Why all Miami Marlins fans need to start cheering for that Dodgers-Yankees rematch

If you're a true fan of the Miami Marlins...the time has come to stop rooting for the unexpected.

Before the playoffs become set in stone, root for upsets galore. When the last home series of the year is against the New York Mets, the assignment is clear- send those insufferable snowbirds and New York transplants heading for the exits early. Chaos is king. Sports fans love an underdog whatever the case, be it March Madness, any given Saturday for college football, all the way to the MLB postseason.

Unless you are a fan of the Miami Marlins or another small market and/or low payroll MLB club waiting on pins and needs for the sweet deliverance of upcoming CBA negotiations in 2026. Because if that's you, then you need to think long and hard about taking as chalk an approach to the 2025 MLB playoffs as possible.

In other words, bring on that Dodgers-Yankees rematch. Bring on the payroll kings.

Why? Bouncing the Mets might have felt great for Marlins fans, and if social media is any guide, might have felt great for fans of roughly twenty-eight other teams. However, the trouncing of baseball's biggest spender by the game's cheapest did nothing good for the narrative that the integrity of the game is undersiege from uberspending billionaires. ESPN's Jeff Passan penned a piece Monday on just how up in the air the 2025 postseason is, despite every preseason projection crowning the Dodgers as being as inevitable as Thanos.

If the takeaway heading into the 2026 CBA negotiations is that superteams are no guarantee of success, then it's going to be extremely tough sledding for fans clammoring for salary caps and salary floors coming to MLB.

Of course. superteams aren't a guarantee of success. As Passan notes, and any red-blooded baseball fan can tell you, there are plenty of examples of the underdog coming through. Yet heavy spending does help an awful lot with being consistently competitive, with driving profits and thus further investment into payrolls. The 2025 Dodgers might not have ended up ever looking like a threat to the 2001 Seattle Mariners for regular season win totals...but they are still expected to finish more successfully overall. And if the Dodgers do end up doing that, if the Yankees end up getting their revenge, or even if the Phillies finally go all the way, then the lesson of the 2025 will remain that cash is king. No one looking back a year or two from now will remember how up in the air things seemed at the end of September- just that feeling of inescapability from the end of October.

That's the despair fans of the small payroll clubs that would benefit greatly from official salary constraints want fueling those CBA negotiations. Usually, the underdog winning is a great thing.

Sometimes though? A couple of them need to lose so that others can go on to win.

As much as I hate to drop a lose the battle to win the war cliche on Miami Marlins fans, and really on fans of any other bottom ten payroll team, the 2025 MLB postseason is really looking like one of those battles that need to be lost.

Bottom-line? Go Dodgers.