If you have a passing interest in the world of sports, it’s likely that you’ve heard about the LA Dodgers’ recent dominance. After spending over a billion dollars in the 2023 offseason (including $700 million to sign two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani) the Blue Crew had a season to remember, besting the New York Yankees last October to win their eighth World Series in franchise history.
For most teams, the offseason following a championship is rather uneventful. While 29 other teams scramble to match up to the competition, the champions generally prefer to stand pat, re-sign their key players and wait for the next season to begin. It’s sports conventionalism at its finest — why mess with a good thing? But as we’ve learned in the past couple of years, this Dodgers team is anything but conventional, and their actions this offseason have shown the entire league that the Dodgers don’t just want to win — they’re out for blood.
The Dodgers’ relentless drive to improve has resulted in the team breaking out the war chest and assembling a squad for the ages. Since December, the team has signed two-time Cy Young winning pitcher Blake Snell, added two All-Star closers in Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates and bolstered their outfield depth with Michael Conforto. If that wasn’t enough, the team also landed Roki Sasaki — the most hyped up pitching prospect in years — for pennies on the dollar, as international signing rules limit Sasaki to earning just $25 million on his contract. Couple these signings with the team re-signing nearly every player from last year’s team, and you have a baseball Death Star that makes the rest of MLB look like a little league squad. It wasn’t a cheap offseason by any means (as the Dodgers shelled out nearly $500 million), but it’s a small price to pay to assemble what is quite possibly the most talented baseball team of all time.
Unsurprisingly, the Dodgers’ spending spree has drawn the ire of the baseball world. It’s not shocking that a league full of notoriously stingy owners would balk at such extravagant expenditure, but the past few months have seen an unprecedented level of Dodger hatred. Anonymous executives from other clubs have even accused the Dodgers of colluding with unsigned players — a claim that MLB investigation found to be baseless. It seems that rather than matching the Dodgers’ ambition, MLB executives would rather cry foul as their teams continue to lag behind. The thing is, the Dodgers haven’t broken any league rules. They’ve simply chosen to spend when other teams do not. Nothing is stopping these teams (and their rich ownership groups) from acquiring talent as the Dodgers have — nothing except their own reluctance to open their checkbooks.
Even though the Dodgers have technically operated within the rules, many draw their criticism from other teams simply not having the spending power and franchise allure that they do. Despite Commissioner of Baseball Rob Manfred voicing his opinion that what the Dodgers are doing is not bad for the sport, many are still raising the question of whether the Dodgers have “ruined baseball.”
One valid critique is the argument over deferred money — the idea that a player will take less money in the front end of his contract to allow the team to spend more in the present, creating incredibly backloaded deals that pay players well into their 40s and even 50s. The Dodgers have over $1 billion in deferred payments while no other team has more than $50 million. On average, Dodgers’ stars have between one-fourth and one-third of their contract money deferred, unless, of course, your name is Shohei Ohtani and $680 of that $700 million is deferred (which was actually Ohtani’s idea). While deferrals allow the team to spend more in the short term and continue to field a championship roster, not every team may be willing to take such financial risks. Deferrals are not a new concept and have been commonplace in the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) for decades. However, this may be subject to change as the CBA expires in December 2026. Well-known examples include the contracts of Ken Griffey Jr, Bruce Sutter, and the legendary Bobby Bonilla whose name is enshrined in history for the deferred payments he still receives from the Mets yearly, despite not touching the diamond since 2001.
Deferrals may not be a new idea, but being so flush with cash in recent years has allowed the Dodgers to level up the concept to a new height not previously thought attainable. Interestingly, the Dodgers no longer have the largest payroll in baseball according to Spotrac, after being recently usurped by the New York Mets, who spent $765 million on a 15 year deal for Juan Soto among other smaller signings. Obviously, if you add the deferred money, the Dodgers would blow every other team out of the water. This has prompted some to propose something of a deferred money tax that would function similarly to the regular luxury tax, where the team would be taxed a portion of the deferred money remaining on the contract yearly. Have the Dodgers become so powerful that league rules which specifically apply to only one team need to be implemented?
What’s more likely is that the Dodgers have created such a powerful winning culture in only a few years that other fans simply can’t stand it. Every new free agent that signs with the team has the same reason: it was the best available option to win. Only a year removed from being called “playoff chokers,” the Dodgers behemoth threatens to strong-arm themselves into a dynasty of World Series championships.
Contact Mac Ribner and Ben Petteruti at ribner@oxy.edu and petteruti@oxy.edu
