TORONTO — The World Series opens Friday night at Rogers Centre, and Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts dropped the gauntlet last week in the din of celebrating their 26th National League pennant.

“I’ll tell you, before this season started, they said the Dodgers are ruining baseball. Let’s get four more wins and really ruin baseball. Let’s go,” Roberts said in an on-field interview, his voice echoing around Dodgers Stadium.

Roberts took his share of grief on social media, but if this is all about spending money, the Dodgers have had plenty of help ruining baseball. Notably, the Toronto Blue Jays have to be right there with them.

This World Series boasts teams with two of the best records in Major League Baseball, and those teams are also among the top five in player payrolls. The Dodgers at $416.8 million for luxury tax purposes, are first; the Blue Jays, at $280 million, are fifth.

They have two of the top three players in terms of total cost per long-term contract: Shohei Ohtani, making $700 million over 10 years, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. at 14 years, $500 million, are two and three.

Juan Soto, who signed a 15-year, $765 million contract with the New York Mets last offseason, is No. 1. The Mets have the second highest payroll of $341.2 million, and they didn’t even make the playoffs.

Perhaps the most damning figure for the Dodgers is that their tax bill this year is projected at $168.8 million, accumulated through continued seasons of luxury tax-busting payrolls. It’s higher than the actual payroll of the lowest 13 MLB teams and double what the bottom-feeder Miami Marlins spent at $85.3 million.

The luxury tax threshold this season was $241 million.

The Dodgers defer money and do it all within the existing rules. They have $1.01 billion in deferred contracts paid out to eight players, the whopper being the $680 million deferred portion of Ohtani’s deal.

“Every year I feel like we’ve got to do it again,” Dodgers owner Mark Walter said after the Dodgers swept the Milwaukee Brewers in the NLCS as Ohtani hit three homers and pitched six innings of two-hit ball with 10 strikeouts. “I’m nervous now because we still have to win. If we lose the World Series, it’s not good.”

They’ve paid Ohtani $4 million in cash the past two years for potentially two NL MVPs and two World Series titles. Conversely, the Jays paid Guerrero $325 million of his contract up front in a signing bonus, according to figures provided by Spotrac, to try and win their first World Series since back-to-back championships in 1992-93.

So, are the Jays, or the Dodgers for that matter, ruining baseball by maximizing their payrolls?

“We have a marketplace that supports doing both things at once, having a team up here and having a great development pipeline. Not every market can do that,” Dodgers president Stan Kasten said on the most recent episode of Sportico‘s Sporticast podcast. “I understand that, and that’s a problem. That’s a problem we should address in baseball. But we have a market that does allow that, and while the rules allow us to exploit that, and capitalize on that, we do it. We understand that we’re fortunate. To not take advantage of that would be a disservice to all our fans.”

There are no guarantees, of course. For their billions of dollars in spending, the Dodgers have only won the World Series twice since Walter and Guggenheim Baseball bought the team out of bankruptcy from Frank McCourt, a Boston real estate developer, in 2012 for what turned out to be $2.15 billion in a take-it-or-leave-it deal. Yes, it’s hard to believe—the Dodgers went into bankruptcy protection only 13 years ago, and a Delaware court agreed for the team to be sold in auction. However Guggenheim said their offer would disappear if McCourt didn’t take it on the spot. McCourt took it.

The 2003 Dodgers sale from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. to McCourt for $430 million included the team, Dodger Stadium and the 250-acre parking lot that still surrounds the ballpark in Los Angeles. In the 2012 Guggenheim transaction, McCourt, who famously owned several valuable parking lots in Boston, retained 50% ownership of that parking lot—because of course he did. The Dodgers are now valued by Sportico at $7.73 billion, second in MLB with a No. 1 revenue stream in 2024 of $855 million. McCourt still owns 50% of the parking lot, and leases it out to Guggenheim.

The growth from $2.15 billion to $7.73 billion is an extremely healthy one for Walter and McCourt, despite the fact the Dodgers are trying to win only their third World Series title and second in a row during the Guggenheim era.

If one believes there’s a competitive balance issue in the sport—and that’s expected to be the top issue next year in collective bargaining negotiations for a new Basic Agreement—here are the facts: The Dodgers are in the World Series for the fifth time since 2017 and in the Blue Jays are facing their fifth different Fall Classic opponent. They are 2-2, defeating the Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays, and losing to the sign-stealing Houston Astros and the Boston Red Sox.

If they beat the Blue Jays, it will be the first time since the Yankees in 1998-2000 any MLB team will have won back-to-back titles. Even more incredibly, it will be only third time in history an NL team will have done so, joining the 1921-22 New York Giants and the 1975-76 Cincinnati Reds.

All this is to say, a team can buy its way into the playoff dance—seven out of the top 11 teams with the highest payrolls this season did—but you can’t buy your way into winning it all. There are too many variables, as Mets owner Steve Cohen has discovered.

The Dodgers, under Walter, have put together a cohesive organization under the right manager in Roberts, who has an all-time best .621 regular season winning percentage in his 10 years leading the team. During his tenure, the Dodgers are 369 games over .500, turning them into a destination organization for players.

“We feel like family. We’ve got people that fit,” Walter said. “I heard Mookie [Betts] say, ‘It’s not all on me. Everybody has to share.’ The whole lineup does it. The other night the seventh, eighth and ninth guys did all the hitting. That’s what makes the difference.”

Win or lose, the Dodgers haven’t “ruined” baseball—not even close. There are other culprits.