The Dodgers introduced their latest big-ticket free agent signee on Thursday. Team president Stan Kasten was among those in attendance at the press conference to celebrate Tanner Scott joining the club on a four-year free agent deal.
Asked about the Dodgers’ second consecutive monster offseason, Kasten defended the organization’s spending. “This is really good for baseball. I have no question about it,” he told reporters (link via Fabian Ardaya of The Athletic). Kasten pointed out that MLB’s playoff volatility reduces the chance for any individual team to post a dynastic run of World Series titles. He argued that the Dodgers’ roster-building approach should energize both their own fanbase and those of other clubs who want to see them fail.
“On the entertainment side, which is what we are, it’s really good when there’s one beloved team by their fans who come out in record numbers, leading all of baseball in attendance, while that same team can be hated and lead baseball in road attendance. That’s a win-win for baseball,” Kasten said.
Needless to say, not everyone outside Los Angeles shares that opinion. ESPN’s Jeff Passan published a lengthy column looking at both the Dodgers’ successful Roki Sasaki pursuit and their overall success in both free agency and internal player development. Unsurprisingly, the Dodgers have gotten backlash not only from opposing fans but from rival front offices. That’s in response to both L.A.’s overall willingness to spend and the level of deferrals they’ve included in most of those contracts. Readers are encouraged to check out Passan’s piece in full.
Cot’s Baseball Contracts projects the Dodgers for a luxury tax payroll around $375MM. The Phillies have the second-highest layout at roughly $308MM. The Yankees are the only other team above $300MM by that estimate. The gap between the Dodgers and the 30th-ranked Marlins is almost $300MM.
Passan writes that the payroll disparity (plus the $765MM guarantee which Juan Soto secured from the Mets) has led to a “rekindling” of talks amongst owners who hope for the implementation of a salary cap. New Orioles owner David Rubenstein, who purchased the franchise from the Angelos family last spring, is among those in support.
“I wish it would be the case that we would have a salary cap in baseball the way other sports do, and maybe eventually we will, but we don’t have that now,” Rubenstein told Yahoo Finance at this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos. “I suspect we’ll probably have something closer to (the salary caps and floors) the NFL and the NBA have, but there’s no guarantee of that.”
A cap, of course, would need to be collectively bargained. Major League Baseball’s owners have attempted to implement a cap in many previous CBA negotiations. The MLB Players Association has refused to budge on that issue, as it remains strongly opposed to putting fixed limits on players’ earning power. The luxury tax is designed to curtail spending at the top of the market. It has indeed served as a deterrent for some big-market franchises but obviously is a barrier which teams are free to cross if ownership is willing.
“I think the big city teams have some advantages. Now, in Los Angeles, they have another advantage,” Rubenstein added. “They have Japanese players, [a] number of them that they got like Shohei, and people in Japan really love watching the Dodgers, and they sell a lot of merchandise in Japan for Dodgers players.”
A salary cap would not have directly influenced the Sasaki signing. His earning power was hard-capped by MLB’s international signing limit for amateurs. Sasaki qualified because he hasn’t turned 25. He signed for a $6.5MM bonus that is hundreds of millions of dollars below what he would’ve commanded had he been a true free agent. The Dodgers’ spending may have indirectly influenced his decision — he’s joining the defending champions on a roster that already had a pair of Japanese superstars in Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto — but the geographic and endorsement reasons for his signing are outside the purview of a cap.
Nevertheless, it’s clear that many fans are frustrated by how this offseason has transpired. More than two-thirds of respondents to a recent MLBTR poll indicated they hoped for a salary cap to be implemented during the next round of collective bargaining, which will take place after the 2026 season. Roughly half of respondents said they’d be willing to sacrifice the entire ’27 season to a work stoppage if it meant the league could successfully leverage the players union into agreeing to a cap. MLBTR’s Darragh McDonald and Tim Dierkes discussed the situation in greater detail on this week’s edition of our podcast.
Deferrals are another source of agitation for many fans, particularly after Ohtani’s deal that deferred $680MM of his $700MM guarantee. The Dodgers are neither the first team nor the only current club to defer significant money. The Nationals had deferrals on a few deals (e.g. Max Scherzer, Patrick Corbin) that were crucial to their 2019 World Series win. The Blue Jays deferred around two-thirds of the salary on Anthony Santander’s contract just this week. Still, the Dodgers have deferred a much greater amount of money than anyone else within the past year-plus. Ohtani, Will Smith, Blake Snell, Teoscar Hernández, Tommy Edman and Tanner Scott have all deferred payments on recent contracts.
As MLBTR’s Tim Dierkes covered shortly after the Ohtani signing, the deferrals are not really a workaround the luxury tax. In many cases, those contracts’ net present value — which adjusts the deferrals for inflation — ended up around expectations. As Passan notes, the CBA requires teams to set aside money for the future salaries within two years of signing a contract that includes deferrals. Passan points out that the deferrals and significant signing bonuses, which many of those deals included, are advantageous for the players to minimize taxes under California law though.
None of this will change in this offseason or next. We’re less than two years away from the expiration of the CBA and what seems likely to be another offseason lockout. These conversations will take on greater urgency as that draws nearer.