Brandon Gomes pushed again on the notion his Dodgers are baseball’s new “Evil Empire,” however somebody within the advertising and marketing division perhaps didn’t get that memo.
As a part of the group’s promo calendar for the 2025 season is Star Wars Evening on Could 14, and the giveaway is a bobblehead-sized Demise Star hovering over Dodger Stadium.
The Dodgers adopted a World Sequence title with a second straight offseason spending spree that included signing the likes of Blake Snell (5 years, $182 million), Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki (minor league cope with a $6.5 million bonus), Tanner Scott (4 years, $72 million) and reliever Kirby Yates on a one-year, $13 million deal.
That got here a 12 months after the group paid over a billion {dollars} in contracts for the likes of two-way star Shohei Ohtani, Japanese hurler Yoshinobu Yamamoto, amongst others.
It’s spurred comparisons to the freewheeling spending of the early Nineties Yankees, who threw big-money contracts at big-name free brokers, spurring late Pink Sox government Larry Lucchino labeling the rival franchise the “Evil Empire” in 2002.
Now, nonetheless, the Dodgers have inherited the “Star Wars”-themed branding — excellent for a promo evening on the calendar.
Until you’re, say, the group’s basic supervisor, like Gomes, who doesn’t actually embrace the thought.
“We are focused on and tasked with making sure our team is as good as possible,” Gomes stated on “The Show,” with Joel Sherman and Jon Heyman in January. “If that’s creating ire elsewhere, that’s positive, as a result of I feel meaning our followers are very glad, which is what the objective is. I feel the character of our sport, the character of the playoff format, you will be technically one of the best group and it doesn’t assure you something.
“All we’re doing is making sure that we have as talented a team as possible.”
