As the Dodgers officially welcomed their latest gazillionaire pitcher to a remodeling Dodger Stadium on Tuesday, the churning of the bulldozers in the infield was momentarily drowned out by the whining around the baseball world.
Boo-hoo! The Dodgers are buying another championship!
For shame! The Dodgers have an unfair advantage!
It’s not right! The Dodgers are ruining baseball!
On and on the tears flowed, from Pittsburgh to Minnesota, from Northern California to South Florida, with many blubbering that signing two-time Cy Young Award-winning Blake Snell to a $182-million contract officially makes the defending World Series champions bad for the game.
Stop it. Just stop it.
Far from being a blight on the major-league landscape, right now the Dodgers’ front office is everything that is good about the game.
They are smart, savvy and fearless. They base decisions not only on analytics but also attitude. They spend a lot of money, but only because they make a lot of money, and since when is reinvesting revenue into your fans a bad thing?
Many think the Dodgers should be grateful to win the World Series this year and humbly behave like other recent defending champions by cutting corners and reducing costs and receding back into the pack.
Forget that.
These Dodgers are intent on running it back, going even harder for an encore, sparing no expense in an attempt to become baseball’s first back-to-back champions in a quarter-century.
Deal with it. Endure it. Maybe even learn from it?
The Dodgers need not apologize to anyone for doubling down on a Commissioner’s Trophy, because they have created a championship the right away.
They’ve built it, not bought it.
Andrew Friedman spent nearly a decade creating the sort of smart culture that strengthened the clubhouse and stocked the farm system.
Stan Kasten spent that same time running a Guggenheim business model that restored the fan experience at baseball’s largest stadium, selling record numbers of tickets while enduring much justified criticism to score big TV money.
Finally, with the infrastructure in place and the new money flowing, the Dodgers then opened their fatted wallet for the players that created the championship.
Players didn’t want to come here only for the big money, they wanted to come for the winning baseball, which is something that could have happened with any team that was lucky enough and brainy enough and focused enough.
“Winning is hard. There are teams that have a lot of resources that have trouble winning,” Friedman said Tuesday. “Winning is hard. It goes way beyond money. It gets to culture, the type of people you have around.”
Everyone talks about the nearly $2 billion in committed money, the more than $1 billion owed in deferred payments from 2028 to 2046, and a current annual payroll that will exceed $350 million, more than triple some of baseball’s cheaper operations.
But did you know that for the first five years of his reign, Friedman did not sign a player for more than $100 million? He used that time to build an atmosphere where players wanted to be and, soon enough, the superstars essentially began signing themselves.
Listen to Snell, who signed so early in the offseason that the stove was not yet even hot.
“It was really easy,” he said of his choice. “…You look at the team, you look at what they’ve built, what they’re doing, it’s just something you want to be a part of.”
Over the last couple of years, one has heard the same thing over and over.
Mookie Betts was traded here, liked what he saw and signed his giant contract four months later. Freddie Freeman wanted to stay in Atlanta, didn’t feel the love and quickly moved into the Dodgers’ embrace. Shohei Ohtani moved up the road from pleasant Anaheim because he desperately coveted a championship.
Money was a major factor in all three signings, for sure, but the offers were maximized by the atmosphere.
Players saw how other players got better here. They saw the Dodgers rescue the careers of Max Muncy and Chris Taylor. They saw how young Walker Buehler grew into a lights-out pressure pitcher here. They saw Will Smith go from ordinary catcher to a $140-million man.
The final piece to the complicated economic puzzle occurred last winter with a simple handshake. Ohtani agreed to defer all but $2 million annually of his $700-million contract if it would help the Dodgers pursue championship players. The Dodgers agreed, living up to their promise by signing the likes of Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow and Teoscar Hernández. It is no coincidence that Snell agreed to defer $66 million of his contract. The Ohtani agreement grows stronger and deeper.
“The pledge that we made when we met with him about how aggressive we were going to be to try to win, we feel some responsibility and obligation to fulfill that,” Friedman said of Ohtani. “I think no matter what, our mindset was, ‘Let’s be aggressive to add to the core that we had.’”
So they recently added Snell, and tacked on a $74-million extension for National League Championship Series most valuable player Tommy Edman, and here’s guessing they’re not done yet.
“What’s really difficult is to win; what’s even harder to do is repeat,” Friedman said. “And to a man, all the guys that we talked to, our players, coaching staff, everyone was of the mind, ‘Let’s run it back. Let’s do everything we can to be in a position to win.’ We feel like we’ve got a really talented team in place. So everything for us was centered around, ‘What can we do? What can we add to put ourselves in the best position to do that?’”
And to all of you who are complaining about the Dodgers’ passion, does your team have the same basic commitment? A chart called “The Scrooge Index” compiled by Travis Sawchik of the Score would indicate it does not.
According to the index, the Dodgers ranked second in baseball last season by investing 67% of their total revenue into payroll. The Tampa Bay Rays were last at 32%. The Dodgers spend more than half of their big money on talent as part of an unspoken pact with fans that Kasten, the Dodgers’ chief executive who arrived with Guggenheim in 2012, refers to as their virtuous cycle.
”This is our investment in our fans, and our fans keep investing in us,” Kasten said. “The first day I got here, we said we think this market would support us if we do the right things, and our fans have supported us, and this is us supporting them, so they can support us, and on and on.”
Come spring training, there actually may appear a Dodgers story in this newspaper that doesn’t contain a dollar sign. But for now, sit back and enjoy the spending while understanding that the nurturing of this dynasty is about something much richer.
