Dodgers vs Marlins proves that money doesn't necessarily guarantee victory

I dug into the salaries or payroll of MLB teams in the recent past and was stunned to find out the absolutely massive payrolls that some teams have and how some other teams spend just a fraction of what other teams do. As you would expect, the teams with the massive expenditures on their players tend to be the better teams, this is basically guaranteed. But what you don't expect to see is the sort of thing that we witnessed earlier this week where the LA Dodgers lost 2 out of 3 games vs a team that has such a small payroll that one would presume that these games would simply be a total blowout.

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There's a lot of people that will say excuses such as "the teams don't really give it their all until the later season" or "Miami tries harder than they normally would because they are playing against the reigning World Series champions" but let's be real here guys: The difference in payroll between these two teams in particular are absolutely absurd.

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I definitely don’t expect anyone to read all of that but just pay attention to the top and the bottom entries. LA is the most expensive team in MLB and Miami is the cheapest. Things get even more scary for the Dodgers when we dig further and see how they have deferred some of their salaries for future years in order to dodge as much of the luxury tax as possible. They are referred to as a number of things including “commitments” and the Dodgers have around $300 million over the next three years and a lot of this is just estimated and can of course grow larger over time. For the next three years Miami has $5 million deferred until next year and then ZERO for the next two years after that.

I dug into the numbers even more and discovered that Shohei Ohtani, a single player for the Dodgers, gets paid roughly $127 million for just this season and this is nearly double the salary of the ENTIRE Miami Marlins roster.

So when people start making all the excuses about how LA isn't trying as hard and they can or Miami is giving it their all I have to call BS on that. If you are spending 6 times the amount of money as the team you are playing against, you really shouldn't have to try all that hard in order to defeat them. The fact that Miami didn't get absolutely trounced in every single one of these games says a lot about how baseball, unlike a lot of other team sports, can't really be bought completely.

I don't generally watch entire baseball games but I did for a couple of these and I was just kind of awestruck about how the David vs Goliath situation was playing out with Miami winning twice and even when they lost the first one I was thinking "LA should be beating them a lot more than this!"

I would imagine that this gave Miami a much needed boost to their fans and players because you just defeated the most expensive team in baseball and one of the most expensive teams in any sport, with 1/6 of their budget.

Miami has no hopes of winning the league and would probably be pleased as punch to make the playoffs, which for them is probably pretty unlikely especially if they have any injuries in the season. They do not have the talent depth that LA does (obviously) and if a couple key players throw their arms out, they have no backups.

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There are certain rather whack things in baseball that will draw my attention and one of them is the above guy whose name is Jansen Junk. Tell me you are not going to follow someone with such an awesome name. My buddy was telling me that "he must not throw junk, he's in the majors!" But now I am following this guy. Jansen Junk gets paid 1.25 million dollars in his current contract, which is 1/100 of what Ohtani gets paid. One of these two players got a win this week though and it wasn't the guy getting paid 100x the salary!

LA is probably going to go far in the playoffs, which are still a long ways away from now. We have about 100 games to go until then. I will be watching Miami though out of the corner of my eye because it would be truly amazing if a team with the lowest salaries in the entire MLB were to do the impossible.