The latest episode of the MLB Trade Rumors Podcast is now live on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts! Make sure you subscribe as well! You can also use the player at this link to listen, if you don’t use Spotify or Apple for podcasts.
This week, host Darragh McDonald is joined by Steve Adams and Anthony Franco of MLB Trade Rumors to discuss…
- The overlapping stories at the top of the market and what they might mean: The Dodgers agreed to a deal with Kyle Tucker. The Mets gave Tucker a similar offer but then pivoted to signing Bo Bichette. Tucker had a long-term offer from the Blue Jays and Bichette from the Phillies but both went for the short-term deals. Is this some kind of paradigm shift or just unique circumstances? (1:50)
- Could we ever predict this type of pivot in our Top 50 post in future years? (17:25)
- How these deals impact parity, the upcoming expected lockout, collective bargaining agreement, etc. (34:35)
- Bichette’s fit in the Mets’ position player mix (recorded prior to the Luis Robert Jr. trade) (1:04:25)
- The Cardinals trading Nolan Arenado to the Diamondbacks (1:15:25)
- The Red Sox signing Ranger Suárez (1:26:55)
Check out our past episodes!
- The Cubs Land Cabrera And Bregman, Remaining Free Agents, And Skubal’s Arbitration Filing – listen here
- Contracts For Imai And Okamoto, And Thoughts On The Pirates And Giants – listen here
- Three-Way Trade, Murakami’s Short-Term Deal, And Willson Contreras To Boston – listen here
The podcast intro and outro song “So Long” is provided courtesy of the band Showoff. Check out their Facebook page here!
Photo courtesy of David Banks, Imagn Images
Kyle Tucker signing with the Dodgers pretty much guarantees there will be a prolonged lockout after the coming season. The only question is whether there is a 2027 season.
Or 28
Lloyd – Competitive balance isn’t nearly as big an issue to owners as it is to some fans here. If it was a 6-team postseason then perhaps, but with 12 teams getting in every year the Dodgers have little impact on the rest of MLB. And as long as MLB continues to make money hand over fist, nothing is broken.
Getting the greedy low payroll teams to spend more, THAT is the real issue.
Blah blah blah, the Pirates will never be able to do what the Dodgers are doing. Just because they’re operating within the rules doesn’t mean the rules aren’t broken. 2.2 billion dollars guaranteed contracts. They’re damn near outspending an entire division. Tax evasion in the form of deferrals. Sweetheart TV deal from when they filed from bankruptcy. 120 million dollars this year JUST for Tucker. Sorry but when ONE single individual player costs more than entire payrolls there’s a problem. Sooner you people get that through your thick skulls, sooner we can have integrity in this sport.
Wash – In 2024 the Pirates had an estimated Net Profit of $58M while the Dodgers estimated Net Profit was only $10M.
Many of the biggest Estimated Net Profits in MLB were teams with very low payrolls.
It’s a problem whether you acknowledge it or not.
According to Forbes, the Dodgers net profit in 2024 was $32 million dollars
@fever
The financial gap in MLB isn’t just about revenue—it’s about ownership structure and financial engineering.
The Dodgers are owned by Guggenheim Partners, a massive investment firm managing over $300 billion in assets. The Mets are owned by Steve Cohen, worth roughly $20 billion from his hedge fund success. For these owners, the team is just one piece of a much larger financial empire.
But here’s the real genius: they’re not actually giving away money when they sign these massive deferred contracts.
Guggenheim can loan money from their investment firm to the Dodgers to fund deferred contracts. That money gets set aside for future payments to players like Ohtani or Freeman. But here’s the kicker—Guggenheim still invests that money and keeps the capital gains. They’re essentially lending to themselves, moving cash from one pocket to another, and continuing to do what they do best: generate investment returns.
So while it looks like the Dodgers are committing $700 million to Ohtani, the ownership group is really just relocating money within their ecosystem. They’re “paying” the player with funds that continue working for them through investments, and they pocket the growth. It’s almost like financial laundering—legal, brilliant, but fundamentally inaccessible to normal team owners.
