The Brewers finished the regular season with the best record in baseball at 103 wins, but October still runs through Los Angeles. The Dodgers have spent like a powerhouse all year, and their payroll gap over the other three teams left standing is impossible to miss.
At $339.32 million, the Dodgers sit second in MLB in adjusted payroll, trailing only the Mets. That figure does not even capture the full picture, since it counts Kyle Tucker at just $1 million while ignoring most of the impact of the $54 million signing bonus he received in February.
That kind of spending dwarfs the rest of the field. The Brewers are at $146.21 million, good for 19th in MLB.
The Rays come in at $95.62 million, 28th. The Guardians are last at $74.46 million.
Tucker’s signing bonus alone is only about $20 million shy of Cleveland’s entire payroll.
The Dodgers also dominate the upper end of the salary scale. Fourteen players in the LCS are making at least $15 million per year, not counting Tucker because his compensation came almost entirely through a signing bonus.
Eleven of those 14 are Dodgers. Of the other three, one is Brandon Woodruff, and he is out for the season because of injury.
Shohei Ohtani leads the group at $70 million, followed by Blake Snell at $36.4 million and Tyler Glasnow at $32.5 million. Tarik Skubal is at $32 million, with Mookie Betts at $30 million and Freddie Freeman at $27 million. The rest of the list includes Christian Yelich at $26 million, Jose Ramirez at $25 million, Woodruff at $22 million, Yoshinobu Yamamoto at $20.3 million, Teoscar Hernandez at $19.7 million, Edwin Diaz at $17 million, and Tanner Scott and Will Smith at $16 million apiece.
For Tampa Bay and Cleveland, the spending ceiling looks very different. The Rays’ highest-paid player is Yandy Diaz at $12 million. The Guardians do not have another player besides Ramirez making even $8 million annually.
Across the playoff bracket, the payroll picture is just as stark. The Yankees are at $308.34 million, the Phillies at $291.95 million, the Braves at $263.46 million, the Cubs at $249.32 million, the Astros at $239.76 million, the Padres at $226.25 million and the Red Sox at $207.99 million. After that come the Brewers, White Sox at $103.33 million, Rays and Guardians.
The bigger-budget teams had the edge in numbers overall: eight of the top 10 payroll clubs reached the postseason. But the field was not perfectly aligned with spending power.
Three of the four teams in the LCS are in the bottom half of the league in payroll, including Cleveland at the very bottom. And the Mets, who rank first in payroll, did not make the postseason at all, with the caveat that the Dodgers have a higher active roster payroll in 2026.
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Tampa Bays deeper lineup is part of what makes this series feel tilted its way on paper, even before the first pitch of Octobers biggest round. The Rays did enough head-to-head damage to build confidence heading into Cleveland, and their starting pitching gave them a formula that worked when these teams met before. What remains to be seen is whether that edge holds when the stakes rise and the margin for error gets much smaller. [Read more 🡒]
Junior Caminero Is Changing How Fans See The Rays Again
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The backstory only adds to the fascination around him, because the move that brought him to Tampa Bay was viewed at the time as a fairly small transaction. Now, with Caminero carrying so much of the clubs future and changing the conversation around the lineup again, it is easy to see why Rays followers keep circling back to the details of how he got here. [Read more 🡒]