It felt like overkill in the offseason. The team that had everything — the defending champions — just kept layering on more and more talent and adding to a soaring payroll.
The Dodgers signed free agents Michael Conforto, Hyeseong Kim, Roki Sasaki, Tanner Scott, Blake Snell and Kirby Yates and re-signed their own free agents Teoscar Hernández, Enrique Hernández, Clayton Kershaw and Blake Treinen.
That blew their payroll beyond $400 million, which will bring roughly $160 million in luxury-tax penalties. The financial windfall notably of having the cash cow of Shohei Ohtani on a contract that is so heavily deferred allowed the Dodgers to aggressively overstock their roster.
But part of the philosophy also surrounded just how much their head of baseball operations Andrew Friedman hates paying the inflated prices at the trade deadline. The hope was that by deepening and re-deepening the roster, Los Angeles could avoid playing in this sandbox at this time of year. And maybe having so much depth that they could actually be contenders and yet sell items at the deadline to further refurbish their system.