Compare that to the Pirates, where ownership has no massive investment firm to create this self-contained financial loop. They can’t loan themselves money, invest the deferred amounts, and capture those gains. Every dollar committed to payroll is a real cost they have to extract from team revenue.
The big market advantage isn’t just having more money—it’s having a financial infrastructure that turns player contracts into investment vehicles.
The Pirates can afford to play Tucker $60 mil but they can’t them go out and pay Ohtani, Yamamoto, Freeman, Snell, Betts, etc. We have to really all this nonsense that having the Dodgers/Guggenheim and Cohen/Point72 haven’t just changed the game It doesn’t help that these two billionaires hate each other after Cohen lost his big to buy the Dodgers back in 2012. The only other owner had the same capacity to compete financially is the Jays owner.
OK. So the Pirates add that 58 million profit to payroll and we are at ALMOST one third of the Dodgers payroll.
What incentive does Nutting have to spend that 58 million?
He’s still not making the playoffs. May as well pocket the money.
THE
SYSTEM
IS
BROKEN.
ghost – Two $29M players could make a huge difference in closing the 12-win gap for the postseason.
Hey Knicks, stick to the NBA as you know nothing about MLB not it’s finances. Your assumptions regarding deferral funds is not only incorrect but also violates SAP. And Guggenheim is prevented from ‘loaning’ money to the Dodgers by MLBs franchise/ownership agreement.
Nonsense.
Enjoy this season. It will be the last one for a while. Any hope of avoiding a work stoppage went out the window yesterday when The New York Times reported owners will push for a salary cap “no matter what.”
“No matter what” means fans be damned. “No matter what” means they are willing to lose an entire season or two or more to prove a point.
Owners are furious at the salary imbalance and are going to take the nuclear option of forcing players into a position players don’t want in order solve a problem players aren’t responsible for. It all leads to one big question. Who are owners at odds with? It’s not the players. Owners are furious with owners.
They are going to go into a labor negotiation that’s not Side A versus Side B, it’s Side A versus Side A.
Sorry, players are not to blame in this scenario. Every human being would do exactly as the players have done. Why blame the players? They are not sneaking into owners’ houses at night and writing a check to themselves. If Pittsburgh and Colorado and Miami and the White Sox aren’t willing to spend money to be competitive, and the Dodgers, Mets, and Blue Jays are, who’s at fault here? The Rangers owners have decided not to be competitive this year, not the Rangers players.
Isn’t trying to win the point?
It’s as if Mom and Dad are fighting over the grocery bill and the consequence of that fight is they will refuse to feed the kids. Starve the kids and they will learn the hard way to affect the price of groceries, right? It doesn’t make sense
There will be a World Baseball Classic, a 162-game schedule, and All-Star Game, playoffs, and a World Series.
Then, nothing. Months and years of nothing. Because billionaires hate being told no. Especially by other billionaires.
Most billionaires don’t have a billion in the bank. It’s a net worth thing (including the value of the team). Mets and Doger owners/ownership groups have more money than other teams to spend.
It makes me laugh when people say team X can spend more money but just doesn’t want to. The Padres took that approach when PS was running things. Now every article is about how they can’t spend any more money, are broke etc. So that whole argument is dumb.
There are owners/ownership groups that are just here for the MLB welfare. They are allowed to spend next to nothing and get that welfare cash to turn a good profit. That’s on the owners too. Whenever someone buys a team it’s the owners that approve it. They have to do their homework to see who is buying the team and what they will be doing. Some owners might not actually mind having division rivals that aren’t going to try so there is that side of the coin too.
I get players wanting to get the max they can and I would do the same in their shoes. But we have to ask the question, at what point is it no longer sustainable? I think we are quickly reaching the breaking point especially with the collapse of the RSN model and the accompanying cash influx.
