The Dodgers got the player they wanted and didn’t have to give up farm system prospects or high-value players to do it.
Arte Moreno got to play the luxury tax for 2023 and didn’t even get a sniff of playing in the playoffs.
Today didn’t suck one bit.
Ohtahnis one year salary will be more than how many mlb teams?
2 or 3 would be my guess
8 teams according to Sportstrac.
This is the funniest pitch for Shohei:
https://x.com/el_tragon_de_la/status/1733608618241773725?s=46&t=uVJSfJx5SZFU4gJqFfMgxg
Joe Kelly was always a favorite. Now his wife is on the Christmas Card list.
Dodgers have signed Yamamoto to a 12 year, 325 million contract. Dodgers will be the team to beat in 2024. What a huge signing!
With Ohtani and Yamamoto, the question is who else can they afford to add?
I bet they don’t even make the series.
Ohtani only costs $2M per year, but is a $46M cap hit. Not too bad copared to the stated $700M. Net present value of ~460Mish with the deferred salary, but the agent can claim the 700 for his client while LA really is paying a Judge-type contract plus 30M for the extra pitching potential. Ohtani will make 30, 40, 50M in endorsements however.
The real value is in the bobble heads.
While everyone else is getting the player bobble heads, as Nicholson put it, I like to “scoop the pudding bucket going the other way”.
If they ever have a Bobby Riggs bobblehead night, I would spend a big chunk of my retirement and charter a private jet to get to that game!
The real value is n the Dodger Dogs at the game and a trip to Tommy’s after the game for a Tommyburger.
From Joe Posnanski’s Substack… Essentially, being the best regular season team in baseball is something they already were before the signings, but, with these signings, have they figured out how to win those crap-shoot short series? Read the whole thing, it isn’t that long.
On Thursday, the Dodgers signed Japanese super-ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto to a 12-year contract worth $325 million. Let’s take a brief look at the Dodgers’ signings the last few years.
— In July of 2020, the Dodgers gave Mookie Betts a 12-year, $365 million extension.
— In March of 2022, the Dodgers signed Freddie Freeman to a six-year, $162 million contract.
— Back 10 days or so ago, the Dodgers gave Shohei Ohtani a 10-year, $700 million deal. All but $20 million of it is deferred to 2034.
— At around the same time as the Ohtani deal, the Dodgers traded for Tyler Glasnow and then extended his contract for five years and $136,542,400 (they threw some odd numbers into his player option).
— Yesterday, as mentioned, they signed Yamamoto for 12 years and $325 million.
That’s five players they have signed through at least 2027 (Freeman) but most are signed into the 2030s.
The cost: $1.69 billion, rounding up from Glasnow’s player option.
There is no easy way to describe how much money that is. I mean, you could say that John Sherman bought the Kansas City Royals for less than that, but I’m not sure that gets us there. You could say it’s roughly equal to the Gross Domestic Product of the Solomon Islands, but what do we know about the export business of the Solomon Islands?*
You could say that the 2024 Porsche 911 S/T is priced at $291,650 (including destination charges!) and that with $1.69 billion you could buy 5,794 of them, which would be a neat trick, since Porsche is not even building half that many.
*The Solomon Islands, apparently, were hit hard by a collapse in the tropical timber market and have since relied on palm oil, which is a whole controversial thing that will probably be a topic on “Last Week Tonight” before long, so, you know, maybe it’s best if we just leave this whole Solomon Islands GDP thing alone.
You could say that if there were a million-dollar coin, and it weighed, say, 35 grams (roughly the weight of the $20 eagle gold coin available at the turn of the century), then $1.69 billion of those coins would weigh more than gymnast Simone Biles holding a male Icelandic Sheepdog.
That probably doesn’t get us there, either, but it’s fun to think about.
The point is that while we know $1.69 billion is a lot of money, we probably don’t have the capacity to understand JUST how much money it is. The Dodgers have gone multi-Steinbrenner here, and I don’t think Justin Halpern will mind me quoting his text to Michael Schur, since I imagine it’s pretty representative of many baseball fans: “I’m not even a Padres fan anymore. I’m a fan of every single team that is playing the $@#$*( Dodgers.”
The funny thing about this is: I STILL don’t know that the Dodgers are the best overall team in the National League. The Braves still look better to me, assuming their players don’t wake up one morning and wonder why the heck everybody else is getting paid so much more.
BUT, there’s actually something else I’m thinking about now …
Look, we all know that Dodgers GM Andrew Friedman is a really smart guy. The guy figured out how to win in Tampa Bay, when winning should have been impossible. He came to the Dodgers in 2015, and since then, the Dodgers have not only had the best record in baseball, it’s a runaway:
Records since 2015:
Team W L W% GB
Dodgers 845 512 .623 –
Astros 801 555 .591 43.5
Yankees 771 585 .569 73.5
Guardians 744 610 .549 98.5
Rays 739 617 .545 106.0
If you had told me that the Guardians had the fourth-best record in baseball since 2015, well, no, I wouldn’t have believed that. But that’s not the point here. The point is that Andrew Friedman is really smart, and the Dodgers have won 100-plus games five times in the last seven years, and he and that Dodgers front office seem to know stuff that other people don’t know.
