Depending who you ask, the Dodgers enter the 2025 season as one of the best or one of the worst things for the sport.
They’re a blueprint more teams need to follow, an example to less-willing clubs of what it means to really care about winning. Or, they’re a machine too powerful to copy, a behemoth benefiting from numerous revenue streams created by the addition of Shohei Ohtani and an enormous $8.35 billion local television deal that other teams can’t possibly compete against.
They’ve perfected MLB’s economic system by pouring their vast resources back into the club at an unprecedented rate. Or, they’ve broken it by exploiting a structure that needs an overhaul to correct the vast disparities.
As the Dodgers embark on the 2025 season, their extraordinary spending has drawn cheers locally, jeers nationally and eyes internationally. Appropriately, the reigning champions will start their title defense Tuesday in Tokyo with one of the deepest rosters ever assembled, a group that now features three of Japan’s most gifted talents.
“The Dodgers have gone out and done everything possible, always within the rules that currently exist, to put the best possible team on the field, and I think that’s a great thing for the game,” commissioner Rob Manfred said at spring training media day. “That type of competitive spirit is what people want to see.”
And yet, passionate emails in Manfred’s inbox tend to paint a different, more aggrieved picture.
“By the same token … it’s clear that we have fans in some markets that are concerned about the ability of the team in their market to compete with the financial resources of the Dodgers,” Manfred continued. “And I think if we’ve been consistent on one point, we try to listen to our fans on topics like this.”
The juxtaposition is inevitable when the sport’s model franchise also highlights its troubling imbalance.
On the low end of the payroll spectrum are the Marlins and White Sox, two rebuilding teams who aren’t making an effort to win games this year, as evidenced by luxury-tax payrolls that currently sit close to $87 million apiece. On the high end are the Dodgers, whose luxury-tax payroll hovers close to a record $400 million at a time when only three other teams — the Mets, Phillies and Yankees — project to be above $300 million.
Whether right or wrong, the Dodgers’ spending has become the story, much more so than the six teams set to enter the 2025 season with a payroll of $100 million or lower. MLB players, and the executive director of the MLB Players Association, would argue that’s not right.
“It’s not so much an issue about what the Dodgers are doing,” Tony Clark told FOX Sports last month. “It’s why two-thirds of the teams have decided to sit out on improving themselves to be the last team standing. That’s a bigger question.”
To put it another way, a $160 million payroll would be close to league average. For the Dodgers, who added two of the top three starters on the market, the top reliever and arguably the top outfielder behind Juan Soto among a litany of moves this offseason, $160 million is about how far they are projected over the CBT threshold.
“I think with the position we’re in right now and the success we’ve had, it puts us in position to be even more aggressive,” president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said. “It’s about doing everything we can to maintain. We’ve talked about this a lot – there have been a lot of large-revenue teams that had a run of success and then fallen off a cliff and taken years and years to build back.”
That does not seem likely to be an issue for the Dodgers anytime soon.
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Already equipped with an enviable infrastructure, copious star power and one of baseball’s deepest farm systems, they also have the backing of an ownership group pushing the payroll to heights previously unseen. Last offseason, they committed $1.4 billion to overhaul a roster that would go on to win the 2024 World Series. Unwilling to rest in their quest to repeat, and having just seen how pitching plans can unravel in an instant, they went on to spend nearly half a billion more this offseason on signings and extensions.
“When I say I can’t be critical of the Dodgers, they’re doing what the system allows,” Manfred said. “If I’m going to be critical of something, it’s not going to be the Dodgers, it’s going to be the system.”
That system can’t be changed until after the 2026 season, when the current collective bargaining agreement ends. Regardless, calls for a hard cap, which owners have long desired and players have stood firmly against, are sure to escalate ahead of the next set of labor discussions. Those calls will only get louder if the Dodgers win it all again.
Neither the current soft cap — after exceeding the highest threshold, the Dodgers are taxed at 110% for every dollar they spend over $301 million — nor the championship title they won have deterred their desire to add. Instead, they’ve turned what was already one of baseball’s most gifted rosters into a potentially historic one.
“The crazy part is, you think it’s like, ‘OK, once we sign someone, that’s it,” Blake Snell, their biggest expenditure this offseason, said. “Then we sign another guy, and you go, ‘That’s it.’ And then it keeps going. To see how invested they are in us winning and investing as much as possible…it’s pretty special.”
PECOTA standings project the Dodgers for 103 wins; the next closest team is the Braves at 92. FanGraphs offers a more modest take, with the Dodgers at 96 wins, three ahead of the Braves. But FanGraphs also gives the Dodgers a 23.2% chance to win the World Series. No other team is above 15.7%.
As Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten will point out, that doesn’t guarantee anything. He would argue what they’re doing is actually a good thing for the sport.
“Right now, we’re 3-to-1 against to win the World Series,” Kasten said in February. “That’s 70-75% likely that someone else will win the World Series. So obviously, it hasn’t damaged the game competitively.
“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.”
Indeed, for all the complaining about the Dodgers and the unfairness of their inexorable operation, they were one game away on two separate occasions from a third straight first-round exit last season. After overcoming a litany of injuries to finish the job in 2024, they spent big — and in a way unlike any reigning champion in recent history — in an effort to avoid both the hangover effect of playing deep into October and the need to patch their holes at the deadline again.
Those within the Dodgers’ organization don’t see that as something to be admonished.
“Fans are pouring their hard-earned money on us,” Freddie Freeman said. “To see the organization and ownership put it back into the team, I think that’s why everyone’s so happy. There’s a buzz around here.”
“What are we supposed to do, you know?” Mookie Betts asked. “We want to win.”
