I genuinely have no words. I am in utter disbelief that the Los Angeles Dodgers, the team that has won the chip the last two seasons has signed the premier bat on the free agent market for an outstanding cost of $240 million for 4 years. So much for wishful thunking that this guy could come to the Mets and form one of the strongest outfield duos in the game with Juan Soto. To think that this guy stated before he doesn’t want to be the center of attention and everyone was speculating this means he wouldn’t want to sign with the Dodgers all for him in the end to sign a record breaking deal and become the highest paid outfielder in terms of AAV. The Dodgers have given up over $2.25 Billion in contracts over the last 3 off seasons. That is more than the TOTAL value of 17 MLB franchises.

Lets dive into this because clearly the only way to deal with such a terrible act for all of baseball is to simply take a deep breathe, cope and pray some sort of bad luck strikes this damm good team. From the gecko, this team has 6 MVP winners, 1 ROY, and multiple World Series victors but more fascinating is that the top three of four of the Dodgers biggest acquirements are players that have already won a chip- Mookie Betts in 2018, Freddie in 2021 and Tucker in 2022. Now Tucker will get the chance to win a second ring in his career and a third consecutive ring for the behemoth of a team.

Talk about buying your World Series rings! Nearly majority of the Dodgers roster was already a high leverage player either acquired via trade or of course free agency! Out of their starting nine, only Will Smith and Andy Pages are homegrown stars, the rest of them are due to the deep pockets of the Guggenheim cooperation. At least George Steinbrenner had some players he developed in the farm instead of signing literally every great player. Their top four Ohtani-Betts-Freeman-Tucker can all arguably be considered top ten players.

Unbelievable.

Let’s flashback to last night before the tyrants of LA once again took over baseball. The race for Kyle Tucker consisted of the Blue Jays, the Mets and the Dodgers. The Blue Jays were said to have a long term deal going over 10 years while the Mets and Dodgers both led with short term contracts. The Blue Jays offer was for 10 years and estimated between $370 million and $400 million whereas the Mets final offer was $220 for 4 years for an average annual value of $55 million. The Mets also offered a $75 million dollar signing bonus for Tucker which was an $11 million dollar increase from the Dodgers offered signing bonus. But the offer that he grabbed was the Dodgers and it was 4 years, $240 million guaranteed with opt-outs after Years 2 and 3, $64M signing bonus. Of course $30M was deferred bringing it to a total net value of $57.1 million per year after deferrals.

It is still an unholy amount of money for a player who only reached the 150+ game plateau twice in his career and hasn’t since crossed that mark since 2023. Since then he has played 78 games and 136 games last season but certainly not enough to merit such an unprompted amount of money. Kyle Tucker now makes more money yearly than Juan Soto or Aaron Judge both of whom are extremely worthy of their contracts and are able to produce for more than just 150 games twice in their careers.

He waited out the market until he found a deal worth signing for. After realizing he will not receive a 10+ deal with similar AAV to Guerrero or Soto he decided to take a shorter deal and one that immediately had the Mets prance up as one of the stars of the offseason was available in their hands. He really just used the Mets and Uncle Steve to his advantage to raise the Dodgers offer and ran with it. You can admit everyone is money hungry, it is human nature but when you run off with essentially $121 million for next season (salary+signing bonus) that is highway robbery!

I cannot even fathom the thought of this being the third player to negotiate with the Mets that turned his back on us to sign with the Dodgers, the others being Yoshinubo Yamamoto and Trevor Bauer though on the latter half im glad Bauer signed with the Dodgers.

These are all the contracts of the Dodgers worth more than $100 million

Dodgers contracts worth more than $100M:

Shohei Ohtani: 10 years, $700,000,000

Mookie Betts: 12 years, $365,000,000

Yoshinobu Yamamoto: 12 years, $325,000,000

Kyle Tucker: 4 years, $240,000,000

Blake Snell: 5 years, $182,000,000

Freddie Freeman: 6 years, $162,000,000

Will Smith: 10 years, $140,000,000

Tyler Glasnow: 5 years, $136,562,500

8 out of 9 of these guys are not even homegrown. Whatever.

Let’s talk about why Kyle Tucker received such a high contract. Tucker has accumulated 27.3 wins above replacement in his 8 year career and avers around 5.2 WAR a season. He broke out in 2021 when he had 5.3 WAR in 140 games for the Houston Astros. He had 149 hits, 83 runs, 30 home runs, 92 RBIs, 53 BB, for a slash line of batting average of .294/OBP of .359/ slugging of .557 and an OPS of .917 for an OPS+ of 147. His peak came in 2024 when he accumulated 4.7 WAR in nearly half of his games played at 78 games. He was on pace to win the MVP and put up truly historic numbers at the beginning of the season. 4.7 WAR, 56 runs, 80 hits, 23 home runs, 49 RBIS, 11 SB, 56 BB, for slash line of .289/.408/.585..993 for an OPS+ of 179. Last year was still amazing with 4.6 WAR 133 hits 91 runs 22 home runs 73 RBIs 87 BB for a slash line of .266 .377 .464 .841 for an OPS+ of 143. He has 4 al star appearances, two silver sluggers and one gold glove and two top 20 MVP finishes and somehow he is worth 60 million a year. Great.

Baseball is entering a dangerous zone and with the competitive balance agreement expiring next year we are on pace for a lockout. The CBA is both the players union and the owners agreeing on terms and conditions of baseball that will be used for the next five seasons. Since it is going to expire naturally next season it will take some time until there is a true consensus for baseball. The players union and owners will demand a lockout due to the acts the Dodgers have done to create such an ugly and unbalanced league.

I get that the highest tax threshold is labeled the Cohen Tax after Steve Cohen, however the Mets aren’t really that big of a threat. Of course we signed Soto and are in the market for all players but the rate of return on players signing with us is almost 1:0 compared to the Dodgers. The Dodgers are the biggest issue and need to be stopped and if that means canceling next season then so be it. What is even the point of watching all of baseball if the Dodgers are simply just going to win it all next year and out bid any free agent they want. Players are getting super greedy because they know that Steve Cohen and the Dodgers will sign almost anyone of high talent to any contract but when there is a senseless bidding war no one can win it is really just who acts faster and who drops the biggest payday. These new guys are not worth these flashy new deals but they have the agents that portray them as some sort of icon and desirable piece that needs the luxury of a high end deal. Baseball has lost its wings and its time for a major change.