Like the Dodgers officially welcomed its latest gazillionaire pitcher to a renovated Dodger Stadium on Tuesday, the churning of bulldozers in the infield was momentarily drowned out by laments around the baseball world.
Boo-hoo! The Dodgers buy another championship!
Damage ! The Dodgers have an unfair advantage!
This is not good! The Dodgers are ruining baseball!
The tears flowed again and again, from Pittsburgh to Minnesota, from Northern California to South Florida, and many wept as the two-time Cy Young Award winner signed. Blake Snell to a $182 million contract officially makes the defending World Series champions bad for the game.
Stop him. Stop him.
Learn more: Blake Snell signing is Dodgers’ latest financial flexibility: ‘This is where you want to play’
Far from being a blight on the major league landscape, the Dodgers front office currently represents everything that is good about the game.
They are intelligent, savvy and fearless. They base their decisions not only on analytics, but also on their attitude. They spend a lot of money, but only because they make a lot of money, and since when is reinvesting revenue back into your fans a bad thing?
Many believe the Dodgers should be grateful for winning the World Series this year and behave humbly like other recent defending champions by cutting corners, cutting costs and getting back into the fold.
Forget it.
These Dodgers intend to turn the clock back, pushing 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. Bear with it. Maybe even learn lessons from it?
The Dodgers don’t need to apologize to anyone for doubling their Commissioner’s Trophy, because they immediately created a championship.
They built it, not bought it.
Andrew Friedman spent nearly a decade creating the kind of smart culture that strengthened the clubhouse and fueled the farm system.
Stan Kasten spent the same time running a Guggenheim business model that restored the fan experience to baseball’s greatest stadium, selling record numbers of tickets while enduring plenty of justified criticism to make big money on television .
Eventually, with the infrastructure in place and new money flowing in, the Dodgers then opened their fat wallets to the players who created the championship.
Players didn’t want to come here just to make a lot of money, they wanted to come to win baseball, which could have happened to any team lucky enough, smart enough, and focused enough.
“Winning is difficult. There are teams that have a lot of resources and are struggling to win,” Friedman said Tuesday. “Winning is difficult. This goes way beyond money. It affects the culture, the type of people you meet.
Everyone is talking 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 the cheapest trades in baseball.
But did you know that during the first five years of his reign, Friedman didn’t sign a player for more than $100 million? He used this time to create an atmosphere where players wanted to be and, soon enough, superstars began signing themselves.
Listen to Snell, who signed so early in the offseason that the stove wasn’t even hot yet.
“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 past few years, we’ve heard the same thing over and over again.
Bets on Mookie 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 fell into the arms of the Dodgers. Shohei Ohtani left the pleasant town of Anaheim because he desperately coveted a championship.
Money was certainly a major factor in all three signings, but the deals were maximized by atmosphere.
Players have seen how other players have improved here. They watched the Dodgers save the careers of Max Muncy and Chris Taylor. They saw how Walker Bühler has become an extinct pressure pitcher here. They’ve seen Will Smith go from an ordinary receiver to a $140 million man.
The final piece of the complex economic puzzle happened last winter with a simple handshake. Ohtani agreed to defer all but $2 million of his annual spending. $700 million contract if it would help the Dodgers pursue championship players. The Dodgers agreed, keeping their promise by signing signings like Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow And Teoscar Hernández. It’s no coincidence that Snell agreed to defer $66 million from his contract. The Ohtani chord becomes stronger and deeper.
“The commitment that we made when we met with him about how aggressive we were going to be to try to win, we feel a certain responsibility and an obligation to fulfill,” Friedman said of Ohtani. “I think whatever happened, our mindset was, ‘Let’s be aggressive to add to the core that we had.’
So they recently added Snell and added a $74 million extension for the most valuable player in the National League Championship Series, Tommy Edman, and I guess they’re not done yet.
“What’s really difficult is winning; what’s even harder to do is rehearse,” Friedman said. “And to a man, every guy we talked to, our players, the coaching staff, everyone was like, ‘Let’s take him back.’ Let’s do everything we can to be able to win. We feel like we have a really talented team in place. So for us it was all about, “What can we do?” What can we add to put ourselves in the best position to achieve this? »
And to all of you who complain about the Dodgers’ passion, does your team have the same fundamental commitment? A chart titled “The Scrooge Index” compiled by Travis Sawchik of The Score would indicate no.
According to the index, the Dodgers ranked second in baseball last season by investing 67 percent of their total revenue in payroll. The Tampa Bay Rays were last with 32%. The Dodgers spend more than half their money on talent as part of an unspoken pact with fans that Kasten, the Dodgers general manager who arrived with Guggenheim in 2012, calls their virtuous cycle.
“It’s our investment in our fans, and our fans continue to invest in us,” Kasten said. “The first day I got here, we said we thought this market would support us if we did the right things, and our fans supported us, and we’re the ones supporting them, so they could support us. support, and so on.”
During spring training, this newspaper may publish a Dodgers story that doesn’t contain a dollar sign. But for now, sit back and enjoy the spending while understanding that this dynasty’s education is about something much richer.
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This story was originally published in Los Angeles Times.
