NL

The Ohtani MVP bobbleheads — which feature a smiling Ohtani in his Dodgers uniform, holding his NL MVP award in his right hand and resting a bat on his shoulder with his left hand — have been a hot seller on the resale market, with more than 250 having sold on eBay since Wednesday.

Both calculations put the payrolls of the NL powerhouses within 1% of one another.

And starters Michael King, Dylan Cease and Yu Darvish are back from a team that won 93 regular-season games, a wild-card series and pushed the Dodgers to the limit in a five-game NL Division Series.

The next two years were abject disappointments, with the team getting upset in back-to-back NL Division Series eliminations.

The team had failed to repeat its title in 2021, when a 106-win club flamed out in the NL Championship Series.