Jack Harris: No high-priced help is coming. Why the Dodgers are betting on themselves.
LOS ANGELES — By not taking a gamble on any of this offseason's top free agents, the Dodgers instead placed one very big, very high-stakes bet on something else.
Themselves.
That's perhaps the best way to summarize the club's winter activity, in which the Dodgers made themselves an outlier among Major League Baseball's large-market teams by not making any large-scale investments.
Almost unanimously, the sport's other biggest contenders decided that the length and cost and risk of mega-deals was all worth it — that heavy spending is simply what it takes to compete in the majors' current landscape.
The New York Yankees retained Aaron Judge and added Carlos Rodón.
The San Diego Padres (who signed Xander Bogaerts), Philadelphia Phillies (who signed Trea Turner) and Atlanta Braves (who traded for and then extended Sean Murphy) all spent their way into the league's luxury tax.
Then there are the New York Mets, who were already headed toward a league-record
