What are the
Los Angeles Dodgers up to, or not up to, as the case may be? There has been a lot of rhetoric flying around in Southern California about the inability of the Dodgers to make a free-agent splash this winter or to pull off a blockbuster trade. It's gotten fairly venomous.
Let's leave aside the ephemeral issues of intent, discontent and all matters pondering who is mad at whom, and whether it's justified. Instead, let's just put on our Andrew Friedman hat and try to assess where the Dodgers are and where they should be. Let's begin with a glance at which teams have opened their wallets the widest while acknowledging that there remains a fair bit of free-agent spending still to come this winter.
Free-agency spending at a glance
| Team | # | fWAR | YRS | SAL | AAV |
|---|
| 1. Yankees | 2 | 7.9 | 10 | 337 | 33.7 |
| 2. Nationals | 8 | 11.2 | 19 | 315 | 16.6 |
| 3. Angels | 3 | 8.1 | 9 | 261 | 29.0 |
| 4. White Sox | 6 | 12.3 | 13 | 202 | 15.5 |
| 5. Phillies | 2 | 5.5 | 6 | 132 | 22.0 |
| 6. Blue Jays | 4 | 7.7 | 9 | 114 | 12.7 |
| 7. Diamondbacks | 5 | 4.7 | 10 | 110 | 11.0 |
| 8. Reds | 3 | 5.1 | 9 | 100 | 11.1 |
| 9. Braves | 7 | 8.3 | 11 | 99 | 9.0 |
| 10. Twins | 7 | 7.7 | 8 | 60 | 7.5 |
| 11. Rangers | 4 | 4.9 | 8 | 56 | 7.0 |
| 12. Padres | 3 | 1.4 | 8 | 48 | 6.0 |
| 13. Brewers | 7 | 7.1 | 10 | 46 | 4.6 |
| 14. Mets | 4 | 3.5 | 4 | 24 | 6.1 |
| 15. Marlins | 3 | 1.7 | 4 | 21 | 5.2 |
| 16. Tigers | 3 | 4.0 | 3 | 16 | 5.5 |
| 17. Astros | 3 | 2.1 | 5 | 16 | 3.1 |
| 18. Giants | 3 | 3.5 | 3 | 14 | 4.6 |
| 19. Cardinals | 2 | 4.0 | 3 | 13 | 4.3 |
| 20. Rays | 1 | 1.6 | 2 | 12 | 6.0 |
| 21. Red Sox | 5 | 2.9 | 5 | 12 | 2.4 |
| >>>22. Dodgers | 2 | 1.4 | 2 | 11 | 5.6 |
| 23. Athletics | 1 | 0.7 | 2 | 8 | 3.8 |
| 24. Indians | 2 | 2.1 | 2 | 7 | 3.4 |
| 25. Orioles | 2 | 1.8 | 2 | 4 | 1.9 |
| 26. Royals | 2 | 1.6 | 2 | 4 | 1.8 |
| 27. Mariners | 2 | 1.3 | 2 | 3 | 1.5 |
| 28. Cubs | 2 | 0.2 | 2 | 2 | 0.8 |
| 29. Pirates | 2 | 0.4 | 2 | 2 | 0.8 |
| 30. Rockies | 0 | 0.0 | 0 | 0 | 0.0 |
Key: fWAR -- projected 2020 FanGraphs WAR; YRS -- total years committed to free agents; SAL -- total salaries committed to free agents, not including incentives; AAV -- average annual value of free-agent contracts signed.
Teams are ordered by their total commitment of free-agent dollars. The data comes from the
free-agent tracker at FanGraphs, though I've filled in a couple of blanks based on reported signings not yet officially announced and worked in
Davenport translations for players signed out of Japan and Korea. Players signed to minor league deals are not included.
According to the tracker, about 71% of projected 2020 WAR among free agents is off the market. Of the 47.3 WAR projected for players as yet unsigned, more than half (24.4) is accounted for by the 15 best players available:
Josh Donaldson,
Marcell Ozuna,
Yasiel Puig,
Brian Dozier,
Alex Wood,
Nicholas Castellanos,
Todd Frazier,
Kevin Pillar,
Ivan Nova,
Jason Kipnis,
Wilmer Flores,
Steven Souza Jr.,
Jhoulys Chacin,
Addison Russell and
Alex Gordon. Clearly, there are still opportunities for a slow-starting team to light a fire under its not-so-hot stove.
That team could be the Dodgers, if they so desired. The money is certainly there. Only the Yankees have a higher franchise value and a larger revenue base, according to the
most recent reports on these things from Forbes. The Dodgers are in essence the Yankees of the West Coast and have been for a long time. Their attendance is robust, topping 3 million every season since 2001. Last season, that figure reached a franchise apex of 3.97 million. The Dodgers' local television contract is a monster. L.A.'s resources are as vast as any team's in the majors.
On the field, the Dodgers have been unassailably triumphant in recent seasons, with seven straight division titles and two pennants since 2013. Last season, the Dodgers won 106 games and posted the run differential of a 110-win team. They won the National League West by 21 games over the
Arizona Diamondbacks. During their current seven-year streak of division crowns, the Dodgers have won 118 more games than any other team in the NL West. However you measure it, the Dodgers have been wildly successful.
