In terms of how well a team is doing as far as games are concerned there is no comparison between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Chicago White Sox. The Dodgers are a far superior team. They just won the world series and if you ask a lot of pundits and have AI look at stats and well, basically any other metric or person in the know about which one of these teams are going to do better this year the answer would be the Dodgers. LA looks already like the could be headed to another World Series while nobody would say the same about the White Sox.
But there is more to this picture than just win/loss records and percentages because baseball is a business.
The Dodgers are one of the most popular teams of all time right now due largely in part to their excellent additions of Japanese players one of which may very well be one of the greatest baseball players who has ever lived in Shohei Ohtani. He truly is a marvel and the other day I heard that he is the first player since Babe Ruth that truly excels at both pitching and batting. It is kind of expected that most pitchers are going to be terrible at batting but this man is a phenom. I'm sure that most batters and good fielders CAN pitch if they had to, but are they going to be one of the best in the league or even the world when they attempt to do so? Absolutely not!
If I was to ask a casual baseball fan to simply name the name of someone that simply plays for the current White Sox team I think that most people who don't live in Chicago would really struggle to answer that question though. The White Sox are a non-issue as far as the league is concerned and there is virtually no chance they are a threat for the overall title.
So why would I say that it is better to own then White Sox than the Dodgers? That's crazy talk, right?
Well it all comes down to what is the most important thing in sports (unfortunately) and that is good ol' greenbacks AKA money.
The Dodgers have an amazing team for one really big reason: They paid for it. The White Sox on the other hand are one of the stingiest clubs in all of Major League Baseball. The Los Angeles Dodgers overall payroll is currently $549 million, and this is more than the bottom 3 teams overall payroll combined. One of the bottom 3 teams is the Chicago White Sox.
In fact, just that one previously mentioned baseball player for the Dodgers is getting paid more than every single player combined on the White Sox roster...substantially more than all of them combined actually.. and this is where the business side of baseball comes into play here and purely as an owner or investor, why it would be better to be involved with the White Sox than with the Dodgers.
The White Sox have a total overall payroll of $87 million, which isn't chump change by any means and ironically, their highest player is also a Japanese man by the name of Munetaka Murakami. Not quite the household name like Ohtani though now, is it?
So with that $87 million in outgoings comes total club earnings of much more than you might think at $277 million which makes their payroll a mere 31% of overall revenue.
Now let's look at the Dodgers: Their total payroll is an absolutely insane $549 million and as you would expect they have a much higher amount of club earnings at $774 million and you are fast at math you might be thinking 774-549= 225 man! That is more than 277-87=190! and you would be correct if it wasn't for one little thing in MLB that they established in 2022 called the "luxury tax."
What this means is that any team that is spending over a pre-determined salary limit, that team is "taxed" by the league to penalize them for outspending other teams. The pre-determined "limit" is $244 million. The idea is that this limit will keep things more fair and prevent certain teams from simply spending so much that they win over and over again. This system doesn't really work though because some teams are wealthy enough that they simply pay the tax and don't concern themselves with that upper limit at all.
But before I get too long winded about all of this the Dodgers payroll is 73% of their overall revenue and they also pay $150 million in "luxury tax" which is BY FAR the highest luxury tax that any team in the league pays. Most teams, in fact, make it an objective to stay below the $244 million and a lot of people out there argue that it would be better if the teams were not taxed but instead were forced to stay below the $244 million threshold.
I can only guess that the LA Dodgers' owner(s) aren't really all that concerned about making money in the short-term and instead are aiming for long-term dynasty status, which at that level of spending, is pretty likely provided you can keep the fans interested and remaining profitable.
In the meantime the White Sox owners (the 2nd most thrifty team in the league 2nd only to Miami) are sitting back and are content to stay as competitive as possible while at the same time realizing that they are going to probably have a winning percentage of less than 50% while still getting good enough attendance to pay the bills and make the owners a good ol' chunk of change.
It will be interesting to see how the White Sox do against the Dodgers seeing as how the Los Angeles side spends nearly 7 times as much money on their players. An upset would be truly wonderful to see. These 3 games don't happen until June 12-June 14 with all 3 games taking place in Chicago.