L.A. Story

We’ll start today with a new weekly series I’m trying over at the JoeBlogs YouTube Channel called “JoeBlogs Stories,” where I will, you know, tell stories. As I’ve been teasing over the last little while, there are some big, and I think exciting, changes coming to JoeBlogs over the next little while. I’ll tell you a lot more next week, but the big idea here is to make JoeBlogs bigger and better and even more fun.

In the video, where I talk about Magic Johnson and my first day in sports writing, you might catch a glimpse of the new JoeBlogs logo!

Fun, right? Or if you prefer the Cleveland Browns version of it:

Or a Kansas City Chiefs version?

Buffalo Bills?

Guess who’s trying to learn basic Adobe Illustrator!

I suppose we should probably use a Los Angeles Dodgers version, since they’re today’s topic.

I’ll be interested to see who is the first person in the comments to see what I did there.

Anyway, so much fun stuff coming. And if I do it right—please, please, please let me do it right—it should be a seamless thing for you. Of course, I’d love it if you subscribe to the YouTube Channel and, as always, it would be great if you want to subscribe to JoeBlogs and join our awesome community.

A little PosCast update—as I type these words, we’ve raised almost $22,000 already for the amazing folks at TeamGleason simply by opening up baseball cards. None of us know exactly how this keeps working except that you are an incredibly giving audience, and you apparently get a kick out of seeing Mike and I open up baseball cards. Thank you! And keep on giving! 

Remember, if you donate any amount—we’re suggesting $25 but every dollar helps!—you’ll be entered into our PosCast giveaway, where we’ll be giving away all sorts of amazing prizes, including a bunch of incredible things that PosCast listeners are donating. I’ll put together a list in the next couple of weeks!

Also, we’re now recording VIDEO of the PosCast. Here we are on the YouTube Channel, if you just so happen to have an hour and 26 minutes to spare and want to watch two guys open baseball cards. And yes, I’m wearing a Montreal Canadiens jersey. That’s a LONG story that I’ll have to tell later.

Here, for posterity, is a look at the moves the Los Angeles Dodgers have made this offseason:

• Nov. 30, they signed two-time Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell to a 5-year, $182 million deal. After Snell returned from injury on July 9 last year, he made 14 starts, the Giants won 12 of them, he pitched 80 innings, struck out 114, and he hit the 1-2-3 lotto by having a 1.23 ERA AND holding hitters to a .123 batting average.

• Dec. 10, they re-signed reliever Blake Treinen to a 2-year, $22 million deal. Treinen, who missed all of 2023 but was 7-3 with a 1.93 ERA in 46 innings in 2024, was utterly key in the Dodgers’ raucous postseason—he pitched NINE times in the Dodgers’ run to the World Series hunk of metal.

• Dec. 10, they signed Michael Conforto to a 1-year, $17 million deal. Conforto hit .237 with 20 home runs last year and that doesn’t sound like much, but that’s all a bit deceiving because he played for the Giants. That means he played half his games in the hitter’s deathtrap that is Oracle Park. Conforto hit SEVENTEEN of his 20 home runs away from home, and he hit two doubles, a triple and a home run at Dodger Stadium. He slugged .530 away from San Francisco and absolutely pounded lefties all year, and you can see the Dodgers getting a steal here.

• Jan. 3, they re-signed Teoscar Hernández on a 3-year, $66 million deal. Teoscar not only mashed 32 doubles and 33 home runs for the Dodgers last year, he also was Shohei Ohtani’s best friend.

• Jan. 4, they signed Korean infielder Hyeseong Kim—not to be confused with free agent Ha-Seong Kim, who hasn’t yet signed with the Dodgers—to a 3-year, $22 million deal. The Dodgers’ Kim hit .326 in the KBO last year and stole 30 bases. He turns 26 in a few days.

• Jan. 19, they signed left-handed reliever Tanner Scott to a 4-year, $72 million deal. Scott had a fantastic season in 2024, going 9-6 with a 1.75 ERA and 22 saves in 72 innings. Scott throws in the upper-90s, and last year gave up the lowest average exit velocity in all of baseball. BUT everybody seems pretty sure the Dodgers only made this move because Scott OWNS Shohei Ohtani—they faced each other in the postseason four times and Scott struck out Shohei all four times. The Dodgers are now making preemptive moves, kind of like Alabama used to recruit all of these superstar high school players as backups just so they wouldn’t play for LSU or Georgia.

• Jan. 20, they signed Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki. I don’t know what there is to say about Sasaki that Mookie Betts didn’t already say: “I think that everyone believes he can definitely be the best pitcher on the planet.”

