Between all their riches and all their star power, the other 29 teams in Major League Baseball already had good reasons to fear the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Now you can add another to the list: The Dodgers have gone and hired a certified baseball genius to run the show.
As Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times was first to report, the Dodgers have lured Andrew Friedman away from his job as the general manager of the Tampa Bay Rays:
According to Ramona Shelburne of ESPN Los Angeles, the Dodgers are making Friedman their president of baseball operations. With incumbent GM Ned Colletti stepping aside to become a senior adviser to Dodgers president and CEO Stan Kasten, Friedman is free to hire his own GM.
Basically, the Dodgers are making Friedman what the Chicago Cubs made former Boston Red Sox GM Theo Epstein: the big boss in charge of everything.
And in so doing, the Dodgers are effectively going to run the highly intriguing experiment the Red Sox wanted to run back in 2002, when they almost pried Billy Beane away from the Oakland A's. They're going to find out what a successful small-market executive can do with a big-market budget.
Time will tell. But right now, it's beyond easy to imagine the answer being quite a lot.
You won't be very impressed by Friedman's track record if you focus only on what his Rays did in 2014. They went 77-85 and finished 19 games out of first place in the AL East. Nothing to write home about there.
Of course, it's better if you don't focus on 2014. To get the real gist of how the big-money Dodgers were drawn to Friedman, you need to focus on the teams he built between 2008 and 2013.
With some help from Baseball-Reference.com and Cot's Baseball Contracts:
That's five 90-win seasons out of six, complete with two AL East titles, four trips to the playoffs and one American League pennant.
That's good stuff for an organization with a payroll that went as low as $43.7 million and never climbed higher than $75 million. Especially in a division featuring two of the biggest payroll titans around in the Red Sox and New York Yankees.
Friedman didn't establish such a track record through blind luck. Under him, the Rays had a system.
Topkin outlined all the different aspects of this system in an excellent article last year, highlighting how Friedman's Rays were a perfect mix of "intelligent, organized, prepared, creative, thorough and forward-thinking."
Surely, it's only through a combination of all those traits that an organization can do so many things well. Such as:
- Digging up bargain free agents, such as Casey Kotchman in 2011, Jeff Keppinger and Fernando Rodney in 2012 or James Loney in 2013.
- Finding hidden gems in trades of big-name players, such as Ben Zobrist in the 2006 Aubrey Huff trade, Matt Joyce in the 2008 Edwin Jackson trade or, more recently, Drew Smyly in this summer's David Price blockbuster.
- Locking up young stars to team-friendly, long-term contracts, such as Evan Longoria in 2008, Matt Moore in 2011 or Chris Archer in 2014.
- Continually churning out good young pitchers, from Price to Moore to Archer to Alex Cobb to Jeremy Hellickson to Jake McGee.
And finding talent wasn't the only thing the Rays excelled at under Friedman.
His system also involved coming up with all the data that turned Joe Maddon into baseball's most innovative manager. Just as important, the Rays system placed a special emphasis on keeping players healthy.
Especially pitchers, as Topkin noted:
"They devote tremendous time and energy into injury prevention: like their shoulder exercise program for pitchers that not only is individually tailored, but mandatory and monitored."
Tampa Bay's methods for keeping pitchers healthy have worked like a charm. Disabled-list data cobbled together by Jeff Zimmerman at FanGraphs for the 2011, 2012 and 2013 seasons can vouch. And as B/R's Will Carroll noted, Moore's Tommy John operation earlier this year came as a total shock in light of the organization's track record with elbows.
All this leads us to a quote from Maddon to Topkin that pretty much says it all: "I want to believe that the overarching theme here is that the system works."
Indeed it did. And that Friedman was able to make it all work despite his resources being restricted by the Rays' perennially poor attendance and a local TV contract that, per FanGraphs' Wendy Thurm, is only worth $20 million a year makes it that much more impressive.
And there, obviously, is the scary part about Friedman joining the Dodgers: He's going from limited resources to basically unlimited resources.
There's certainly no attendance problem at Dodger Stadium, as the Dodgers have ranked first in the National League in attendance the last two seasons. To boot, the club has a local TV contract worth several hundred million dollars per year.
The Dodgers' revenue supply is pretty much endless. And as this year's $230 million payroll can vouch, Magic Johnson and the rest of the club's ownership group sure don't mind spending said revenue.
In Friedman's hands, that revenue could be used to turn the practically flawless system he had in Tampa Bay into an actually flawless system. One that will direct him toward legit stars worthy of the Dodgers' riches rather than bargains worthy of fliers, with everything else being perfectly geared toward keeping the club's roster cohesive and effective.
If there's a concern about Friedman joining the Dodgers, it's the one that ESPN's Buster Olney (subscription required) brought up about how much Friedman will be allowed to be himself in Los Angeles.
The current Dodgers leadership may not mind spending, but it veers "sharply from day to day, seemingly valuing star power as much as WAR." This is true, and you do wonder if the taste for flash the Dodgers ownership has displayed could encroach on Friedman's more methodical style. There is room for this partnership to go awry.
Then again, you don't target a guy like Friedman unless you admire his style. And because Shelburne noted that a "handful of teams" had tried to get Friedman out of Tampa Bay before the Dodgers, they must have made it clear that they weren't just looking for him to come aboard and stay the course.
Nope, this should be the real deal: the Dodgers owners as the investors and Friedman as the architect. This figures to be arguably the game's sharpest executive at the controls of the game's most powerful spending machine.
Rather than a disaster, the Dodgers are more likely signing up for a dynasty.
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