It’s worth noting that it has taken far more than a blank checkbook for the Dodgers to get to this point. Take the two aforementioned players. The Dodgers couldn’t have acquired Betts without the Red Sox deciding they wouldn’t pay him what he was worth, and they couldn’t have signed Freeman without the Braves deciding to move on from him.
Yes, they’ve identified both the correct franchise cornerstones to build around and flexed their financial might, most recently giving Snell their fifth different nine-figure commitment since the start of the 2024 offseason. But they’ve also revealed their attractiveness as a destination separate from their ability to spend.
Roki Sasaki’s signing bonus was limited by international amateur restrictions, yet he still picked the Dodgers this winter. Teoscar Hernández surrendered more money elsewhere — about $5-6 million — to stay in Los Angeles.
“A lot of it for us is obviously players want to be in a place that they know that ownership is committed to winning,” general manager Brandon Gomes said. “On top of that, we take a lot of pride in our family programs, the culture, how we treat our players, doing everything first class. Having that reputation throughout the game that we take care of our players and their families is important to us.”
Perhaps the best example of their standing among players around the league is the deferrals that have carried many of their recent deals to the finish line — and, in turn, become a talking point of frustration for opposing fans and owners, despite Friedman calling it “kind of a lazy narrative.”
“I think everybody’s making deferred money jokes now,” Gomes acknowledged.
CBT figures are determined using the average annual value of each player’s contract on the 40-man roster, and deferrals, which are calculated by present-day value for luxury tax purposes, can help lessen the blow. Friedman has described them as “a lever” and “a useful tool” to close a deal.
And he has used them frequently.
The Dodgers will owe more than $1 billion in deferrals through 2046. For each contract with deferred payments, they will have to fund the future amount they owe within a year and a half. That’s not a problem for Guggenheim Partners, an investment firm ownership group that can put the money to work immediately.
As Friedman put it: “We’re not going to wake up in 2035 and be like, ‘Oh my God, that’s right, we have this money due,'”
Ohtani’s jaw-dropping $680 million in deferrals on his $700 million contract takes up a majority of that amount, but the contracts of Hernández, Ohtani, Freeman, Betts, Tanner Scott, Will Smith and Tommy Edman have also combined for around $366 million in deferred money, adding to the Dodgers’ flexibility in the present. Many of those players received hefty signing bonuses to mitigate the amount they’re pushing to the future, an especially attractive option for players who don’t want to be taxed in California.
“It’s just smart business,” Edman said. “Smart for the team and for players as well.”
In the current CBA, there are no limits to the amount a team can defer. The Dodgers have utilized that system to their advantage, though any team is capable of offering similar salary structures, as Edman will point out.
He doesn’t believe deferrals are why people are actually mad at what they’re doing.
“I think that the total volume of money, just the pure number of free agents we’ve signed, is the reason people are complaining,” Edman said.
Whether it’s the way they’ve structured their deals or the sheer total they’ve spent that has irked the 29 other fan bases more, the Dodgers’ spending will surely be a talking point when labor negotiations pick up ahead of the next CBA. Rival owners, despite being recipients of the Dodgers’ success through revenue sharing, will point to the team as a problem. Players, meanwhile, see a club willing to do what it takes to win as other teams stand pat.
“The question isn’t the team that’s pushing the envelope,” Clark reiterated. “The question is why everyone else is sitting on their hands not looking to improve their clubs when they have the wherewithal to do so.”
Even as the payroll gap has widened, parity in the sport remains.
Since the start of the 2020 season, only four teams — the Pirates, Rockies, Angels and Nationals, who won the World Series in 2019 — have failed to make a playoff appearance. No team has repeated as a World Series champion since the 2000 Yankees. No reigning champion has even made it back to the Fall Classic the following year since the 2009 Phillies.
Compare that to the salary-capped NBA, which has seen three repeat champions since the Lakers won three straight from 2000-02. Or to the hard-capped NFL, which has seen the Chiefs go to five of the last six Super Bowls and win three of them. Prior to that, the Patriots won the championship three times in five years and went to eight straight conference finals.
Then again, no baseball team looks better suited to change the mold than the Dodgers. In fact, it’s possible baseball’s new evil empire could soon be more formidable than the old one.
“The Dodgers, whatever they spend, are probably more profitable on a percentage basis than the old Yankees were,” Manfred said, “meaning it could be more sustainable.”
They’ve already made the postseason 12 straight years, and the rest of the 2020s look even more promising. Their player development factory has consistently churned out enough talent to either supplement their stars at the big-league level or provide intriguing prospect packages to other teams at the deadline to sustain their winning ways. Most obviously, though, they continue to pour their profits back into their product, both thrilling their fan base and igniting the vitriol of others and their less ambitious ownership groups.
Like it or not, 25 years after the Yankees became baseball’s last repeat winners, there’s a new baseball villain, one that could shape the discourse around the sport for years to come. Love them or hate them, all eyes are on the Dodgers in 2025.
“I think you’ve got to embrace it,” manager Dave Roberts said. “Who wouldn’t want to be the focus and do what our organization is doing for the city, the fans? To be quite frank, we draw more than anyone as far as any venue in the world. When you’re drawing 4 million fans a year, the way you reciprocate is by investing in players, and that’s what we’ve done.”
Rowan Kavner is an MLB writer for FOX Sports. He previously covered the L.A. Dodgers, LA Clippers and Dallas Cowboys. An LSU grad, Rowan was born in California, grew up in Texas, then moved back to the West Coast in 2014. Follow him on Twitter at @RowanKavner.
Los Angeles Dodgers
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