With that in mind, I can’t help but wonder: Are these signings specifically designed to make the Dodgers a postseason killer? See, here’s the thing: The Dodgers have already been the best team in baseball. That simply doesn’t mean as much as it once did, not with the expanded playoffs and short series. The Dodgers, everybody knows, have won just the one World Series since 2015, and that one in the bizarro pandemic season. Just as a reminder:
2015: Lost to the Mets in five games
2016: Lost to the destiny Cubs in six games
2017: Lost to the trashcan Astros in seven games
2018: Lost to the Mookie Red Sox in five games (later signed Mookie)
2019: Lost to the destiny Nationals in five games
2020: Won the World Series by winning four playoff series, including a tense seven-gamer with Atlanta.
2021: Lost to the Freddie Freeman Braves in six games (later signed Freeman)
2022: Lost in four games to a Padres team that they beat by 22 games in the standings
2023: Swept in three straight by a Diamondbacks team that they beat by 16 games in the standings
You can see the pain there. And it seems to me that, ever since Moneyball, we have sort of given really good teams that lose in the playoffs something of a pass by talking about how short-series are crapshoots. I totally believe that to be true—short series are crapshoots—but I also believe that it’s Andrew Friedman’s JOB (and the job of his front office) to change that dynamic and take some of the chance and luck out of winning those short series.
You might say: That’s impossible! Baseball doesn’t work like that!
But it isn’t impossible. There are ways to give your team the best chance to win a short series. And because I think Andrew Friedman is a smart guy, I’m guessing that he is spending not just a lot of his time but pretty much ALL of his time trying to unlock that mystery. Losing short series is the Dodgers’ core problem, the only problem that matters. If they spend $1.69 billion on five players, and win 115 games, and promptly lose to an 84-78 Rockies team that they beat by 31 games in the standings, well, almost nobody is going to think the signings worked.
What I’m thinking is that by signing two potentially dominant pitchers in Yamamoto and Glasnow (and, you would hope, eventually a third in Shohei), Friedman is betting that those guys, along with the return of Walker Buehler and the continued development of Bobby Miller and so on, will make them invincible come playoff time. What I’m thinking is that he and his folks have pored over all the data they can find about what wins in the playoffs, and they have developed countless secret theories, and then they acted and spent all the money in the world to build an October Death Star.
Of course, only time will tell. For now, right, I can’t wait to see how good Yamamoto will be and what it will look like to have Mookie-Freddie-Shohei hitting back-to-back-to-back. But I’m also looking to see if the Dodgers unlocked something to do with the postseason.
The older I get, the more baseball lures me to the couch on hot summer days. The more you watch a team, the more you want those players to do well. If you don’t catch the game, you’ll check the standings. My earliest memories are when I was about 4 or 5 years old when my family lived in Torrance.
So, yeah, I’ve become a casual Dodgers fan. It’s more enjoyable than mowing the lawn, definitely more satisfying than sprinkler repair. It’s a nice pastime during the summer when there’s no other sports happening, except golf and NASCAR.
The Dodgers have made some astute trades recently, they have a lot of money and a massive fan base. The laid-back, west coast version of the Yankees, if you will (except for the fights with Giants fans). I completely understand why other fans don’t like them.
But as a Dodgers fan I don’t take these big deals seriously, I don’t get amped up thinking “this will be the year!”. Why not?
Because the great equalizer in baseball is …baseball, itself. The Dodgers and Yankees could together spend half the nation’s GDP on their rosters, and it doesn’t really mean doodley squat.
Pete Rose gets a large number of adjectives connected to his name, most of them negative. But even if he was guilty of it, his deflection in trying to defend himself is true: Only idiots bet on baseball.
At the end of the day, baseball is still about trying to fail less than expected, and as a team tries to string together enough non-failures to win it all, that likelihood is 95% chance, with a 5% relationship to skill.
The futility of trying to buy a World Serious Championship can be summed up in one brilliant Onion headline: “Yankees assure world championship by signing every player in baseball”
I can remember when the Angels had the top RHP and LHP in all of baseball, a top 5 catcher, a top tier infield, and Rod Carew! …and still couldn’t win the AL West.
Tommy Lasorda said it best. “There are 60 games each season you will definitely win. There are also 60 games each season you will definitely lose. It’s the 42 games left that determine whether you will be playing in the playoffs; and the best part is no one knows which is going to be which.”
As a Dodgers fan, I am ecstatic. I’d buy a pair of season tickets, but I going to guess that two season tickets are going to cost more than the NIL payments for a decent QB.
Go Dodger Blue.
BTW, Clayton Kershaw has been one of the weaknesses of the Dodgers’ post-season over the past decade. He’s a Hall of Fame pitcher who could never get it done in the playoffs. It’s hard to win when your #1 pitcher on the staff cannot be trusted for the playoffs. I don’t blame him, and it might just be bad luck, but damn there seemed to be a correlation between the playoffs and his awful pitching.
Went to Dodger Stadium store after the Yamamoto signing. Let’s just say the local Asian (obv more so Japanese) community is HYPED! They didn’t have Yamamoto gear out just yet but Shoehei and “Showtime Shoehei” shirts were flying off the shelf. I didn’t realize the extra seats sold per game the Dodgers sell per game is 90 million $ more than any other ball club. The franchise is investing in product. This is what Billionaire owners should be doing with the money.
Baseball is generally a money maker for the owners. Then again a lot of Billionaires buy teams for tax write offs.
Looking at the contracts, the additional revenue and the stadium size this was a much easier move for The Dodgers. Now, I gotta run to Crypto to watch The Lakers beat the Celtics.
The Japanese are absolutely crazed about Ohtani, they actually have an Ohtani Cam that never moves away from him even when he is sitting on the bench. The Tokyo Airport has Ohtani merchandise everywhere. They were the same for Ichiro back in the day
The games are going to be a spectacle in the best possible way.