The Official 2024-25 MLB Hot Stove Thread

Regular_P

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www.espn.com

Are the Dodgers ruining baseball? Inside the Roki Sasaki signing -- and a spending spree that has rocked MLB

L.A.'s run of star additions has angered opposing fan bases and sounded alarms across the sport. But is the team or the system to blame?
www.espn.com www.espn.com

Great article by Passan about LA's spending and the reckoning that could be coming. I'm highlighting what I feel are the best parts:

THE ANGER -- from disillusioned fans, from dispirited front offices, from owners made to look as if they don't care -- is very real. And it's growing to the point that people at the highest levels of Major League Baseball acknowledge it concerns them. Most worrisome is the rhetoric that fans are done with the game. That what L.A. is doing is unfair. That the financial imbalance ruins the sport.

A villain around which people can rally is tolerable; an unbeatable monolith is not. An exemplar for how teams can operate is instructive; an extinguishing of hope is not. With every transaction pushing the Dodgers further from the former and more toward the latter, MLB faces growing cynicism that has reignited calls for a salary cap -- and made collective bargaining discussions set to start a year from now, before the current basic agreement expires following the 2026 season, that much more fraught with peril.

Over the past 13 months, the Dodgers have morphed from a large-market, big-money jewel franchise that spent exceptional sums of money and didn't have much to show for it into a referendum on the state of MLB in 2025. Because baseball is the last of the major North American professional sports leagues without a salary cap or floor, the difference between the Dodgers -- who carry a payroll in the $375 million range -- and the next-highest team, the Philadelphia Phillies, is nearly $70 million. That's to say nothing of the gap between the Dodgers and the 30th-ranked Miami Marlins: around $300 million. The $120 million or so the Dodgers are in line to pay in luxury tax penalties on top of their payroll is more than the projected Opening Day payroll of 10 teams.
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A day after Sasaki's signing, Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts told 670 AM in Chicago that "it's really hard to compete" with the Dodgers. Ricketts bought the Cubs for $845 million in 2009. They are worth around $5 billion now, according to a person who values professional sports franchises. The Cubs, according to Forbes, have the third-highest revenue in MLB, behind the Yankees and Dodgers. They are the epitome of a big-market, high-earning franchise. Ricketts said the Cubs attempt to break even every year. Forbes estimates they have earned more than $585 million before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization over the past decade in addition to the more than $4 billion appreciation of the team.

At the time, the Cubs were attempting to sign Scott, among the most coveted relievers this winter. The next day, with a final offer of four years and $66 million -- $6 million shy of where the Dodgers landed -- they lost. The $18 million-a-year salary Scott received fell in line with those of other elite closers.

This is not a chicken-and-egg situation. Teams like the Cubs and Boston Red Sox -- should-be powerhouses -- earn reputations quickly among players by not spending. When franchises show they care about winning, players take note. The flocking of talented players to the Dodgers is not a function of a willingness to overpay. The vast majority of the long-term deals handed out by the Dodgers are market price or club-friendly. Betts', Freeman's, Smith's. Ohtani's deal -- with $68 million of his annual $70 million salary deferred for a decade -- was proposed by him to the Dodgers as well as to the other teams that pursued him: Toronto, San Francisco and the Los Angeles Angels.

While the Dodgers are among the rare teams that can carry three $300 million-plus deals (and four other nine-figure pacts on top of that) without bleeding money, they also thrive in the middle market. They took advantage of Ricketts' unwillingness to push -- he has limited the Cubs' budget this winter, even after trading for Kyle Tucker -- and won the bidding for Scott. Any team could have pursued Hernández, whose deal this winter was at market value. Every team passed on signing Snell to a long-term deal in the 2023-24 offseason. Edman was widely available at the trade deadline.

Every MLB club, even those with the lowest revenues, can compete for that sort of talent. So many operate with unbending devotion to their computer models, though, that the simple act of spending has become an even greater advantage for the Dodgers. With a history of teams on limited budgets annually performing among the best in the game, those franchises could fare even better stretching themselves financially and investing in winning, at the very least proportionally to those who devote a higher percentage of revenue to payroll. The Dodgers' willingness to spend in grand sums and success with it should motivate other teams to keep up, not preclude them from doing so.
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THREE DECADES AFTER the longest work stoppage in MLB history, the inequity baked into the game's financial system remains. MLB's pursuit of a salary cap in 1994 led to the cancellation of the World Series that year. The rekindling of a cap conversation has already begun -- particularly by owners peeved by the Dodgers' spending and the sheer size of Juan Soto's 15-year, $765 million, no-deferred-money deal with the New York Mets. Proposing a cap in next year's CBA negotiations would be tantamount to a declaration of war by MLB -- and already those owners are prepared for commissioner Rob Manfred to lock the players out Dec. 1, 2026.