The Dodgers have not, however, managed to end a franchise championship drought that began after the Tommy Lasorda/Kirk Gibson/Orel Hershiser Dodgers won it all in 1988. That, in a nutshell, is where the discontent stems from. The growing concern seems to be that the Dodgers are willing to do just enough to keep the turnstiles turning, but not quite enough to get over the ultimate hump. At least that's my take on what the beef is, because, to be frank, I don't quite understand the antipathy.
According to
Cot's Contracts, the Dodgers' end-of-season payrolls have ranked as such over the past seven seasons, beginning with 2013: 2nd, 1st, 1st, 1st, 1st, 4th and 4th. After exceeding the luxury tax threshold in each of the first five seasons of their division crown streak, the Dodgers have stayed below it in each of the past two seasons. According to Cot's,
Los Angeles' commitments currently leave the team about $37.6 million beneath the 2020 threshold of $208 million.
On one hand, it's easy to see how a wave of discord could have begun. You have a rich team that annually has come up just short of the end goal and has a ton of space under a tax line that it could easily blow past if it wanted to, especially because the recent fiscal discipline would exempt the team from any repeat offender penalties. Unfortunately, it's just not that simple.
The Dodgers reportedly were very much interested in the top-tier free agents this winter, a group that really consisted of three players:
Gerrit Cole,
Stephen Strasburg and
Anthony Rendon. At various times, the Dodgers were connected with all three players via the whisper mill. It now seems Cole was intent to land with the Yankees, his boyhood team. It always seemed like Strasburg was destined to re-up with the Nationals, the only big league team he has known. And as for Rendon, well, for some reason the Dodgers were
too glitzy for his taste.
It's hard to know to what extent any of those proclivities could have been erased with a whole lot of zeroes, and if you want to hammer on the Dodgers for not outsprinting the other offers, that's fair game. Beyond that, once that elite trio was off the market, the Dodgers were left in a position of having bags of cash to spend and no logical candidate to give them to.
That's not to say that
Zack Wheeler,
Madison Bumgarner or now-former Dodger
Hyun-Jin Ryu couldn't have helped the Dodgers. However, there are reasons those three players (just to pick on that trio) landed deals with a combined total value of $283 million, while Cole, Strasburg and Rendon landed $814 million among them. The primary reasons are impact and certainty, along with the scarcity of those qualities.
Wheeler, Bumgarner and Ryu represent clear upgrades for the teams that signed them, and you can say the same of most of the other second-tier free agents who have signed. Still, while those guys would have helped the Dodgers, they wouldn't have moved the needle in the way that matters most: in October.
The primary reason for that is the Dodgers are already really freaking good, and even as we chat here in the first half of January, their return to another postseason bracket is the closest thing to a cinch that we've got on the board. To cite
my own projections, I've got the Dodgers winning an MLB-best 100 games and owning a 96.1% shot at making the playoffs.
Why, then, would the Dodgers spend just to spend?
We know, and so do the Dodgers, that even the strongest on-paper teams usually will spring a leak or two, even in a good season. L.A. has tried to build depth for such eventualities by adding some low-risk, good-upside free agents in starter
Jimmy Nelson and reliever
Blake Treinen. The Dodgers have had a lot of success with such players over their current run, and if Nelson and Treinen quickly move from the second-chance class to the All-Star Game, it would barely qualify as a surprise.
Meanwhile, the offseason isn't over. On Thursday, my cohort David Schoenfield ran though
a list of trade candidates across the majors, some of whom will surely be on the move over the next few months. Among the names Dave threw out there:
Francisco Lindor,
Mookie Betts,
Josh Hader,
Kris Bryant,
Kirby Yates,
Nolan Arenado and
Robbie Ray.
With mounds of money to spend and a
top-five farm system, the Dodgers will be positioned to land any of those needle-movers if their current teams become more aggressive in shopping them. That could happen now, or it could happen in July. Perhaps it won't happen at all, which is the spot the Dodgers landed in last season, when they weren't able to make a splashy in-season move.
But the Dodgers, perhaps more than any other team, can afford to be patient. Without making a single additional transaction before Opening Day, they will still figure to tower over the other four teams in their division. They can wait to see if Treinen, Nelson or any other second-chance vets they acquire pan out. They can wait to see who gets hurt and if any of their veterans take a sudden nosedive. There will be leaks, and the Dodgers can afford to wait from whence they spring.
The other thing that has to be mentioned is that to suggest the Dodgers, or any team, is one key move away from getting over the October hump is misguided. What exactly is the magical formula for winning in October? Because I've yet to see that formula or any credible analysis that it even exists. All you can do is build as strong a roster and shore up as many weaknesses as you can. No one has been doing that as consistently well as the Dodgers. And if you can't see that in the L.A. roster as it currently stands, shouldn't that 118-game edge on the rest of the division earn them the benefit of the doubt?
That said, Cole and Strasburg both just demonstrated what a bona fide ace can mean in October. The Dodgers would surely have loved to sign either of them, even as they hope that
Walker Buehler will become their equivalent. They came up short in those pursuits, and that is surely disappointing for their fans. But that is no reason to start throwing darts at the remaining free-agent board. That's not how the Friedman Dodgers have operated, and it has worked out fabulously. Have we forgotten that? Have we forgotten what the state of the Dodgers was before the current ownership group took over?
I get it. Thirty-one years without a title for one of baseball's flagship teams is a very long time. But this current run of success didn't happen because the Dodgers spent just to spend. It happened because they stopped doing that.
no wonder we never sign anybody 
