Another year, another sticker shock for the Dodgers, who have leaned into their role as the biggest spenders in the sport, with gusto. Kyle Tucker is their newest prize, picking Los Angeles over the New York Mets and Toronto Blue Jays, his two other reported closest pursuers. Tucker signed for a reported $240 million over […]
Another year, another sticker shock for the Dodgers, who have leaned into their role as the biggest spenders in the sport, with gusto. Kyle Tucker is their newest prize, picking Los Angeles over the New York Mets and Toronto Blue Jays, his two other reported closest pursuers.
Tucker signed for a reported $240 million over four years permultiplereports. Jeff Passan at ESPN, who broke news of the signing, has more details on the breakdown of the deal, along with Alden González:
Tucker at $60 million per year would be the second-highest contract in MLB history by nominal average annual value, behind only Shohei Ohtani’s $70 million per year. But with deferrals, the average annual value comes down a bit, to a reported $57.1 million for competitive balance tax purposes. That would be the highest ever, ahead of Juan Soto ($51 million) and Ohtani ($46.1 million).
While Tucker has been a great player, he’s not Ohtani. But he didn’t have to be in this market, with Bo Bichette and Cody Bellinger his main competition among this year’s free agent class. Coupled with a dearth of impact hitters the next couple of offseason, Tucker represented a rare chance to add a true difference-maker to a lineup, hence the premium price tag.
The coupling of large signing bonus ($64 million) and deferrals ($30 million) is similar to what the Dodgers have done with recent deals. Blake Snell received his entire $52 million signing bonus last season, for instance. That the Dodgers have over $1 billion in total deferred salaries — to 10 players, to be paid between 2028 and 2047 — creates another sticker shock, though Ohtani’s whopping $680 million deferred really skews that number.
It’s not as simple as saying paying Ohtani only $2 million per year during his contract (and $68 million annually each year from 2034-43) is funding the Dodgers moving into another stratosphere of spending. By rule, teams must set aside funds to eventually cover any deferred salaries down the road.
“It’s just how you account for it. You have to fund a lot of it right now, and having that money go to work for you,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said in December 2024. “A lot of our ownership group are from financial background, and can have that money going to work right now, and not something that sneaks up on us. We’re not going to wake up in 2035 and say, ‘Oh my God, that’s right. There’s this money due.’ We’ll plan for it along the way.”
But the financial flexibility does help, as does winning the last two World Series. It allows the Dodgers to strike when they see someone they want. And they haven’t missed on much recently.
Once Tucker is officially on board, the Dodgers will have 22 players under contract for 2026. Filling out the roster, and adding in the usual assumptions for minor league salaries, pre-arbitration bonus pool, and team benefits, their payroll for competitive balance tax purposes will be well over $385 million already.
The first CBT threshold in 2026 — the final year of the collective bargaining agreement — is $244 million, and the Dodgers will blow past all four thresholds. Anything they spend over $304 million this year will be taxed at 110 percent, the highest allowable rate as multiple-time repeat tax payers. But this is nothing new, as the Dodgers’ last two luxury tax bills are the two highest in MLB history:
- 2024: $103 million tax on a $353 million payroll
- 2025: $169.4 million tax on a $417.3 million payroll
When I first started tracking Dodgers payroll in 2009, my first year writing for True Blue LA, the purpose was far different than now. I was trying to see how much the Dodgers were spending, because there were legitimate questions of the depths of then-owner Frank McCourt’s pockets, which proved to be well-founded when he dragged the team into bankruptcy before leaving town with a billion-dollar parachute.
Now, tracking Dodgers payroll is more of an accounting exercise. Functionally there’s not much purpose, other than to see just how much they might spend. It’d be one thing if one of these signings might hamper the Dodgers from making other moves. But after signing Ohtani to a record-setting contract, the Dodgers also signed Yoshinobu Yamamoto to the largest deal ever for a pitcher, and traded for Tyler Glasnow. Last year, the Dodgers signed Snell for $182 million over five years.
It hasn’t hindered them yet.
Category: General Sports
