Will the Dodgers break baseball? And other Opening Day questions.
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 27 March 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Baseball is back – and so are the sport’s existential questions, both on and off the field.
Coming off a dominant 2024 season, Shohei Ohtani and the Los Angeles Dodgers are looking to become the first team since the 2000 New York Yankees to capture back-to-back World Series championships. Standing in their way is a changing game, the increasingly pervasive threat of elbow injuries across the majors, and the 29 other MLB teams set on beating them.
Today on “Post Reports,” guest host Ava Wallace is joined by Washington Post national baseball writer Chelsea Janes to discuss how the Dodgers are shaping the future of America’s pastime and building a team to compete in October.
Today’s show was produced by Lucas Trevor. It was mixed by Sean Carter. It was edited by Maggie Penman. Clips provided courtesy of MLB.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It is opening day for most Major League baseball teams, but the team everyone is talking about the Los Angeles Dodgers has already played their first game. |
| 0:11.1 | Out of no one. |
| 0:13.1 | Bounces one left side. |
| 0:14.6 | Backhand Rojas, long throw to finish the job. |
| 0:18.5 | The Dodgers sweep the Cubs to open 2025 in Tokyo. |
| 0:25.1 | They were already a super team last year, building their team around Shohei Otani, you may have heard of him, |
| 0:30.7 | and they won the World Series and then spent the offseason hoovering up a bunch of other elite players. |
| 0:35.9 | They signed the best starting pitcher available, |
| 0:37.9 | Blake Snell. They signed the best young Japanese pitcher maybe ever. They've signed a bunch of |
| 0:44.1 | outfielders who are lesser known, but still would be the headliner on most other teams. So |
| 0:49.9 | they are stockpiling talent pretty much all over the roster in ways that no one else can, does, or even really tries to do. |
| 0:57.6 | This is my colleague Chelsea Janes. |
| 0:59.8 | She covers baseball for the post, and I spoke to her while she was sitting in a hot car outside of a stadium at spring training. |
| 1:05.7 | And my first question for Chelsea was, are the Dodgers going to break baseball? |
| 1:10.0 | And as they keep pouring money into |
| 1:11.7 | their roster, can any other teams in Major League Baseball even keep up? Every few decades, there is a fear |
| 1:17.4 | that some team is breaking baseball. When I was younger, it was the Yankees. The New York Yankees |
| 1:22.9 | have once again reached the summit of the sports world. They've won their third straight championship, |
| 1:29.9 | fourth in the last five years, and 26th all time, the most successful team in the history of |
| 1:37.2 | professional sports. Starting the new millennium, the New York Yankees are once again world champions. They were outspending everyone. |
| 1:47.9 | No one could keep up. And that team won three consecutive World Series really did sort of dominate |
| 1:53.0 | the sport. And it survived to them. No one's won back-to-back championships since then, including |
... |
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