• Jan. 22, they reportedly signed reliever Kirby Yates. I guess this one hasn’t been officially announced yet, but it seems to be true—Yates will turn 38 years old just after Opening Day, and he’s coming off what is probably the best year of his career—he had a 1.17 ERA in 62 innings, struck out 85, had an 0.827 WHIP and saved 33 games. The Dodgers apparently made this move because Michael Kopech won’t be healthy at the start of the season, which is a bit like buying a new Lamborghini because your Corvette is going to be in the shop.

OK, let’s start with this: No team in baseball history, not Steinbrenner’s Yankees not Cohen’s Mets, not anybody, has ever purchased as much talent as these Los Angeles Dodgers have over the last five years. It is utterly mind-blowing.

It isn’t just the money they’ve spent—though people will talk about the money, obviously; their payroll could top $400 million—it’s the surgical way they’ve spent it. There are zero “name” signings here. A Name Signing is when a team brings in a name player as much for effect as to improve the ballclub. They want to get the fan base excited. They want to make the owner happy. They want to add some star power. Sometimes, the Name player is in his prime; often he’s not. Sometimes Name Signings work; often they don’t.

The Angels, for a time, were the kings of name signings—Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton and Anthony Rendon and the like. None of them worked. The Padres went bananas with name signings as they tried to get Peter Seidler a World Series before he died.

Juan Soto is a Name Signing.

None of these Dodgers players are like that. They all make absolute perfect sense for a team trying to build a dynasty. The Dodgers have been the best team in baseball for a decade now, and everybody knows they have only two World Series titles to show for it—one of those famously in the COVID year—and they’re desperately trying to take fate and randomness out of a baseball playoff system that is famously fateful and random.

Pitchers get hurt? Well, what if you pile up SO MANY GREAT PITCHERS that you take injuries out of the equation? The Dodgers’ rotation for 2025 right now looks like so:

1. Blake Snell

2. Yoshinobu Yamamoto

3. Roki Sasaki

4. Tyler Glasnow

5. Tony Gonsolin

6. Dustin May

7. Clayton Kershaw (assuming he signs and gets healthy)

8. Shohei Ohtani (after he gets healthy)

9. Landon Knack (looked all right in 2024)

10. Bobby Miller (who looked promising in 2023)

11. Ben Casparius (who pitched well enough as a rookie to be a postseason key)

12. Emmet Sheehan (missed 2024 with Tommy John but should return and looked pretty good at the end of 2023).

So, yeah, eventually the Dodgers should have a 12-man rotation. But they’ll need that because their bullpen is thin… oh, wait, yeah, their bullpen isn’t thin at all, it’s the best bullpen in baseball, with Yates, Scott, Treinen, Kopech, Alex Vesia, Evan Phillips, and maybe even a healthy Brusdar Graterol if he makes it back from shoulder surgery in the second half…

I mean, where do you turn to get some comfortable at-bats?

And we haven’t even started talking about the Shohei-Mookie-Freddie-Muncy-Teoscar-Will Smith lineup…

Yes, the Dodgers are trying to take luck out of the equation. They’re trying to build a team so foolproof that nothing can stand in their way. I’m not sure that’s actually possible. Baseball is a game of skill, yes, but it’s also a game of chance, particularly in short series—a “crapshoot” as Billy Beane famously called the playoffs—and the Dodgers could lose a short series because of a couple untimely errors or because Snell just doesn’t have it on the big day or because Bryson Stott turns into Rogers Hornsby for a weekend. You never know.

But they’re sure looking pretty invincible.

Brilliant Reader Scott sent in an interesting question: Are the Dodgers good or bad for baseball? That is to say: Is baseball better off with a superhero/supervillain for everyone to admire/loathe/root for/root against?

I like it when there are superteams in sports, at least for a little while. I think the Chiefs are great for professional football because they offer a target, a powerhouse you have to beat to become the best. Will the Bills finally overcome the Chiefs this weekend? Will Patrick Mahomes endure? This is riveting stuff. The Chiefs give professional football an order, much in the way that Belichick/Brady’s Patriots did, and the Jimmy Johnson Cowboys before that, and the Chuck Noll Steelers before that and the Lombardi Packers before that. They give the sport an order.

The Dodgers give baseball an order. The 2025 season is very clearly about whether the Dodgers win it all again or somebody can knock them out. I like a clear storyline.

Of course, if the dominance goes on too long… that’s not good. You don’t want what happened with the Yankees in the 1950s. It’s funny that people will sometimes call that time baseball’s “Golden Age.” It was hardly that. The Yankees were so good then, and there was so little hope just about everywhere else, that attendance plummeted, a bunch of teams moved to find an audience, and there was a Broadway show called “Damn Yankees.”

If Lin-Manuel Miranda writes a musical called “Effin’ Dodgers,” we’ll know it’s gone too far. For now, I think, it’s pretty fascinating.