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Of course, the baseball of it isn’t why people are talking about this contract today. The upgrade in left field, the fit in the lineup, even Tucker’s injury history and slow bat aren’t driving the conversation. No, it’s mostly about the Dodgers signing a player to a contract with the highest average annual value ever, after signing a reliever to the highest average annual value ever for a reliever, after signing a player to the highest total contract ever, after signing a pitcher to the biggest contract a pitcher ever got, after, after, after...
I don’t have anything for you that you haven’t already heard from me. I’m just never going to be mad about a team trying to win. MLB should be competitive, not collaborative. Teams should have to fight for the best players, not have the players fight among themselves for a limited pile of available money. Teams should value wins more than they do money, championships more than they do profits, while noting that the former will always drive the latter.
Do the Dodgers have an advantage? Yes. They have well-capitalized ownership and, playing in a big city, access to more fans and more television homes. They, like the teams in New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Houston, have structural advantages. That should be the case. When teams in those places succeed, more people are happy and more money is made. Some advantage is reasonable. Milwaukee and Chicago are not equal. New York and Kansas City are not equal.
(Before you send me an email with the letters “NFL,” let me remind you that the NFL doesn’t have local markets. There’s no local TV and you need to sell about 600,000 tickets a year, which is less than the Rays and A’s sold in minor-league parks this year. The season is 1/9th as long. The business models are not comparable, and that’s before we get into the labor relations.)
MLB has put massive systems in place to account for those differences in potential revenue, while making sure the details are kept quiet and, frankly, welcoming the ignorance of fans about these systems. If net local revenue-sharing transfers were public knowledge the way the details of Kyle Tucker’s pay package are, we’d have much different conversations. We have estimates, coming up on a decade old, that the top teams put in maybe $80 million a year, the bottom teams collect about that much. Those extremes have surely grown due to the collapse of the RSN system.
The Dodgers probably share about $100 million a year, every year, with other teams. The Dodgers paid $169 million in tax -- just tax -- on last year’s payroll. Eighty million of that goes into a slush fund that gets kicked back to teams that get revenue sharing. So the Dodgers paid $180 million last year to the teams they’re trying to beat. It was about $140-150 million in 2024. How much is enough? The Yankees, the Mets, the Cubs are all sending around $100 million or more a season to the Pirates, the Marlins, the Royals, the Reds, the Brewers, but we don’t have the hard numbers. That’s to MLB’s advantage.
If we had hard information on this, if we could see that since 2016, the Pirates have collected more just in local revenue sharing and luxury-tax kickbacks than they have spent on players, it would change the conversation. If we could see that the Dodgers have shared a billion dollars in revenue since 2018, it would change the conversation. MLB guards that information jealously because it knows that making it publicly available would shift the focus from the teams that spend to the teams that don’t. They benefit from fan and media ignorance when it comes time to press for favorable terms in the next CBA.
As I wrote a few years back, there’s also hidden revenue sharing. Those teams with the biggest fan bases, the ones on TV for much of October, get the same 1/30th slice of the national-TV money that the teams who never appear in those games do. Who is driving the $900 million a year in those deals? Who collects $30 million a year just for existing?
So no, the Dodgers aren’t a problem. The Dodgers are doing what 30 teams should be doing, trying to win. They’re doing it while sending $180 million to teams that, in many cases, aren’t. Don’t let MLB’s success at keeping the latter part a secret fool you.
