The collapse of the Dodgers dynasty is a reflection of America as a whole

It’s hard to dislike the Los Angeles Dodgers. From the manager down, they seem like nice enough guys. Still, it’s important to try.

It’s also important that people have a measured response to their humiliating sweep in the National League Championship Series by the Milwaukee Brewers. Don’t laugh at them. Rather, feel disappointed by them.

The Dodgers were built to win, not to contend. They make no sense in a ‘just trying to do our best’ context. They’ve let everyone, mostly themselves, down. Reminding them of that will hurt more.

This isn’t about last year. The Dodgers beat Toronto fair and square, if you’re the sort of unbounded capitalist who believes that playing California roulette with people’s pensions in order to pay pitchers is a fair thing to do.

For several years, the Dodgers have created a unique animus amongst sports fans. They’ve never done anything wrong, exactly. They comport themselves with dignity. It is instead what they represent that makes people batty. They leveraged the system – which is no system at all – to create a monopoly on talent.

The only limit to the Dodgers acquisitive ambition was the 40-man roster. If they could have, they’d have hired two teams of all-stars – a handsomer one for home, and a pudgier one for away. All this greed created a frenzy around them.

Milwaukee Brewers sweep L.A. Dodgers in NLCS to reach World Series for first time since 1982

Game 7 aside, my most enduring memory of the World Series is one of about a million gift shops at Dodgers Stadium. I figured we would not get enough seats for all of us in the Dodgers’ geriatric press box, which can comfortably accommodate about four. I did not figure they’d stick us out in the part of the outfield that’s in direct sunlight throughout the game. That’s why I hadn’t packed a hat.

There’s only one kind of hat you can get at Dodger Stadium. Quick in and out, I figured. Wrong. It was like being led down into consumer hell. Ring eight – the guy who keeps saying ‘Just one more thing.’

Inside, it was like one of those Black Friday news clips from the eighties, with suburban moms beating each other senseless over Cabbage Patch Kids. People were buying armloads of clothes. Grabbing things off shelves willy-nilly, without looking at the sizes. Plopping indiscriminate piles on the counter that took 15 minutes to tally up. The lady in front of me spent two thousand American dollars on polyester junk. That’s about how much my first car cost.

That gift shop was one of those amazing places where you see America as she is, rather than what she thinks she is. This is what the Dodgers represent.

You could hate them, but not much. How can you really hate Shohei Ohtani? He’s delightful – maybe because nobody’s ever heard him speak. More entertainers should try it.

What people hated was what the Dodgers represent – the free market run amok; the rich getting richer; the Walmart to your struggling local hardware store.

The Dodgers became the most familiar version of the faceless and unstoppable corporate monolith that we all fear. If you could name Meta’s board of governors the way you can name L.A.’s typical batting order, you might hate technocrats in the same conflicted way. Peggy Alford, chief financial officer of eBay? She’s not so bad. I remember that big series she had against Anthropic. Real gamer.

We build monoliths for the pleasure of watching them fall. The longer they stand, the more pleasing the eventual release.

So it’s a good thing that the Dodgers were so good, so consistently, for so long. Three straight years of effective total dominance is forever in modern sport.

The way they beat the Jays last year – toeing the out-of-bounds marker for all of Games 6 and 7 – created the impression that they might never lose again. They’d just keep buying and buying and winning and winning. It would take a middle-class revolution, and maybe a season lost to a lockout, to reverse their advantage.

Instead, like the House of Bourbon and the Politburo, the collapse began within. Their best-ever rotation got very average at the wrong time. Ohtani went so cold that people assumed he was injured. The rest of the order shrivelled. Early leads evaporated like mist. Everything the Dodgers did well, they started to do poorly.

Two of MLB’s smallest spenders will meet in the World Series

Milwaukee gets the credit for it, but it was the Dodgers who beat the Dodgers. They didn’t look defeated. They looked bored. After it ended, they couldn’t even bother to seem disappointed.

“The train finally ran out of steam, I guess,” said L.A. third baseman Max Muncy. I’m sure he slept fine last night. Why wouldn’t he? Like the rest of them, he’s beyond caring.

Without a purpose greater than simple accumulation, winning gets boring once you do it for too long. I think this whenever I hear about a successful person sabotaging their own life.

The Dodgers lost interest, and then they lost. No amount of money, no high-tech mental routine, will ever solve that problem.

Now that they’ve fallen, the upcoming work stoppage has lost its rationale from the ownership side. If the Brewers (19th-highest team salary in MLB) can whip the Dodgers (first), to face either the Rays (27th) or the Guardians (29th), then maybe money really isn’t the measure of it. Maybe things are fine as they are. It will now be difficult to sell a different idea to an indifferent public.

If the Dodgers do return unchanged – and that’s my hope – it will be without the aura of imperviousness. Once you pop this balloon, there’s no getting the air back in it. Which means their era of decline has begun.

Mostly, the unloved rise and hubristic fall of the Dodgers is an American story. Maybe America should think about it a little.