Boras has a lot of power, during the last negotiation he commanded his guys to reject the offer to start the season even though it was a good deal. The other non-Boras reps were able to thankfully outnumber his people and we were able to start the season.
In my opinion a cap would help with the financial sustainability of the league. A floor would force the welfare kids to spend and that would also be good.
The irony is that for one side to gain the other must lose. Neither is going to go in with the goal of losing. 1994 drove people away and it took 98 to get people to care again. A prolonged stoppage will have the two sides arguing over a league that will be losing value to both sides by the day.
James: We need to understand that baseball team owners are not hobbyists. They buy these franchises not for fun or recreation, but as business investments. Often they are held in investment groups with multiple shareholders, all expecting a return on their investment. So the net worth of any given owner or group of owners is effectively irrelevant. It’s all about the balance sheet.
A cap would do nothing to promote competitiveness. But then, it isn’t intended to promote competitiveness. It is intended to promote profit. A floor would likely be meaningless unless it was set high enough that some of the less flush teams were stressed financially by it. How many of those team owners would vote yes?
I don’t know why it is so hard to accept that the priorities of team owners are not the same as the priorities of fans, and what they want for themselves does not necessarily promote our interests. This seems so blindly obvious I can’t fathom why everyone doesn’t get it instinctively.
The 30 owners can divide up the revenue from the game anyway they wish. If they wanted to pool all of it and divide it in 30 equal shares, they could. They don’t. If they wanted to reward teams for success instead of failure, they could. They don’t.
So, no, winning is not the point. Not for the owners. We should never confuse them with the fans. The point for the owners is making a profit. The current system virtually guarantees that all of the owners in big and small markets, winning or losing, make money. This may not be our goal as fans, but it is their goal as owners. Deal with it.
The owners push for a salary cap every five years, and it is always rejected by the PA. And it always will be for at least as long as ownership refuses to provide the financial disclosures required for the players to trust that they aren’t being shafted.
The salary cap is being promoted as a means of creating competitive balance. Don’t believe it. A cap has nothing to do with competitive balance, because it is entirely within MLB’s power to promote balance without one. It is entirely about making more money for ownership. And seriously who wants to destroy the game for that?
There needs to be both a floor and a ceiling however the Tucker contract guarantees there will be no baseball in 2027 and possibly go into 2028. Some said the Cubs overpaid for Bregman, aren’t they all overpaid, but LA gave Tucker almost double what he’s worth. Some of those same people say what LA is doing is good for baseball. Tell me how no baseball next year will be good for baseball. If the Dodgers net profit was only $10 million then they have the most creative accounts in the world who somehow manipulated their income to being deferred
What bs. There is way too much money being made by all involved in MLB for there to be a prolonged work stoppage. Yes the way the vast sums of money at play is divided should be re-examined but there is no way baseball will go away for even a large chunk of 2027 let alone beyond that.
A floor and a ceiling helps only the owners. It ain’t happening.
If Bo has any injury/down time and picks up his opt-this contract will be an anchor around the mets neck. He’s played upto 135 last 3 years. 135ish games @ $42M- Ya, that doesnt look so good.
We “brookies” need to chill and understand what’s happening in baseball right now. @Rangers and @James mentioned part of the problem. The fight isn’t much about Owner vs Players as it is recent team owners like the Dodgers/Guggenheim Partners and Mets/72Point. Billionaire owners who’s main business are fund management companies that manage hundreds of billions in assets. Team valuation means nothing. Yes, the Yankees are valued at roughly $8 billion, making them the most valuable franchise in baseball. But here’s what people miss: Hal Steinbrenner’s personal net worth is only $2-3 billion—and the vast majority of that wealth IS the Yankees.
Unless Hal uses his ownership shares as collateral to secure loans (which would then be used to cover operational costs and payroll), that $8 billion valuation is just a number on paper. It’s not liquid cash he can spend. It’s not generating outside income he can funnel into the team.
Not all billionaires are created equal and we “thousandaires” don’t comprehend it.
