Deferred contracts were once baseball’s annual joke played on the New York Mets.
They released veteran third baseman Bobby Bonilla after a dismal season in 1999. But rather than pay the $5.9m left on his contract as a lump sum, the club offered a 25-year deferred deal at a munificent 8% interest rate.
Bonilla retired in 2001. Since 2011 he has picked up an annual cheque from the Mets for nearly $1.2m, as he will through to 2035, the year he turns 72. The notoriety of this ludicrous arrangement may help explain why deferred deals have since been used sparingly in Major League Baseball. But the Los Angeles Dodgers are making the strategy famous again.
Shohei Ohtani deferred all but $20m of the 10-year, $700m deal he signed with the Dodgers before the 2024 season. The 30-year-old makes $2m a year until 2034 then $68m annually for a decade. It’s an exceptionally team-friendly arrangement for a megastar in his prime. And it’s far from the only time the Dodgers have deployed the win-now, pay-later strategy amid a staggering and controversial signing spree that is building them into baseball’s sole super-club, with a squad that’s America’s answer to European soccer’s galacticos.
Related: Ferocious, calm and deadly: why the Mets agreed to pay Juan Soto $765m
In the past five years Los Angeles have committed more than $1bn to eight players in deferred salaries while also paying hefty signing bonuses and being among the league leaders in annual payroll in the here-and-now. Since cruising past the New York Yankees in last year’s World Series the Dodgers have strengthened their already-deep squad, with the reported signing of 37-year-old reliever Kirby Yates to a one-year, $13m contract taking their off-season spending to more than $450m.
Spring training does not begin until mid-February but rivals are already pessimistic, perhaps even panicked, about their prospects of stopping the Dodgers, who also won the World Series in 2020 and have topped the National League West division in 11 of the past 12 seasons.
Even MLB’s most valuable franchise, the Yankees – hardly impecunious and so dominant in the late 1990s and early 2000s that the then-Boston Red Sox president nicknamed them the Evil Empire – appear to be throwing in the towel. “It’s difficult for most of us owners to be able to do the kinds of things that…