The Braves are the car buyer who passes on the new German luxury model and instead purchases a year-old sedan that’s nice but not over the top. The Dodgers are the guy who can’t decide between the Rolls-Royce, Porsche and Mercedes-Benz so he just buys all three.
(The Pirates are the guy who has to borrow $25 from his girlfriend for a monthly bus pass and swears he’s good for it.)
Braves general manager and president of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos worked his brand of discount shopping again this past week, signing former Padres outfielder Jurickson Profar to a three-year, $42 million deal just minutes before increasingly aggravated Braves fans arrived at 755 Battery Avenue with torches and pitchforks.
He was the first player signed by the Braves this offseason to a major league free-agent contract. It was a typical Anthopoulos acquisition.
By comparison, the Dodgers had three separate free-agent signings and an extension this offseason bigger than Profar’s deal. This following the 2023-24 offseason when they committed $1.2 billion to three players (and then re-signed their catcher to an extension worth $140 million early in the season).
Anthopoulos should feel lucky that the Dodgers didn’t sign Profar by accident, mistakenly caught up in their free-agency trawling.
It spoke again to the reality that the Braves live in and how different it is from the one that the Dodgers (and NL East rivals Mets and Phillies) inhabit.
With a tighter budget, Anthopoulos focuses on deals that will provide return throughout the life of the contract and don’t take up so much of the pie that he can’t afford to have depth. It often requires taking on some risk, such as when he traded with the Red Sox last offseason for pitcher Chris Sale and then signed him to a two-year, $38 million extension.
Sale came to the Braves with a history of injury, but Anthopoulos banked on Sale being past it. Sale responded by winning the NL Cy Young Award and the NL Comeback Player of the Year.
The Dodgers view contract value differently. Take pitcher Blake Snell, for instance.
In November, they gave Snell the seventh biggest contract for an active pitcher (five years for $182 million), according to Spotrac. Snell has won two Cy Young Awards, but those were the only two times (in nine major league seasons) that he finished in the top 10 in his league in WAR for pitchers.
For the market, it actually wasn’t an outrageous contract. Still, chances are not good that the 32-year-old Snell will be worth the $36.4 million that the Dodgers will be paying him in his age-35 and 36 seasons in 2028 and 2029.
But the Dodgers will have Snell on their roster for as long as he’s an effective pitcher, which makes the contract worth it to them. The premium paid to have him on the roster during his prime negates the burden he’ll be after that.
It tracks with an observation once made by Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman: “If you’re always rational about every free agent, you will finish third on every free agent.”
It is a game that Anthopoulos and the Braves, bound by a smaller budget, cannot play. The Dodgers’ estimated payroll for 2025 is $367 million, according to FanGraphs, compared with the Braves’ $212 million.
It doesn’t mean that they can’t be competitive, in no small part because of Anthopoulos’ management of the roster and payroll. There is little reason to think that they can’t make the postseason for the eighth consecutive season. But they are annually observers for the bidding of the top players in the free agent market.
But perhaps the bigger worry for the Braves is the Mets. They made the biggest free-agency purchase of the offseason, outbidding the Yankees for right fielder Juan Soto. The Mets committed $765 million to him for a 15-year contract.
The Mets will be paying Soto an average annual salary of $51 million through his age-40 season. It’s an exorbitant price. But it guarantees that this singular talent will be a Met for the best years of his career.
The Mets have not often been accused of having a thoughtful spending strategy, but that seems to have changed with president of baseball operations David Stearns, who was hired in September 2023.
Stearns showed his capacity as the general manager (and later president of baseball operations) of the small-market Brewers, assembling a roster that reached the postseason 2018-21. Milwaukee had made the playoffs twice from 1983 to 2017.
An executive capable of winning with a relatively meager payroll (the Brewers ranked no higher than 16th in payroll during the aforementioned four-year postseason run, according to Spotrac), Stearns now can wield that acumen along with the checkbook of owner Steve Cohen. It figures to make the Mets a bona fide contender in the NL East.
The Phillies, who have their own deep pockets and a shrewd executive in Dave Dombrowski also willing to pay premiums, have provided challenge enough to the Braves. But the Mets stand to become a rival that consistently wins and challenges for the postseason.
The specter of the Dodgers looms over all of baseball. But the budget-conscious Braves have to worry about contending with the Phillies and Mets first.
About the Author
