Watching the baseball playoffs this week, I was struck by the parallels between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Eli Lilly. Both franchises spend a lot of money and always appear to come out on top.
Two storied franchises: one, a star player in my work life; the other, the bane of my leisure existence.
Eli Lilly and the Los Angeles Dodgers are both at the top of their respective industries. In this time of outrageous revenues, Lilly last year became the first pharma company to hit a $1 trillion market cap, while the Dodgers had a payroll of around $430 million in 2026, nearly $75 million higher than the runner up, the New York Mets.
Watching the Dodgers defeat the Atlanta Braves in the Major League Baseball (MLB) playoffs this week, clinching the division series on Wednesday night, I was struck again by the similarities between the L.A. franchise and the pharma that always seems to come out ahead: Eli Lilly.
Show me the money
Let’s start with Lilly. The Indianapolis-based company has soundly overtaken its chief rival, the Danish pharma Novo, in biopharma’s trendiest modality: GLP-1s. Last year, Lilly’s weight loss and diabetes GLP-1s, Zepbound and Mounjaro, combined to top $35 billion in revenue, besting a longtime bestseller in Merck’s blockbuster checkpoint inhibitor Keytruda.
As the big bucks roll in, Lilly is quickly rolling them back into the industry. Over the past decade, the obesity juggernaut has bought out more biotechs than any of the other top 12 pharmas by revenue, according to a recent BioSpace tally, with 2026’s total now topping $30 billion.
Meanwhile, over in the MLB, the Dodgers have won back-to-back world championships: over my Toronto Blue Jays last year—by a score of 5-4 in the eleventh inning of a heartbreaking game 7—and over the New York Yankees in just five games in 2024. And like Lilly, they’re able to bankroll their expensive roster. The team has paid out $700 million to two-way pitching and hitting superstar Shohei Ohtani over the past decade, and recently acquired the biggest fish available, two-time Cy Young award-winning starting pitcher Tarik Skubal, in a trade with the Detroit Tigers, absorbing a portion of the superstar’s one-year, $32 million salary.
The investments are clearly paying off. The Dodgers have made the playoffs 14 years running, and as for Lilly, the pharma continues to churn out clinical wins that seem to defy the industry’s average failure rate of around 90%.
But money isn’t everything, as the 2026 baseball season has shown. Despite having two of the league’s highest payrolls, the Jays (beset by injuries) and Mets (reason unclear) missed out on October completely, while two of the MLB’s lowest spenders, the Tampa Bay Rays and Chicago White Sox are still alive. So what are the other magic ingredients?
Diversity wins
While best known for its GLP-1 franchise—Zepbound for weight loss and Mounjaro for type 2 diabetes—Lilly is much more than a one-trick pony. The company also markets one of only two disease-modifying therapies for Alzheimer’s disease, Kisunla, and invests heavily in all of its core therapeutic verticals: cardiometabolic health, immunology, neuroscience and cancer.
Both organizations also clearly see the value in expanding their horizons outside of North America.
Last month, Lilly set aside up to $3.25 billion to work with Beijing-based InnoCare Pharma to develop therapies for five targets with critical unmet medical needs. While the partners did not disclose the targets, InnoCare is focused on cancer and autoimmune disease. Two months earlier, Lilly paid up to $1.9 billion to deepen its pact with Shanghai-based small-molecule and immuno-oncology developer Abbisko Therapeutics. On the therapeutic diversity side, Lilly became an early adopter of psychedelic therapeutics, picking up AtaiBeckley for up to $3.8 billion.
As for the Dodgers, they are one of the MLB’s biggest importers of talent from Japan. In addition to Ohtani—who is now earning comparisons to Babe Ruth—the Dodgers roster includes starting pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, whose multitude of pitches have left myriad Jays, Yankees and Braves spinning in circles at the plate. And in 2017, the team’s longtime manager, Dave Roberts, became the first skipper of Asian heritage and second Black manager—after Toronto’s own Cito Gaston—to lead his team to a World Series title.
Parallels aside, there are of course massive differences between these two very different franchises—and I’m only cheering for one. I love watching Eli Lilly funnel their massive revenue back into R&D to fuel those next life-saving therapies and maintain the health of the biotech-pharma ecosystem.
The Dodgers, on the other hand, pay out astronomical salaries to individuals in the hopes of staying baseball’s best, year after year. To the Dodgers, I say, give someone else a chance.
