For a team that has a reputation for digging deep into its pockets and writing some of the biggest checks in Major League Baseball, the Los Angeles Dodgers are acting averse to giving out $100 million contracts to individuals.
Lately, anyway.
As pointed out by Los Angeles Times reporter Bill Shaikin, the Dodgers have stood mute as 12 other teams have 14 signed individual players to contracts worth at least $100 million. It's been policy (or happenstance) since the club signed Clayton Kershaw to a $215 million contract extension two years ago in January.
Sources and methodologies differ, but the Dodgers spent about $300 million on player contracts for the 2015 season. They've spent about $226 million in 2016, so it would take quite a splurge, and an unexpected one at that, to get near to the $300 million mark again.
How did the Dodgers most effectively use their financial might this off-season?
That $300-million payroll was an aberration, not an annual thing. While the talking heads were blabbering about the team signing Greinke and Price, the Dodgers did not flex their financial muscle until the MRI exam results for Kenta Maeda scared off most every other club.
The Dodgers committed $45 million over eight years to the Japanese ace, an average of $5.6 million a year, even if his elbow blows out and he never pitches again. Why in the name of Jason Schmidt would the Dodgers take that risk?
Maeda, who won Japan's equivalent of the Cy Young Award last year, does not get another dollar unless he stays healthy. If he does, and if he pitches well enough to stay in the starting rotation for all eight years, the Dodgers' maximum commitment would be $15.75 million per year. That is about what the Cubs just paid to sign 37-year-old John Lackey as a free agent, and rest assured salaries will go up long before Maeda's contract expires in 2023.
Of course, the asterisk in this $100 million equation is Zack Greinke, who surely would have cost the Dodgers more than that, had he not decided to sign instead with the Diamondbacks for $206.5 million. It's fair to say the Dodgers are using restraint, or trying, when it comes to money. But their tactics this offseason might have as much to do with which players are available, rather than employing a blanket strategy in order to enact a version of someone's idea of financial sanity.
But that doesn't mean the team isn't going to give out another $100 million contract next offseason, or two in the season after next. And it doesn't mean they won't soon have a $300 million payroll, or be the first team to $400 million if the Andrew Friedman/Farhan Zaidi regime thinks it right. They're the Dodgers. They have the resources and, if they have the need, they'll spend the money.
