The Dodgers sent Jack Suwinski outright to Triple-A Oklahoma City, as first reflected on the MLB.com transaction log. The team had not previously designated Suwinski for assignment, so this drops their 40-man roster tally to 39.
Los Angeles claimed the lefty-hitting outfielder off waivers from Pittsburgh last month. They assumed his $1.25MM salary and an accompanying $1.375MM luxury tax commitment in the process. It always seemed like a depth move. Suwinski is out of minor league options and didn’t have a great chance to break camp with the two-time defending champions.
The Dodgers pay a few million dollars to get him into the organization without occupying a 40-man roster spot. Suwinski showed promise a few seasons ago but hasn’t performed well over the past two years. He hit 26 homers with a .224/.339/.454 slash line for the Pirates in 2023. He has been well below the Mendoza line with an on-base percentage under .300 in the two years since then.
Since the start of ’24, Suwinski carries a .169/.271/.297 mark across 455 plate appearances. He has gone down on strikes at a 30% clip and only combined for 12 home runs. Suwinski had a much more impressive .283/.389/.565 showing in Triple-A last year. That also came with a concerning number of strikeouts, though, and he needed to go through waivers before a team could assign him back to the minors.
Suwinski will remain in big league camp as a non-roster invitee. The Dodgers have Teoscar Hernández, Andy Pages and Kyle Tucker left to right in the outfield. Alex Call has a decent shot to win a bench job as a righty platoon bat, while Ryan Ward and Michael Siani occupy spots at the back of the 40-man roster.
That didn’t take long.
Just depth, but not worth the cost in my opinion.
but worth it in their opinion
Cost? It’s the Dodgers.
Exactly. The league is a complete joke.
Yup, The A’s and Marlins are ruining baseball
The Sacramento A’s have improved if you followed all of their off-season extensions. Fisher will spend for the next five years and then sell the team to get a windfall profit. Fisher does not deserve the profit but at least the team will he the payroll increase that it desperately needed.
Marlins, yup, harming baseball.
Dodgers, increasing global interest in baseball and give fans of 29 other teams someone to root against especially hard, great for marketing.
Dont forget the Pirates
As if cost is ever an issue with the dodgers
Shocking.
There’s a valid reason why the Pirates released him and the Dodgers figured it out on their own
How come they didn’t have to send him through waivers again?
They were able to outright him because no one claimed him.
The only way to be outrighted is to be passed thru waivers first. A player doesn’t need to be formally DFAed.
They did. The reporting was deferred until today.
Blake Wondered the same thing.
Who cares? It’s Jack Suwinski.
I am sure they did, no others willing to assume the contract
Because they’re the Dodgers, Coach. No one can stop’em! 🤣
Teams with unlimited funding competing against teams in the same league who are severely limited on what they can spend. Lucky if they can spend 20-25% of what the big big boys shell out every year. SMH
Seems perfectly fair…for Major League Baseball.
Why are they “severely limited” ??? The Dodgers are making profit every season which sustains their ability to continue to invest in the product. Why can’t these other teams do the same ?
won’t somebody think of the less fortunate billionaires? 🙁
Severely limited by their own choosing….
Has a salary cap led to parity in the NFL and NBA? In those leagues it’s largely the same couple of teams in the championship rounds each year, for decades. There’s still enough randomness in baseball that the Dodgers could get bounced in the first round or even barely miss the playoffs somehow no matter what their payroll is.
“The counterpoint to us having an aggressive payroll is the people who are upset by it just want our owner to pocket more money,” Friedman said on the Dan Le Batard show. “Like, I don’t understand the other side of it.”
This is the thing I struggle with understanding too. Fans who keep whining for a salary cap don’t realize it won’t do jack squat to fix competitive balance. It just makes billionaire owners richer and suppresses salaries for the players who actually do the things we pay to see as fans.
Nope, it’s all about revenue sharing, or more accurately the relatively low level baseball has. NFL is at ~60% of total revenue, which ends up being over $400M, which lets all teams viably meet the salary floor. MLB is about 48% of local revenue, which I haven’t found a number for, but it’s significantly less. Doesn’t help that the Dodgers have a special deal where their TV contract only has to be partially shared, or that other teams get around sharing their TV money by owning the broadcasts and bookkeeping creatively.
Any cap requires a floor. Any floor requires increased revenue sharing. We want the Dodgers to share more of their money with the rest of the league so that our teams can give it to the players rather the Dodgers getting all of them.
“I am obviously biased, but I think it is an incredibly lazy narrative,” Friedman said on the Foul Territory podcast. “If you look back 13 years ago, the Dodgers filed for bankruptcy. This is just a really, really strong organization right now where our fan support is incredible, and so the feeling that our ownership group has is we have to fulfill our side of this and reward our incredible fans.”
