Happy Cyber Monday to my fellow bargain-hunting consumers. I’m fresh off my annual marathon viewing of the entire Paul Blart: Mall Cop series—the best Black Friday movies of all time, no contest—and to my surprise, MLB free agency is actually chugging along this year.
Last week, the Los Angeles Dodgers signed ace Blake Snell to a five-year contract, using their wily charm and the opportunity to rub shoulders with Max Muncy, while deferring millions of dollars well into the future.
Now, from the same source that said Arson Judge was going to sign with the San Francisco Giants: every notable free agent in baseball is signing with the Dodgers at a discounted price. That means Juan Soto, Roki Sasaki, Max Fried, Willy Adames, Corbin Burnes, and “about 15 other players” are all heading to L.A for a cumulative sum worth less than the $700 million contract Shohei Ohtani signed last offseason, according to #sources.
Andrew Friedman, the team’s President of Baseball Operations, told the media at his press conference announcing the deals that he wasn’t happy about spending so much, but that he still kept the team under budget this offseason:
“I think these guys are going to be good additions to our ballclub. I’m not sure we’ll have space for everyone since we just won the World Series, but I’m sure guys like Soto and Alex Bregman could use some extra seasoning at Triple-A. Spending $650 million was a little beyond what we hoped, but that 50% off coupon made this all possible. Well, that and the fact that we don’t have to start paying any of these guys until 2072.”
Per Friedman himself, every player will be getting the league’s minimum salary for the duration of their contract, with $600 million of the team’s expenditures this offseason being deferred for the next half-century. Unsurprisingly, their 92% deferral figure is the highest in league history, giving this Dodgers team yet another record that seems impossible to beat.
World Series MVP Freddie Freeman also had comments on the matter, having gone through his own free agency saga a few years back:
“This is why everyone comes to the Dodgers, even if we don’t get paid until the sun burns out. Back in 2021, the Braves tried to sign me with a 75% off coupon. I was frankly appalled that they would cheap out on me like that. I came to L.A. purely out of spite. The code they entered was invalid anyway.”
Rumors have spread that other teams plan to contest the Dodgers’ use of the Cyber Monday discount coupon, claiming that the team had agreed to most of the contracts prior to midnight on the Pacific Coast. In response, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told reporters that the many-time All-Stars were just “pieces of human tissue,” but confirmed that MLB has now invalidated the promo code for all future transactions.