It's clear, by now, that the punitive elements the most recent collective bargaining agreement put in place -- the luxury tax, the qualifying offer system, draft-pick punishment -- are anti-spending measures that just don't apply to some. The Mets have spent exceptional amounts of money and been OK. The Dodgers clearly see money as a competitive advantage they're willing to flaunt. There is room to incentivize other teams to spend without having to institute a cap and a floor.
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As the 2025 season unfolds and attempts to answer that question, they will wear the boos and the chirping and all of the nastiness in opposing ballparks. But this is not their fight. It is the commissioner's and the owners' and the union's. Those stakeholders need to find an answer that isn't just kicking the can down the road for five years but actually, actively changing baseball's economic structure so players continue to make what they're worth and fans see a tolerably fair system.

The greatest drug of sports fandom is belief, and right now, belief in baseball is waning. October has always been the great equalizer, a time when hot teams regularly beat more talented teams. If that happens to the Dodgers in 2025, the schadenfreude will be strong enough to part the Red Sea. Should the Dodgers become repeat champions, though, the chorus will grow louder and the distrust deeper. The stress test has arrived, and for all of the game's resiliency, baseball's future depends on its ability to navigate a situation of its own making.
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blues_funk_reggae

blues_funk_reggae

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Regular_P said:
I haven't seen it mentioned in here but on the Baseball Tonight pod they said Sasaki's group was having teams give presentations on what they would do to improve Sasaki's fastball and Sasaki's team was taping every presentation. So when he announced the Dodgers as his team, there was extra resentment because these teams felt used that they gave him their own secrets and he gets to share them with the Dodgers.
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god shamgod said:
That’s exactly what happened

His “homework assignment” to teams was ‘why did my fastball velocity dip last season and what can you do to help get it back’ so they took whatever information from 10-12 other teams they gathered and give it to the dodgers
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Nasty business :scust:
 
god shamgod

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VegetasHairline said:
www.espn.com

Are the Dodgers ruining baseball? Inside the Roki Sasaki signing -- and a spending spree that has rocked MLB

L.A.'s run of star additions has angered opposing fan bases and sounded alarms across the sport. But is the team or the system to blame?
www.espn.com www.espn.com
Click to expand...

The dodgers make 350 million a year off their tv deal. They’re gettin more dough than mad mlb teams.nah they aren’t ruining baseball they’re using their resources

Still got a top 10 farm ,the 2 prospects the cubs traded them last season hope & Ferris are already top 100 and they’re teenagers :pacspit:

Their scouting,drafting and development is ridiculous they’re about to have to give players away off the 40 man
 
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Regular_P said:
www.espn.com

Are the Dodgers ruining baseball? Inside the Roki Sasaki signing -- and a spending spree that has rocked MLB

L.A.'s run of star additions has angered opposing fan bases and sounded alarms across the sport. But is the team or the system to blame?
www.espn.com www.espn.com

Great article by Passan about LA's spending and the reckoning that could be coming. I'm highlighting what I feel are the best parts:
Click to expand...
I'm a Yankees fan in New York.
I'm disappointed at losing free agents to the Mets or Dodgers.

But I don't have that same hopelessness or frustration that fans from other teams have.

It's easy for a Yankees fan to say "screw it, we'll get the next guy". Because we can get the next guy. We can put pressure on ownership to spend.

If you're a Pirates fan, a Tigers fan...you can't do that. You don't have that luxury. So hell yeah it breeds resentment.

And you can say these small market teams don't spend. Maybe. But does anyone really think the Pirates or Tigers don't have Juan Soto because they're cheap? They're just sitting on 765 million dollars out of greed and the fans can go to hell?

Don't be an a$$hole.

Teams like the Yankees and Mets and Dodgers are exploiting a broken system. Right now the Dodgers are turning it up to eleven.
 
god shamgod

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Astros offer to bregman(6 years 156) still on table

Edit : 6 years not 5
 
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blues_funk_reggae

blues_funk_reggae

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Regular_P said:


The New York Times (@nytimes.com)

Breaking News from @theathletic.bsky.social: Prosecutors disclosed what they said was a recording of Shohei Ohtani’s former interpreter impersonating the MLB star to a bank. Listen here...
bsky.app bsky.app




They got him, @VegetasHairline :unimpressed:
Click to expand...

r552388-935x526-16-9-resized.jpg


Who am I speaking with?

Shohei...Ohtani.....Yeah I'm trying to log in right now...

TbHv6wM.png
 
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