Rockies owner needs to take long look in the mirror after attacking Dodgers spending

In the power-packed NL West, there's one massive black sheep. The Dodgers, Padres, and Diamondbacks are all odds-on favorites to make the postseason, and the Giants, while middling, aren't a total dumpster fire.

The same can't be said about the Rockies, who have finished below .500 every year since 2019, and under .400 three times. They're one of only five teams never to have won a World Series, and they aren't expected to anytime soon.

So it stands to reason that Rockies owner Dick Monfort would feel some kind of way about the Dodgers' spending. Everyone in baseball has an opinion on it; the loudest are negative, but the Dodgers also have some key defenders in Commissioner Rob Manfred (that one's a double-edged sword, to be fair) and ESPN's breaking news wizard Jeff Passan.

But Monfort railed against the Dodgers' lavish spending, saying, (in an article that also refers to him as "the most reviled franchise owner in the history of Colorado sports"): "Something's got to happen. The competitive imbalance in baseball has gotten to the point of ludicrosity now. It's an unregulated industry.

"The only way to fix baseball is to do a salary cap and a floor. With a cap, comes a floor. For a lot of teams, the question is: How do they get to the floor? And that includes us, probably. But on some sort of revenue-split deal, I would be all-in."

Rockies owner Dick Monfort had a lot to say about the Dodgers' spending in free agency

The key here is Monfort acknowledging that one of the teams who would probably grouse at an enforced spending floor is, in fact, the Rockies. Colorado's payroll lands in the bottom third of teams this year, and it includes money they still owe the Cardinals for taking on Nolan Arenado's contract.

And that brings us back to the inevitable counterargument to criticism like Monfort's — every owner in baseball is a multi-millionaire or billionaire who could spend beyond their self-imposed $100 million-ish ceiling. Monfort's net worth was an estimated $700 million in 2020. He fondly calls the Rockies his "baby," but he also extended the franchise's most promising star without actually intending to keep him on the team. If he's so concerned about the Dodgers' spending, why isn't he giving more money to his team to try to stack up with them? Or at least create a semblance of a competitor?

Everyone knows that a lucrative contract with the Rockies would be poisoned chalice, and no one wants to play in Colorado anyway, but those are deeper issues that have nothing to do with the Dodgers. The Rockies don't spend, and they don't use their consistently high draft picks to fortify a top farm system. That's not the Dodgers' problem — it's Monfort's.