New York Yankees again any time soon. Nothing unites fan bases and implores people to tune in more than cheering for David to slay Goliath, even if the Dodgers might catch David’s rock and have Dustin May hum it back at his head at 100 mph. We despised the Yankees when they were at their zenith, and we sneered in disgust at the Dodgers’ California counterparts, the Golden State Warriors, when they boasted basketball’s most insane roster for a few years. Those teams gave their sports an edge that drove fan engagement and created media narratives that we parsed over long after their respective seasons were over. With baseball’s World Series ratings last year hitting the lowest in the sport’s history, what better way to inch back up than to feature a team without a flaw whose only battle is with itself?
Baseball needs a villain. Even if you think you know the outcome before the season begins, it’s simply fun to cheer against the loaded superteam whose victory seems to be a foregone conclusion. Every pitch becomes that much more important when you’re hoping to see the fatal flaw exposed or looking to witness the historic upset that shatters the dreams of the guys everyone expected to succeed. It could even be your team that takes them down.
The Dodgers will bring out baseball’s collective id, driving our emotional impulse to hate and covet that which we cannot have ourselves. This is especially true after the signing of Bauer, who might be the most notorious Twitter troll in the league. He’s exactly the heel the Dodgers needed to force the rest of the league to turn up their noses, which will feed into the frenzy of hatred over the course of the season.
Can the Dodgers handle the pressure? What will Bauer say next? Will the tension of potential greatness break their backs or burnish their championship pedigree?
These preseason questions leave us with only more questions to be answered, and that’s why it’s actually to baseball’s benefit that a team that didn’t need any more standout players signed one of the most sought-after free agent pitchers to codify its top-tier rotation.
Sometimes, sports can induce complicated emotional responses in those of us who watch them. Sometimes, that emotion is pretty simple. And in 2021, the Dodgers will provoke the simplest response of all: hating a great team until it’s dethroned. Most sports fans don’t appreciate the history in front of us until long after it’s over, at which point we will all tell our grandchildren that the team we hated all along was actually the greatest we ever saw.
The Dodgers have created one of the best on-paper rosters baseball has ever seen.
That’s a good thing for baseball, even if they don’t live up to it.
Cory Gunkel is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C. Follow him on Twitter @CoryGunkel.
