SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA — For the Los Angeles Dodgers, being able to pay so many stars comes with a hidden value that one general manager has called “the unseen part of spending.”
The Dodgers have impact players like Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Blake Snell on big contracts. As their luxury tax bill goes up, and as they sign free agents with qualifying offers attached to them, the Dodgers lose out on draft picks and bonus pool money for international free agents.
But they’ve made up for some of the future value that they’ve lost. The Dodgers are known for their buying moves, but they can also sell with the best of them.
“When they go out and acquire players, that makes other good players available,” said Chicago Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer, who has been a part of one of those deals with the Dodgers. “They’ve done a really good job of going out and getting good prospects.”
Take Gavin Lux. Heading into the Winter Meetings last December, the Cincinnati Reds were looking for an impact left-handed bat but didn’t have a ton of payroll flexibility. There seemed to be an intriguing tier of plug-and-play hitters in their price range, but the Dodgers set the market very high by signing Michael Conforto to a one-year, $17 million deal. That signing helped inspire the Reds to pivot their focus to the trade market, and would also set in motion the sequence of events that ultimately led to Lux being traded to Cincinnati.
After the Dodgers signed Conforto and Teoscar Hernández, it made sense to shift Betts to the infield this season to address their need at shortstop. Then, the Dodgers signed 26-year-old second baseman Hyeseong Kim. After the Dodgers allocated over $41 million toward those three players, they didn’t really have a spot for Lux anymore. (Kim will start the season in the minors, but is expected to be back up with the big league club at some point later in the year). Lux was one of the 20-best hitters in baseball during the second half of last season, and the Reds saw an opportunity to get the bat that they had been seeking out all offseason.
“What he did in the second half of last year offensively, how he changed some of his approach and how he went about things, FanGraphs had him as one of the best in baseball in the second half of the season,” Reds president of baseball operations Nick Krall said. “If he can come close to that, you’ve got a really good player no matter where you play him.”
The Reds traded outfield prospect Mike Sirota, who FanGraphs has graded as a 40-FV prospect, plus a Competitive Balance Round A pick to the Dodgers for Lux.
“[Reds assistant GM] Jeff Graupe specifically talks with agents in the offseason,” Krall said. “He was keeping tabs on the Dodgers. He had a lot of conversations with them to know who’s available. When they made a move [signing Kim], we knew that Lux was available. We did the trade in a few days.”
It’s a move where the heavyweight Dodgers acted as the seller and the small market Reds acted as the buyer.
“Looking at the construction of the roster, there are ways where we’re not going to take a step backward to be able to add some future value,” Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes said. “When you’re signing free agents, that’s an important part of the equation. It’s that balance of when it makes sense, and you’re not giving up what you feel are major league wins in that type of way, to be able to continue to add to the farm system.”
The Dodgers are spending so much that they can recoup value in their farm system on the back end. They’re able to make trades where they act as the seller because they’ve already signed better players to replace the guys they’re trading. It worked perfectly for them when they traded Michael Busch to the Cubs for two prospects heading into the 2024 season.
The Dodgers already had Ohtani at designated hitter, Freeman at first base, and Betts at second. They viewed Busch as a ready-to-go big league regular who could contribute at any of those three spots, but those were accounted for with some of the best hitters in the majors. Instead of keeping Busch in the organization as Triple-A depth, Los Angeles traded him to the Cubs along with journeyman reliever Yency Almonte for left-handed pitcher Jackson Ferris and outfielder Zyhir Hope. The Cubs were reluctant to sign a first base slugger to pair with free agent Cody Bellinger heading into the 2024 season, preferring instead to trade from their farm system to get the power bat that Hoyer felt the team needed, and the Dodgers capitalized on the opportunity.
“[Busch] was clearly a major league caliber player,” Gomes said. “It was a tough fit with how we were constructed. We didn’t feel like it made a ton of sense to send him back to Triple-A. Then it was, who are the teams that could potentially use this profile? There was an acute need for the Cubs, and it worked out well.”
“We needed to find a couple of left-handed hitters, and we didn’t have the financial might to go out and spend for two of them,” Hoyer said. “We saw Busch as a guy who had already dominated in Triple-A. He was ready. He didn’t feel like a normal rookie. It felt like a guy we could plug in and have there. We traded some good prospects to get him, but we felt like we didn’t have that player with us and I felt like it was right.”
Busch posted a 119 wRC+ and was a 2.3-WAR player during a strong rookie season. As well as Busch performed in Chicago, Gomes said that he feels good about the trade from the Dodgers’ perspective. Ferris and Hope had breakout 2024 seasons in the minors, and they’ve both developed into highly regarded prospects. Both placed on several industry Top 100 prospect lists this offseason, while sitting just outside the FanGraphs Top 100. The Cubs aren’t a small market team. But the Dodgers spend so much that they were able to take advantage of Chicago’s limitations, which ended up presenting a trade opportunity.
The Dodgers have executed multiple successful versions of this style of trade over the years. In 2019, they traded Yasiel Puig, Matt Kemp, and Alex Wood plus Kyle Farmer to the Reds for the top prospects that they later flipped in the Mookie Betts and the Max Scherzer/Trea Turner trades. In 2023, the Dodgers traded prospect Jorbit Vivas (who became the no. 10 prospect in the New York Yankees organization) and journeyman reliever Victor González to the Yankees for minor league infielder Trey Sweeney (who slotted in as the no. 18 prospect in the Dodgers organization). Six months later, Los Angeles flipped Sweeney and minor league catcher Thayron Liranzo to the Detroit Tigers for starting pitcher Jack Flaherty, who was a critical piece of their World Series run in 2024. The Dodgers’ savviness as they shuffled around minor league players resulted in the acquisition of Flaherty. The Dodgers also spread more talent around the majors with this move: Sweeney was the Tigers’ starting shortstop in the playoffs, and Liranzo is ranked by FanGraphs as the 44th-best prospect in baseball.
The depth in the Dodgers’ farm system helps them deal for key pieces on their postseason roster. It also helped facilitate the acquisition of pitcher Roki Sasaki. Because the Dodgers’ high payroll has them over the luxury tax threshold, they had a smaller pool of international free agent money to spend during the offseason. Los Angeles’ front office tapped into the strength of the farm system in January, dealing outfielder Dylan Campbell to the Philadelphia Phillies and outfielder Arnaldo Lantigua to the Reds for that extra bonus pool money, which ended up going toward Sasaki.
The Dodgers helped offset some of that future value that they lost there with moves like the Lux trade. While the Reds got Lux, the Dodgers ended up with Conforto, Hernández, and Kim, plus Sirota and a Competitive Balance Round A pick. That pick usually lands in the mid-30s, which basically gives the Dodgers an additional first-round pick this year. The more the Dodgers spend, the more big leaguers they’re able to trade and the more prospects they’re able to acquire. As they acquire more prospects, the Dodgers build more organizational depth, gaining flexibility to trade more prospects down the road or potentially get future impact big leaguers.
“The Gavin trade, he’s a really good player who contributed a bunch to our year last year,” Gomes said. “Those opportunities came about because those teams needed that position. That’s just going to be a better opportunity than what we potentially had. That’s a good part of the deal. Adding future value and talent to the farm system, those trades make a lot of sense.”
This formula gave the Dodgers one of the deepest farm systems in baseball to back up a World Series caliber roster. As the Dodgers build out their superteam at the top of the food chain, the rich get richer. The other 29 teams pick up some good players along the way. But according to one general manager, the “unseen value” of all of that spending provides the level of organizational advantage that you can only access by carrying an estimated payroll as large as $389 million.
Content Source: blogs.fangraphs.com