Don’t you just hate the Los Angeles Dodgers? Or to put it another way, don’t you just love to hate the Dodgers?
Of course you do. The Dodgers win a lot, as in three World Series championships since 2020 and two in a row. Now, with their mind-blowing but perhaps not unexpected weekend acquisition of Detroit Tigers ace Tarik Skubal, the Dodgers’ chances of making it three in a row are a whole lot better. And they were already pretty good.
Fans gonna hate, and in that spirit the Dodgers are ripe for the ripping. This is not new. It’s tradition. Consider the many different editions of New York Yankees dynasties that boiled the blood of fans across America. Consider NFL fans outside New England who for two decades raged anew whenever Bill Belichick and Tom Brady powered the Patriots to another Super Bowl victory. Or the millions of NBA fans outside Chicagoland who hated the Bulls during the Michael Jordan years. How about the generations of NHL fans not living in Quebec who cursed the Montreal Canadiens?
Yeah, we all hated those teams all right. But try to imagine a world without Babe Ruth, without Brady, without Jordan, without Jean Béliveau. Try to imagine a world where every team shakes hands at the end of the game and is handed a trophy. Sorry. Nope. Bring on the arguments. Bring on the villains. Bring on the hate.
And now we “hate” the Los Angeles Dodgers. They’re good, so it’s their turn. Simple as that.
Tarik Skubal discusses his trade to the Dodgers
Fabian Ardaya
For some of you, maybe the hate is real. But if the best you can come up with is that the Dodgers’ $429 million payroll is “bad for baseball” and that the small-market teams are being squeezed out of October, it means you’re too busy looking at the big money to see the big picture. Which is this: Baseball’s October stage, its late-October stage, demands the game’s biggest stars. While it sounds great as a high school chemistry experiment for each season to produce a couple of scrappy, seat-of-the-pants outfits that scratch and crawl their way to a World Series showdown, we only need one of those teams. And for said team to take on a potent, overstuffed powerhouse, which these days means the Dodgers.
That’s kind of what we had last year, isn’t it? In 2025, the Dodgers were the smart pick to represent the National League in the World Series, and the Toronto Blue Jays were, well, the dumb pick to represent the American League. Yet we wound up with an epic World Series between the clubs, with the Dodgers taking Game 7 in extra innings and by inches. Surely there were American fans who rooted for the Blue Jays for no other reason than they felt Canada had been disrespected on this side of the border over the past couple of years. But there was also this: Rooting for the Blue Jays meant rooting against the Dodgers.
It used to be said that rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for U.S. Steel, the idea being that in doing so you were supporting Big Business instead of your locally owned corner store. (A random search reveals the quote being attributed to comedian Joe E. Brown, perhaps better known for saying, “Well, nobody’s perfect!” to a dressed-in-drag Jack Lemmon in the closing scene from “Some Like it Hot.”) The Yankees were absolutely U.S. Steel for a good chunk of the 20th century, from Babe Ruth to Lou Gehrig to Joe DiMaggio to Mickey Mantle, and they were a team hated but feared, respected but reviled. These days, rooting for the Dodgers would be like rooting for Tesla. And that’s no fun at all. Except that it is.
Back when the late, great Larry Lucchino was running the Red Sox, he memorably referred to the Yankees as “The Evil Empire.” The truth is that in the early 21st century, both teams were on relatively equal footing when it came to huge payrolls, packed ballparks and boffo TV ratings, but the name stuck and the century-old Red Sox-Yankees rivalry reached new heights. The Dodgers are the new “Evil Empire.”
The tricky part about rooting against the 2026 Dodgers is that they’re generally a likable bunch. Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto are compelling international superstars. Mookie Betts, despite his struggles this season, is a popular future Hall of Famer with a cool nickname. And during the 2024 World Series, it was impossible not to root for Freddie Freeman when the Dodger first baseman went on an offensive tear while attending to his son, Maximus, 3, who was battling Guillain-Barré syndrome.
But it’s OK to hate a team, to fervently root against that team, while respecting what makes the team special. Take, for instance, the 1970s Cincinnati Reds, who won two straight World Series championships and had a scary-sounding nickname — The Big Red Machine — that suggested global domination. Other than dispirited Red Sox fans still smarting over the ’75 World Series, nobody really hated those Reds. Heck, they had a manager, George “Sparky” Anderson, whose affability earned him a guest gig on the hit 1970s sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati,” and they had a second baseman, Joe Morgan, whose elbow-flapping batting stance was imitated by Wiffle Ball sluggers from coast to coast.
But know this: If you followed baseball in the 1970s and lived outside the Cincinnati area, you loved to hate The Big Red Machine. And soon enough it became popular again to love to hate the late-1970s Yankees, what with their bombastic owner (George Steinbrenner), combative manager (Billy Martin) and brash superstar (Reggie Jackson).
I had a conversation with Jackson last year on this very topic. When I asked him about his days with the Yankees, and, especially, how he was treated in Boston, Mr. October told me, “I loved playing in Fenway and getting booed in Fenway. It was really an honor. I really played with the fans in the on-deck circle. Sooner or later I’d hit one out, and I’d walk back and keep my head down, and then I’d look up and stare at a guy and wink at him.”
Those days were better because we had George, Billy and Reggie.
Now we have Shohei, Mookie and Freddie, albeit without the Miller Lite commercials and dugout confrontations. Absent your own hometown team, you should want the Dodgers back in the World Series. Even if you want them to lose.
