There’s not a lot to like about the Dodgers winning the World Series; it’s precisely what MLB had wanted when they wrote their script for the 2024 season, with golden boy Shohei Ohtani having one of the greatest seasons in baseball history and then capping it off with a world championship. It validated the importance of spending money, because the Dodgers spent money like they had the infinite money code in Sim City, and there was no plucky Cinderella squad to dethrone them and give hearty lols to baseball fans outside the greater Los Angeles area.
But personally, I think worst of all is that it opened the door for Dodgers fans, most of whom are fairweather front-running troglodytes whom it’s clear to see how short of a time they’ve been Dodger or baseball fans, based on how loud they are on the internet about their sudden unyielding fandom of the team. I haven’t seen such fervent sore winning from any fanbase, including Philadelphia; those cocksuckers flip a few cars, set fire to them, have a parade, and then it’s back to normal the following week.
The thing is, now that the Dodgers have won an actual championship, as opposed to the Mickey Mouse COVID World Series from 2020, all these slimes claiming to be Dodgers fans are all over the fucking place now, celebrating everything the team does, which also happens to be MLB’s favorite squad, much like all the memes that exist about how the NFL so flagrantly favors the Kansas City Chiefs.
And when there’s such blatant favoritism, then the rich tend to get richer, and the Dodgers have made a lot of news during the offseason, not just with Ohtani winning the National League MVP that was a formality, but the fact that despite the fact that they committed over a billion dollars to free agents last winter, they’ve invented some more currency and have gone ahead and committed even more money to signing Balakey Snell (5 years, $182M) and extending Tommy Edman (5 years, $74M).
Naturally, this raises a lot of questions on how the Dodgers are funding their roster full of All-Stars, MVPs and Cy Young winners, at top-dollar contracts, and the answer is really quite simple: the Dodgers are spamming the ever-living fuck out of deferring money, and are completely comfortable at accruing colossal amounts of debt that will be due to be paid way down the line.
What a lot the people who are crying foul on the internet don’t really understand is that what the Dodgers are doing is 100% completely legal and allowed, it’s just the fact that there’s no team in history that has been this flagrant and so quick and willing to basically sign almost every one of their big-name free agents to deferred money deals. Most teams are owned and operated by businesses and many businesses tend to err on the side of risk-averse, and being risk-averse usually means an aversion to accruing debts, especially those of which are measured in literal hundreds of millions of dollars.
There was a stretch when the Washington Nationals signed a noteworthy number of players to deals where monies would be deferred, and over the last two years, I’ve made it a tradition to construct hypothetical rosters of inactive players still making deferred money, named after the most notorious deferred deal in history, Bobby Bonilla, courtesy of the Mets (and Orioles).
But if not for the fact that no deal was more publicly notorious than Bobby Bonilla, due to its enormous length and how $5M turned into $38M, the whole notion of deferred money would undoubtedly be associated to the Dodgers otherwise, who have been employing this tactic for way longer than people might realize, especially the fairweather fans who became lifelong fans a month ago. Off the top of my head, Andruw Jones and Manny Ramirez both made money from the Dodgers for years after they had departed the team, and this was at a time before the team was owned by Guggenheim, the group many are crediting for the ingenious abuse of the system.
Obviously, recency bias is a thing, and the current narrative can only talk about the resurgence of the franchise over the last decade, where the Dodgers have now captured two World Series, and played in four of them, while making the playoffs nearly every year. And as the rich have gotten richer every year, bringing in more free agents, more all-stars and more Japanese guys, it’s become very public the whole deferring money strategy that the organization has been spamming to great effect.
Since 2020, the Dodgers have amassed nearly a billion dollars in deferred salary debt, out of nearly $1.65 billion in contracts; and here’s the kicker, that’s just to seven players:
- Shohei Ohtani, $700M contract, $680M deferred (2034-2043)
- Mookie Betts, $365M contract, $115M deferred (2033-2044)
- Balakey Snell, $182M contract, $62M deferred (Years TBD)
- Freddie Freeman, $162M contract, $57M deferred (2028-2040)
- Will Smith, $149M contract, $50M deferred (2034-2043)
- Tommy Edman, $74M contract, $25M deferred (2035-2044)
- Teoscar Hernandez, $23.5M contract, $8.5 deferred (2030-2039)
Obviously, this is massively weighted by Shohei Ohtani’s gargantuan deal, but even without it, the Dodgers are still leaps and bounds ahead of pretty much the rest of MLB combined when it comes to deferred money. It’s looking like there’s going to be some stretches between 2030 and 2040 where the Dodgers could realistically be paying for an entire franchise’s payroll for a bunch of guys who could either be out of baseball or be far into their decline phases of their careers, to which I’m sure will be some colorful topics of discussion in the future.
Here’s the thing though: even if the Dodgers are destined to be in The Big Short-level depths of financial hell in the future, if it means they run the table and win two or three World Series in this massive window that they’ve opened up in the present, I still think it’s probably worth it. Basement baseball bean counters are always trying to quantify the cost of a single win, but the Dodgers have been trying to quantify the cost of a World Series based on how they’ve been spending money over the last few years, and the amount of success they’ve enjoyed during it.
My friends and I have often talked about the concept of fan equity upon winning a championship in any sport, and regardless of our differing opinions of number of years, we all agree that a championship in one year tends to soften the demand for more championships in ensuing years, and it seems like the Dodgers are hell bent on trying to amass multiple World Series victories with these freakish Frankenstein rosters of All-Stars, MVPs and Cy Young winners in the present, before all their talent erodes and their deferments kick in, to which the team will gut and rebuild during this time, and I have this suspicion that the Guggenheim group is probably already thinking about then being a time in which they’ll consider selling the franchise to colossal profits.
They’re also probably banking on the rate of inflation softening these numbers a good bit by the time we get to the year 2028-2030, when some of the deferred payments begin to initialize. That’s one small victory the Dodgers got out of all these deals, not allowing them to insert an interest or inflation clause in their deferrals, allowing the team to have a flat, known debts for the foreseeable future.
But the joke hypothetical is that the Dodgers are probably most likely anticipating that the world will end, or some sort of apocalyptic, fall of civilization type of world event occurring that effectively wipes out the world’s economy or, at the very least, destroys the credit agencies of the country like in Fight Club, where they would then hope that their debts that are due magically become nullified.
Ultimately, I’m not mad at the Dodgers for exploiting and spamming deferred money. Like I said, this is something that every team is allowed to do, it’s just that they choose not to, because it’s usually a negative business practice to willingly accrue debt. The Yankees and Mets are like the Lannisters who prefer to always pay their debts, no matter how big they are, while the rest of MLB is a bunch of low-born scrubs who prefer to just not spend money, despite the economic benefit to fielding legitimate contenders.
The Dodgers are basically treating this like a very expensive version of Moneyball, in that they’re capitalizing on an under-utilized methodology, and if it continues to work as it’s been doing over the last few years, who’s to say that they’re not in the right for doing it?
I still dislike the team very much in the present, even if they do have Freddie Freeman. The baseball fan in me always dislikes rich teams getting richer, especially when they have the most obnoxious sore winner fairweather fans in the world, getting to gloat and use the royal we, and be happy that their shitty team is exploiting Mickey Mouse money to great effect. The best outcomes over the next few years will always involve World Series with the Dodgers as far away from them as possible, the further the better.