If $1 million dollars was an hour then Pirates owner Bob Nutting’s $1.1 billion would equal 46 days.
Mark Walter’s $8 billion 333 days (nearly a full year) and Steve Cohen’s $21 billion would be 2.4 years.
Here’s the fundamental difference: Their money comes from sources that have nothing to do with baseball.
Cohen makes billions annually managing hedge funds. Walter’s wealth comes from financial services and insurance. Rogers prints money from telecom operations across Canada. The baseball teams? They’re passion projects. Toys. Tax write-offs, even.
This means they can afford to run their teams at a net deficit indefinitely because they don’t need to extract a single dollar of profit from the franchise. They’re not dependent on baseball revenue to maintain their lifestyle or business operations.
The Mets can lose $100 million in a season and it doesn’t matter to Cohen—he made that back in a week trading securities. The Dodgers can defer $680 million to Ohtani because Guggenheim’s financial infrastructure can structure it favorably. Rogers can absorb losses because their wireless and media divisions generate billions in profit.
Mark Walter and Steve Cohen possess a structural advantage that smaller-market owners simply cannot replicate: they can loan funds directly from their investment firms to their baseball teams to finance massive deferred contracts like Ohtani’s $680 million deal. Those “loaned” funds then get invested by Guggenheim Partners or Point72 Asset Management, generating capital gains and returns that can exceed the deferred interest owed to players, effectively making the contracts cheaper than their stated value. Meanwhile, owners like Nutting—whose wealth is tied entirely to their team—have no external capital source to leverage, forcing them to operate within the actual cash constraints of baseball revenue alone.
No, not really. The only loan involved in deferred salaries is from the player to the team. The present value of the deferred salary is held by the team in a segregated account, from which it is paid out to the player, plus interest, when the loan comes due.
I don’t know why anyone feels a need to make up how this works, when it’s so clearly described in the CBA.
BTW, Guggenheim does have some advantages here, but not the one you described.
If there’s going to be a serious labor dispute or lockout in the future, here’s what it should actually be about: restricting owners from using funds that don’t come from baseball operations.
Right now, Steve Cohen can funnel money from Point72 Asset Management into the Mets. Mark Walter can tap Guggenheim Partners’ resources for the Dodgers. Rogers Communications can subsidize the Blue Jays with telecom profits. They’re essentially playing with house money that has nothing to do with ticket sales, TV deals, concessions, or merchandise.
A fair competitive framework would limit teams to spending only what they generate from baseball-related revenue: ticket sales, local and national TV contracts, advertising partnerships, stadium naming rights, licensing deals, and merchandise. That’s it.
Under this model, the Dodgers couldn’t just write a check from Guggenheim to cover Ohtani’s deferrals. The Mets couldn’t tap Cohen’s hedge fund billions to outbid everyone. The Blue Jays would be constrained by their actual baseball revenue, not Rogers’ corporate war chest.
This would create actual competitive balance—not through punishing success, but by ensuring every team plays by the same financial rules. The Yankees, Dodgers, and Red Sox would still have advantages from their massive markets and revenue streams, but it would be based on what they earn from baseball, not what their owners can extract from completely unrelated business empires.
Of course, this will never happen. Owners would never agree to restrict their own spending flexibility, and the union would fight it because external money means higher salaries. But if we’re serious about competitive balance without salary caps or floors? This is the conversation we should be having.
Level the playing field by making baseball teams operate as baseball businesses—not as billionaires’ checkbooks.
This is entirely incorrect.
The guys on this podcast only care what’s good for baseball writers. They don’t care what’s right for the fans. They just want to make sure they keep having a job, and I guess I can’t blame them for it.
The fans want a system that ensures the Rays
can make the same offer to a player that the Dodgers can. It is really that simple.
If that can be done without a cap, we are all for it.
My favorite line of the podcast. “Loser cuck whining” just fantastic!
Absolutely destroyed me. Darragh is a true wordsmith.
