SURPRISE, Ariz. — Wedged between classic gold medal games in winter sports and the coming World Baseball Classic, MLB found a way to stage a battle between the two most recent world champions here Saturday afternoon.
OK, it’s possible the entire baseball community didn‘t view Triple-A-bound in such breathless winner-take-all fashion. Rightfully so. The Dodgers’ split-squad group that journeyed the 14 miles from Glendale (and ultimately lost to Texas, 7-6) was largely a skeleton crew of Triple-A bound prospects and wannabes.
There was the notable exception of Kyle Tucker batting second, a little reminder that the winner of the last two World Series, and the franchise that is shattering payroll and luxury tax records in the process, managed to add another All-Star bat at an average value of $60 million per season.
Small potatoes, as Hyman Roth would say.
Rangers
The Dodgers paid $169 million in luxury tax on top of a $417 million payroll last season. To the Guggenheim Partners owners, who bought the Lakers at a $10 billion valuation as an aside last year, these are minor matters. With Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto bringing the entire Japanese market on board as Dodgers fans, the richest and smartest team in baseball has ways of generating millions beyond the boundaries of normal revenue sharing that rival owners never even stopped to consider.
Meanwhile, Rangers President Chris Young spent the offseason reluctantly shedding payroll from a losing team, dismissing Marcus Semien, Adolis Garcia and Jonah Heim from the regular 2023 World Series lineup. There’s a real possibility that the Rangers’ one and only championship season in more than half a century in Arlington will be largely viewed, in historical terms, as a fluke. That doesn’t mean it counts any less.
But a team that was in the process of collapsing in September of ‘23 before sneaking into the postseason as a 90-win wild card team, then managed to win 11 straight road playoff games before retreating to the land of obscurity for two years is not exactly the regular contender that Young vowed to construct when he replaced Jon Daniels.
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After two non-winning seasons (78-84 and 81-81), Bruce Bochy and his magic touch have been replaced by the younger, more aggressive approach of Skip Schumaker. He watched last year’s lost season as a special adviser. Does he have enough to work with to get Texas back into contention? We are months away from finding that answer.
What we do know is that while other recent World Series winners — Dodgers in ‘20, Braves in ‘21, Astros in ‘22 — either won 100-plus games the following season or advanced to their league championship series, the Rangers have taken the Washington Nationals’ route of disappearing from the playoffs.
Even if they haven’t gone to the Nats’ extreme — six losing seasons, some of them big ones, since the 2019 World Series — the Rangers aren’t viewed as one of the Dodgers’ greater threats to a third straight title. The AL West has shifted, with Seattle now expected to replace Houston in the top spot, but the Rangers retain the look of a middle-of-the-pack team — plenty of starting pitching (if healthy), major bullpen questions and mostly just hoping for an offensive revival after scoring fewer than 700 runs the last two seasons (they had 881 in 2023).
One plus from the offseason is that Brandon Nimmo’s bat has not shown the diminishing signs that Semien’s displayed the last two years. But the fact that Nimmo turns 33 in March suggests that day is not far off. Still, for this season, the arrival of Nimmo in the outfield and Danny Jansen at catcher represent on-base percentage improvement the Rangers sorely need.
Still, it’s not quite Kyle Tucker, is it?
Baseball being the game that it is, there are no guarantees even for the loaded Dodgers, who required a few late-inning miracles to hold off Toronto. But in a 30-team league, Draft Kings has the Dodgers at +230 to win the World Series, which means a $100 bet only wins $230 if LA survives three (or potentially four) rounds of playoffs. The Seahawks and Rams are +800 to win next year’s Super Bowl by comparison.
No one is asking owner Ray Davis to throw Guggenheim dollars at any of the Rangers’ various issues. But if they are to be anything more than a one-hit wonder like the 2005 White Sox or the 2019 Nats, the Rangers could use a great leap forward in 2026. It starts with claiming their first winning season since winning it all. Both Schumaker and the fans will need a little patience while waiting for those bats to make some meaningful contact and point the Rangers in the proper direction.
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