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When the Golden State Warriors “ruined” the NBA at the end of the 2010s, most of the league quietly packed it in and waited out the storm. You don’t wrestle a hurricane. You board up the windows, drink a beer in the basement, and wait for the wreckage to clear. It turns out the San Francisco Giants ran the exact same playbook against the Los Angeles Dodgers. They didn’t do it on purpose, of course. No, they did it through a dizzying mix of front-office paralysis, botched free agencies, and pure, unfiltered baseball incompetence mixed with old-money San Francisco hubris. But I’ll be damned: It might have worked. Because the biggest win of this cursed, forgettable Giants season isn’t happening on the diamond. No, it’s happening in the pages of the Financial Times and at the desks of the Department of Justice. And that win is the sudden, frankly shocking realization that the Dodgers’ terrifying empire was built on a hilarious house of cards. For years, the rest of Major League Baseball was subjected to endless lectures about Chavez Ravine exceptionalism. We were told the Dodgers simply wanted it more than everyone else. If your team didn’t hand out $700 million IOUs deferred until the next century, your owner was just a cheap coward. The Dodgers weren’t just richer; they were smarter, cooler, and operating on a higher plane of fiscal enlightenment. They were breaking baseball and the only thing you could do to stop it was to stop playing the game altogether while highly-paid lawyers decide what’s best. Well, grab some popcorn. That reality is collapsing in real time. It turns out that Dodgers controlling owner Mark Walter didn’t discover some magical money tree in Southern California. No, he — allegedly — just made all the money up. Here’s the cut-and-dry of it: Walter runs an asset management firm alongside massive insurance companies. The strategy was straightforward: take policyholder premiums from those insurance arms —and loan the cash to other companies he controls. In high finance, you can occasionally do that if you follow the rules and report every cent. Walter allegedly did it constantly and forgot the whole “disclosure” part. Now the Department of Justice is knocking on the door, and Walter is scrambling to unwind deals and pay back billions before the feds bring the hammer down. His lightning-fast sale of the Los Angeles Lakers to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger — it reportedly came to pass over the course of a weekend — eased the ledger a bit. But if what’s being reported in the financial pages is even close to true, the Lakers sale won’t nearly be enough. No, he likely needs billions more by the end of the year to make the books look passable. According to Bloomberg, Walter is now shopping around private deals that offer double-digit yields, putting up his own personal stake in his asset management firm as collateral. When a billionaire starts seeking the Wall Street equivalent of a payday loan, things are officially off the rails. If that insane offer doesn’t plug the leak, the fire sale begins. Everything is on the table: his shares of Chelsea FC (reportedly already on the market), the Los Angeles Sparks, his PWHL club, and his motorsports empire across NASCAR, IndyCar, and Formula 1. And yes, even the crown jewel itself — the Los Angeles Dodgers. Think about what this means for the MLB. The league is hurtling toward an ugly lockout, with owners preparing to cry poverty and demand a hard salary cap to stop the spending monster in Southern California. If the Dodgers’ financial juggernaut was a fiction funded by undisclosed insurance loans, so much justification for the lockout disappears. You don’t need a labor war to fix a systemic spending problem that was really just one guy running a high-stakes shell game. Yes, I’ve spent years hammering the Giants’ front office and ownership in print, and I won’t take back a single syllable. The boring rosters, the passive-aggressive press conferences, the endless parade of mediocre seasons — cresting and falling with an inexplicable 2021 and 2026 — has been brutal to watch. But at least their mediocrity has been entirely, painfully, and honestly earned. The Giants’ ownership group might be many things, but outside of the concession prices, I don’t think they’re crooks. They didn’t cook the books or play fast and loose with old folks’ life insurance money. No, they paid for their bland, overhyped product in clean, boring cash. The Dodgers, meanwhile, bought an empire on layaway and hoped the bill would never come due, all while the man cutting the checks hoped the bags could move around forever. So no, the Giants never possessed the foresight to orchestrate a long-term waiting game. They just tripped over their own shoelaces for the better part of a decade. But in the process, they might have accidentally landed safely outside the blast radius. In baseball, it’s always better to be lucky than smart. It’s even better to be stubbornly mediocre while your archrival builds a billion-dollar sandcastle right as the tide rolls in.