That was so unexpected and absolutely glorious – sent me
I appreciate the discussion on parity, salary cap, etc. IDK if this is really a breaking point or not. But over the past 25 years, only one smaller market team, lower payroll team has won the WS, and that is the KC Royals in 2015. You could argue the White Sox are a smaller market team in a big city given how the Cubs dominate Chicago. Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox, Houston, Texas, Atlanta, San Francisco, Washington, Philly, St Louis. Maybe could lump the Marlins into that smaller market group but Miami is a pretty large market. There really isn’t and hasn’t been parity in the league. Money doesn’t guarantee winning but it does improve the odds. Almost all the WS winners in the past 25 years were above average market size and payrolls when they won.
And that is a problem, over half the league right now doesn’t really have a hope of winning it all. Even my Tigers, who have made the playoffs the past two years, probably don’t have a great chance to win it all even with Tarik Skubal this year. A lot of Tigers fans want the Tigers to trade Skubal because they don’t see any hope this year. Even well-run small market teams don’t have that much hope. Rays, Brewers are as well run as any team yet neither has won anything.
IDK if a hard cap will fix everything or anything. But it does offer hope for fans of smaller market team. And that is what we need, hope.
Hey Darragh, I think you were mostly joking with your “loser-cuck whining” comment, so allow me to joke back at you and explain why the only real cuck here is you.
A cuck by one definition is: a weak and servile man.
The fans who are blaming the Dodgers, however misguided or unsophisticated that take might be, are simply crying foul to an injustice: the unequivocal truth that the game in its current configuration is fundamentally unfair. The common sense that any child possesses is probably enough to determine that there is a significant and irrefutable positive relationship between payroll and winning baseball games. It’s not the only thing but it is the biggest thing by far.
You on the other hand have the tools and experience to understand what is really going on, yet you’ve chosen to become an apologist for a broken system using lazy analysis. Instead of calling a spade a spade and getting on with business of how fix it, you cherry pick data to support a false narrative about parity that perpetuates the problem. That makes YOU a Cuck.
Your assertion that the infrequency of dynasties equates to evidence of parity is patently ridiculous. Go look at a list of the teams that won the world series over the last 20 years. See many low/mid payroll teams on that list? I count exactly one. Now look at the list of teams who lost the world series. Not much different is it? Do you want to know the best way to go about winning a world series? Make the playoffs as often as possible with a talented team. Wanna, know what the odds of a team making the playoffs based on their payroll alone is? Let me help you out. Separate MLB teams into quintiles (5 tiers, 6 teams each) by payroll over the last 20 years then look at the playoff probability within each tier. What you’ll find is that each tier is significantly more likely to make the playoffs than the tier below it and the top tier is 4-5 times more likely to make the playoffs than the bottom tier.
The data overwhelmingly show a strong positive relationship between payroll and winning. Perhaps you cannot buy the ultimate prize in baseball for the reasons all “baseball people” know, but you can damn sure buy more raffle tickets than your competition. For whatever reason you are hyper-focused on outliers, pointing to team x or y that is a “good organization” and “finds ways to win with a lower budget” It’s a fun story but is ultimately has no bearing on the FACT that spending power equates to a significantly higher probability of winning baseball games.
Let the data show you the truth instead of deciding what the truth is and then finding the data to support it… Cuckboy.
This is all to say that we must begin by simply agreeing on the proposition, which to me is self-evident: there is competitive disparity and it matters a lot. As long as there is a cadre of talking heads with this mind virus gaslighting the fans we’ll never get to the bottom of who is to blame or what ought to be done to fix it.
I wrote a long reply to this but then had to get up the Seranthony news and accidentally closed the tab. I’ll try to get most of it back.
I did use some colorful language in an attempt to make my point in an aggressive and humorous way. I am legitimately sorry for any hurt feelings.
I think I clearly said many times that I understand why fans aren’t happy with the current fairness of the system. But I also don’t think it’s unprecedented or historic right now. The Yankees won four of five titles from 1996 to 2000 and almost won again in 2001, for instance. The Dodgers didn’t even really make big free agent moves until a couple of years ago.
