LOS ANGELES — “What’s wrong with being the bad guy?”
That rhetorical question is asked by actor Jason Bateman before every Dodgers home game in the team’s Opening Day hype video. It played again Thursday night before the Dodgers defeated the Seattle Mariners, 6-2, at Dodger Stadium, improving to an MLB-best 69-40 and extending their lead in the NL West to 12 games.
The video embraces the Dodgers’ new identity as baseball’s villain.
“If being the best makes you bad, then so be it,” Bateman says over highlights from last October’s World Series celebration. “They want to beat us because they want to be us. But if we’re being honest, sometimes it’s fun to root for the bad guy.”
The Dodgers leaned into that role all offseason. The back-to-back World Series champions signed four-time All-Star outfielder Kyle Tucker, the premier free agent on the market, to a four-year, $240 million contract. They also added three-time and reigning Reliever of the Year Edwin Díaz on a three-year, $69 million deal.
It wasn’t simply the rich getting richer. It was like Elon Musk winning the Powerball. It felt almost unfair.
Now the Dodgers are heavily favored to land Tarik Skubal, the reigning two-time American League Cy Young Award winner. At just 29 years old, Skubal is in the prime of his career and has established himself as the best pitcher in baseball over the past two seasons. If the Dodgers acquire him, they would add another superstar to a roster already chasing history as they attempt to become the first team since the 1998-2000 New York Yankees to win three consecutive World Series titles.
After the Dodgers swept the Milwaukee Brewers in last year’s National League Championship Series to clinch a second straight World Series appearance, manager Dave Roberts smiled and said, “Before the season started, they said the Dodgers are ruining baseball. Let’s get four more wins and really ruin baseball.”
The Dodgers got those four wins, capturing their third World Series title in six seasons.
Ironically, the biggest threat to baseball may not be the Dodgers but baseball itself.
Major League Baseball appears headed toward another contentious labor battle, with the current collective bargaining agreement set to expire in December. Many of the proposals expected to dominate negotiations seem designed to curb the Dodgers’ competitive advantages.
A proposed salary cap would slash payroll flexibility, with a projected cap sitting at roughly half of the Dodgers’ current payroll. Other proposals include limiting contracts to five years and eliminating deferred money altogether. Those changes would have made Shohei Ohtani’s groundbreaking 10-year, $700 million contract impossible. The same would be true for Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s 12-year, $325 million deal.
No one knows how long a potential work stoppage could last. It could be brief, or it could wipe out an entire season as happened in 1994. No one knows what the next labor agreement will look like either. A salary cap and stricter contract rules could dramatically shrink what has appeared to be the Dodgers’ seemingly endless championship window.
That’s exactly why the Dodgers shouldn’t hesitate to go all in now.
Trading for Skubal may have seemed like a luxury a few months ago. Today, it’s much closer to a necessity.
Three of the four starting pitchers the Dodgers relied on during last postseason — Shohei Ohtani, Blake Snell and Tyler Glasnow — are currently sidelined. All are expected back, but there is no guarantee they’ll return at the same level they performed last October, let alone at the level Skubal is pitching right now.
Adding Skubal isn’t just about strengthening the Dodgers. It’s also about preventing another contender from doing the same. The Milwaukee Brewers, just one game behind Los Angeles for the best record in baseball, would become an even more dangerous October opponent if they landed him.
The Dodgers have embraced being baseball’s bad guys all season. If that’s truly the role they’re willing to play, they shouldn’t stop now.
Bad guys rarely get happy endings. They go out in a blaze of glory and are remembered forever.
At the end of the Dodgers’ hype video, Bateman says, “You need teams like us so you can point your finger and say, ‘That’s the bad guy.'”
If fans are pointing at a three-time defending World Series champion, the Dodgers would gladly wear the black hat for as long as they can.
