Dave Roberts' controversial postgame speech should have Brewers, baseball fans irate

It hasn't quite sunk in yet, the fact that the Milwaukee Brewers' 2025 season has come to an end. Perhaps it was the nature of their final series of the season, a sweep in the best-of-seven National League Championship Series at the hands of the behemoth that is the Los Angeles Dodgers, that makes it so difficult to accept that what was one of the most exciting seasons in franchise history is officially over.

A series that saw nearly all of Los Angeles' big stars make a sizable impact, capped off by a historic performance from baseball's face, Shohei Ohtani, became more of a talking point regarding the ongoing unfairness of MLB's lack of payroll restrictions than a matchup of the National League's best two teams. The baseball world became more entranced by the massive discrepancy in Los Angeles and Milwaukee's payrolls than the baseball that was being played on the field.

Some of that is due to the disappointing performance that the Brewers delivered when it mattered most; when the offense scores just four runs in four games, it is easy to become distracted by more rousing storylines that reveal just how difficult of a task Milwaukee faces in trying to compete with baseball's wealthiest organizations.

However, what most believed to be a fabricated issue, this idea that the winner of the Brewers and Dodgers' NLCS matchup would determine whether or not Los Angeles truly is "ruining baseball" with their inflated payroll, became much more tangible when the Dodgers' manager, Dave Roberts, acknowledged the allegations of Los Angeles' "wrongdoings" after their NLCS win. With a chance to change the narrative surrounding his band of future Hall of Famers, Roberts said the complete wrong thing in his postgame interview following Game 4 on Friday night.

Dave Roberts admits that he wants his team to "ruin baseball" in controversial postgame speech

With their $350 million payroll, the Los Angeles Dodgers won the NLCS "fair-and-square," no one is taking that away from them. They showcased a dominant display of pitching and got all of the offense they needed to send the Brewers home without a win in their third NLCS in franchise history.

Following their NL pennant clinching win on Friday night, just moments before his team leader, and potentially the greatest baseball player in the history of the game, Ohtani, accepted his NLCS MVP award after his historic three-homer, ten-strikeout performance, Dodgers' manager Dave Roberts grabbed the mic, held by TNT's on-field reporter Lauren Shehadi, turned to his team and shouted, "They said the Dodgers are ruining baseball. Let's get four more wins and really ruin baseball!"

This idea that the Dodgers are "ruining baseball" that Roberts is addressing in his controversial speech is in reference to a looming expiration of the current collective bargaining agreement that governs the relationship between players and their respective MLB teams. A topic that is certain to be of the utmost relevance during the negotiations that will hopefully result in a new and improved CBA in early December of 2026 is whether or not a salary cap should be implemented. On one side, most team owners and the commissioner himself want to cap the amount that teams can spend on their payroll each season to encourage competition between teams of varying financial resources. On the other side, the players union is against anything that could potentially prevent them from earning less than they otherwise could.

The Dodgers, whose bloated payroll has resulted in a period of impressive success, are said to be "ruining baseball" because other teams with far less resources don't have the opportunity to sign the same elite free agents that Los Angeles does. As a result, with every year that the Dodgers see great success, calls come from opposing fans for MLB to limit Los Angeles' ability to continue expanding their payroll.

Roberts encouraging his team to "ruin baseball" is revealing to say the least. It exposes the fact that Roberts believes his team's success is more important than preserving the league that allows them to even play the game in the first place. It's a claim that he and his team outweigh the livelihoods of everyone connected to MLB who would be out of work if a new CBA can't be agreed upon and MLB enters into a lockout, something that has happened before. Roberts admits that he's fine with the prospect of the 2027 season being cancelled because MLB and the players union can't agree on whether or not his team's privileged spending habits should be capped.

For Brewers fans, having to listen to the manager of the team that just defeated them in the NLCS say that his goal is to "ruin baseball" is just a twisting of the knife. Not only did they have to watch historic performance after historic performance from the Dodgers' expensive starting rotation crush the dreams of their favorite team, but then they had to listen to Roberts acknowledge that he's aware of the unfairness posed by the Dodgers’ payroll and, rather than talk about how it's allowed his team to assemble a historic group of baseball players who just played their best series of the season, he admitted that he's fine if it ruins the sport that has given him every opportunity he could ask for so long as he and his squad continue to win.

For anyone who wants to see baseball played in 2027, Roberts' postgame comments should be infuriating.