My concern is that the frustration with the Dodgers is going to be weaponized by the owners to push for a cap. I don’t believe the cap would help much and would mostly lead to the owners getting more revenue. I think I’m sticking up for the workers against the fatcat owners. I don’t think that’s a cuck position at all.
This is why I push back on the extreme Dodgers hatred and why I try to push for non-cap solutions, such as small teams getting more competitive balance picks.
Sorry if we disagree and I’m also sorry if I did it in a tactless manor on the podcast.
Darrah,
I appreciate your response to my cuck-loser rebuttal last week. Like I said we’re mostly joking here and my feeling certainly aren’t hurt by lively debate lol. In my opinion the cuck position is saving your harshest criticism for the fans who lack a sophisticated understanding of a complex problem. Again, this only serves to distract from the real issue, which is disparity. I don’t believe we disagree on much other than that.
I’m not advocating for a cap or any other specific strategy until I’m sure that will create the best outcome for all, nor do I want to see the owners taking a larger share of the money than the players. All I want is the capitulation and gaslighting to be replaced by honest conversations about how to fix it. THERE IS MAJOR DISPARITY in revenue, payroll expenditure, on-field talent, and competitiveness. It’s not about the Dodgers or the Yankees or whoever else happens to be the most egregious example of that disparity at any one moment. You can dance around it all you want with narratives about dynasties and low budget teams finding a way, but the facts are the facts. There is an indisputable competitive advantage in the ability to spend more money than your opponent, and at the same time the current regime of competitive balance measures is essentially impotent. The fans know this intuitively, even if they can’t articulate it in a way that satisfies you.
The Dodgers are not to blame, they’re a profit driven organization which is taking advantage of the current rules to the best of their ability. Still though, we’re talking about historic levels of payroll disparity that even the Yankees dynasties of the past would blush at. By some ways of looking at it they’re putting nearly half a billion dollars on the field this season and the market for top talent has gone haywire. Kyle Tucker is a very good player, but does anybody actually believe his output and risk profile warrant such a hefty investment from a purely pragmatic standpoint? I think not.
The last comment I have about narratives that distract us from what is really going on is this conversation about good and bad organizations in the context of big market teams. Yes, the Dodgers are a well-run franchise by all accounts, but I’m not sure why that is supposed to move me. Did it ever occur to anyone that the best coaches, front office people, and player development staff are drawn to teams with money and prestige? That all that trade decisions and recruiting becomes easier and has greater margin for error when you know you can turn around and spend your way out of any problems? Anyway, who are all the homegrown Dodgers that played a key role in the 2025 playoffs? Mookie, Freeman, Ohtani, Snell, Glasnow, Yamamoto, and Roki. Those names are why they won, let’s get real.
On the other side of that coin is perhaps The Mets, which I could argue are an example of a team that spends a lot and doesn’t’ necessarily get the return. “See, you can’t buy a championship… so why are we talking so much about payroll?” I’m not remotely moved by this either. In fact, this might be the worst part of the whole thing. They’re not good enough to win championships, but they still win lots of games (because money buys wins… period) and those wins come at the expense of other teams. So even though they might never get cerebral enough to become a dynasty they will simply be a persistent roadblock for all the small and medium market teams. Those teams who might have otherwise had a shot at a WS title if they could just get a foot in the door of the playoffs on go on a heater.
THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an old problem or a new problem. If a cap isn’t the right solution so be it, but let’s not muddy the issue by engaging in misleading narratives and casting blame on the fans who pay for the whole thing anyway.
Why on earth did the D-backs want Arenado? If there is one position where they have depth and in-house options, it’s in the infield. Okay, I get it. St. Louis is paying most of the cheese he’s owed so Arenado is kind of like one of those scratch-off lottery tickets. Doesn’t cost much. You’re probably gonna lose. But you might get lucky and strike gold.