A friend put it to me like this: if a team has an ultra wealthy ownership group that can put down the money that a player costs into an account that pays the player salary out of the return on that investment – easier to do with deferred salaries – then the capital remains. An ownership group can do this with multiple players if their capital investment allows it. They balance this with the revenues that they receive at the gate, with endorsement deals, with local owner controlled broadcasting deals, etc. So teams with owners with the most wealth have more financial flexibility, but those teams are basically kicking the can down the road at some risk – but they don’t care about future risk that won’t impact them. Compare this to the teams with less ownership wealth and capital that have to negotiate player contracts based on the real world finances of revenue sharing, gate attendance, and local endorsements. It’s an uneven playing field and maybe the only possible ways to level it are either more private equity distribution of ownership, fan sharing ownership, or harsher luxury taxes with redistribution to less wealthy teams (baseball socialism).
Salary caps work for the three other major sports.
The lowest value small market teams that constitute one quarter of the number of all teams have won one World Series since 1991.
No one can argue with those facts.
Blah blah blah.Why do you think that the best coaches and management want to go to the Dodgers?
Because they HAVE the money to win.
Just look at the player salaries that they pay which would bankrupt at least half the teams in MLB.
Because they SPEND the money to win. Fixed it for you.
Yeah dude I love it when the Patriots and Chiefs switch off super bowl appearances every freaking year so balanced very cool wow. I love it when the same 3 NBA teams (or the Lakers) who get the GOAT players of this generation steamroll their way to the finals in their sleep so balanced very cool wow. I love that whichever Florida hockey team is luckiest gets in the Stanley cup finals basically every year so balanced very cool wow.
Those sports have hardly anything that resembles the randomness baseball has. Since the 2020s started the Dodgers have won two championships back to back (barely, btw, Yankees and Blue Jays each took it all the way to game 7!), and one championship during that joke covid season when the cheapies from Tampa took it to game 6. That’s after about 10+ years of being a superteam getting bounced out from the earlier rounds/getting cheated by Houston that one year. They’re the first back-to-back champs since the Yankees in the late 1990s. A whole generation of babies were born, grew up, and became full blown adults in between. There have been a handful of teams that made it multiple times in the intervening years but there’s been more variety in the world series than there typically is in the super bowl, NHL, or NBA finals.
&Jaorb this is very naive and atruistic but you have no idea what the actual revenue is for your team. until the books are laid bare we really can’t levy any absolute opinions. the Dodgers are putting money back into the team.
Look, I’ve got nothing against what the Dodgers have done. They’ve built their brand, they’ve maximized their revenues, they’ve got a tremendous organization, etc. They’re doing it right. And the Pirates are the exact opposite of that. They don’t seem to understand that you need to invest in a business to build it. They’re like a restaurant that serves crappy food and has terrible service and then blames the people refusing to pay to eat it.
But to suggest that these two teams have comparable revenue streams, or even could have comparable revenue streams with better management? That’s ridiculous. The Dodgers have made over a billion dollars from their current TV contract that was excluded from revenue sharing considerations. The Pirates might have made a billion dollars from their TV contract this century. Maybe.
Lets have one super ligue of 12, 16 teams no restrictions, and have the teams who can’t catch up create their own ligue.
The way mlb has balance the competition is by increasing the number of teams in playoffs, .500 teams can make it and that is pathetic.
And mlb is planing to expand?
When every team is actively trying to win, this is a conversation we can have.
At the moment with bottom teams content to collect shared money and not spend on their product on any level, the Dodgers aren’t the correct target.
Baseball has competition. More than most leagues.
Same billionaire owners on other teams, just have different names. They choose not to spend.
When teams are worth a few billion dollars, there’s a big difference between a billionaire worth 2 billion and one worth 100 billion. They’re still billionaires. That’s not to mention their liquid net worth. Would a billionaire sell a business just to purchase another one – an MLB team in this case?
I remember when he hit two HR’s into McCovey Cove in the same game, the only opposing hitter to ever do it.
That said, I’m glad the Giants are fully stocked with OF’s and DH’s, or they might be tempted to sign him.
A couple mil for a depth move. Plenty of cash to burn….
A $2.75 million commitment just to get a Quad-A player to play for Oklahoma City. They don’t even intend to call him up this year. Dodgers really are operating at a higher level than anyone else.
Idk, seems not at all egregious for teams to pay $2-3M to keep a guy in AAA just in case he becomes something. Remember when the Red Sox were paying Rusney Castillo something like $10-11M a year just to hang out in Pawtucket?
There once was a guy in Pawtucket…
Decided. Career minor leaguer.
As a pirates fan for life, not shocking. He stinks. I always thought he was like a Brandon Moss, you know one of the man pieces in that 3-way trade with Boston/La/Pittsburgh that shipped out Jason Bay. Then I looked up Moss stats and he is so much better than Jack ever was/is.
The white sox need help in the outfield, Is he better than Kellenic, Asuna,Hill,or Perrira.
If the answer is yes, make a move for him, if no the White Sox will find some bodies to play the outfield.