Dodgers Interview: MLB Insider says nobody can “out-talent” LA

CAMELBACK RANCH, AZ– Spring chatter always finds its way back to the same question: how long can this keep going? Jeff Passan went on the Rich Eisen Show this week and laid out why the Dodgers sit in a spot that most of the sport can’t touch right now. He talked about the talent, the money, the pull of playing with Shohei Ohtani, and the way the organization keeps building with October in mind.

“How about you get to go play on the best team in baseball and get to play with the best player in history?” Passan said. “Sounds pretty good to me.”

He pointed straight at the financial foundation behind all of it, and how that separates the Dodgers from the pack in a sport where a lot of teams still choose their comfort zone. “What the Dodgers have to offer beyond that [the chance to play with Ohtani] is the advantage that they have in that they have gobs of cash,” Passan said. “They’re owned by Guggenheim Partners, which is a money manager that has more than 350 billion dollars under management at this point. [Mets owner] Steve Cohen is one of the richest men in the world. And then you have a bunch of owners who, would they like to win? Sure. But at what cost? Is it deficit spending? Is it otherwise?”

Passan said the conversation around “fairness” in the sport follows naturally when one roster looks stacked and the spending stays aggressive year after year. “People who are observers of baseball right now feel like the on-field product is pretty darn good at this point,” he said. “You’ve got stars like Ohtani and like Aaron Judge, legitimately generational guys. But does the rest of the game feel fair? And if not, what can they do to go and solve that? Figuring out if there is a happy medium between what the owners want in a salary cap and what the players want, essentially a status quo system, is going to be the rub of this whole thing. Can they do that? Are there going to be creative and open-minded enough people to try and strike a deal rather than run this thing off the cliff?”

So where does the hope come from for everyone else? Passan framed it around baseball’s built-in chaos, while still putting the Dodgers in their own tier heading into 2026. “The greatest hope is not going to be out-talenting the Dodgers because there’s not a team that can out-talent them,” he said. “This is going to be more about the randomness of baseball. Let’s not forget, three years ago, the Arizona Diamondbacks absolutely woodshedded the Dodgers in the postseason and wound up making a World Series run themselves. The nature of baseball makes it possible, but the talent of the Dodgers is so overwhelming that they are the distinct, and I would argue more than any of the almost 25 years I’ve been covering this game, they’re going to be the overwhelming favorites going into the 2026 season.”

Even as the conversation drifted into Yankees-land, Passan kept circling back to what he sees as the Dodgers’ constant: roster decisions made with the last month of the season in mind. “The Dodgers just signed Evan Phillips for six and a half million,” he said. “Evan Phillips is coming off of Tommy John surgery as a one-inning reliever and is not going to be back until about… so that shows you the Dodgers are planning for October. That’s what they have their eye on.”

He also put a spotlight on the way the Dodgers treated this winter like a chance to add more high-end impact, not a time to admire the rings. “The Dodgers have won two in a row and they went out and gave Kyle Tucker $240 million for four years and Edwin Díaz a three-year $69 million deal,” Passan said. “So they added the best free agent in Major League Baseball this winter and they added the best closer on the market and probably one of the three best closers in the game right now.”

And then he landed the point that probably hits every fan base the same way when they look at the standings and the payrolls. “I think it’s fair to ask the question of all the teams out there, do you want to win as much as the Dodgers?” Passan said. “Is this important to you? And if so, how are you showing it? What are you doing to tell your fan base? A lot of these organizations say, ‘We can’t do this. We can’t do it like the Dodgers.’ The rules are in place for them to do so. It would just take an enormous amount of spending, and that’s something that team owners have not shown themselves willing to do.”

Passan summed it up as a system that lets the biggest-spending, most aggressive operators create separation, and he put the Dodgers right at the front of that reality. “Yes, the Dodgers have enormous advantages, and so do the Mets,” he said. “Those advantages are really made clear by the system that’s in place right now. That’s ultimately what we’re talking about today. What does the system look like? And how are there levers that can be pulled so that the Dodgers and the Mets don’t separate themselves into a completely different stratosphere than where the rest of the teams in Major League Baseball are?”

As folks used to say about Frank Sinatra, it’s the Dodgers’ world. We’re just living in it.

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