{"id":50323,"date":"2024-11-30T22:34:00","date_gmt":"2024-12-01T03:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=50323"},"modified":"2024-12-05T22:34:10","modified_gmt":"2024-12-06T03:34:10","slug":"pretty-sure-the-dodgers-are-banking-on-the-world-ending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=50323","title":{"rendered":"Pretty sure the Dodgers are banking on the world ending"},"content":{"rendered":"

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There\u2019s not a lot to like about the Dodgers winning the World Series; it\u2019s 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.\u00a0 It validated the importance of spending money, because the Dodgers spent money like they had the infinite money code in Sim City<\/em>, and there was no plucky Cinderella squad to dethrone them and give hearty lols to baseball fans outside the greater Los Angeles area.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s clear to see how short of a time they\u2019ve been Dodger or baseball fans, based on how loud they are on the internet about their sudden unyielding fandom of the team.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t 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\u2019s back to normal the following week.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s favorite squad, much like all the memes that exist about how the NFL so flagrantly favors the Kansas City Chiefs.<\/span><\/p>\n

And when there\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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).<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

What a lot the people who are crying foul on the internet don\u2019t really understand is that what the Dodgers are doing is 100% completely legal and allowed, it\u2019s just the fact that there\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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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\u2019ve 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).<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 And as the rich have gotten richer every year, bringing in more free agents, more all-stars and more Japanese guys, it\u2019s become very public the whole deferring money strategy that the organization has been spamming to great effect.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since 2020, the Dodgers have amassed nearly a billion dollars<\/em> in deferred salary debt, out of nearly $1.65 billion in contracts; and here\u2019s the kicker, that\u2019s just to seven players:<\/span><\/p>\n