The Los Angeles Dodgers are back-to-back World Series champions. No one would call it cheap.
Major League Baseball’s final competitive balance tax calculations for the 2025 season were released Friday, officially cementing the Dodgers’ status as the most expensive team in baseball history. Their total CBT salary is $417,341,608 million. Their luxury tax bill is: $169,375,768, bringing the total cost to the team to MLB at $586,717,376.
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The tax is greater than the CBT payroll of 12 different teams, including the NLCS rival Milwaukee Brewers. It’s higher than the combined luxury tax of every team in Major League Baseball except the Dodgers or New York Mets.
In total, nine different teams were hit with extravagant bills, with the Mets, New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies and Toronto Blue Jays rounding out the top five with the league’s highest payrolls. The full list of numbers, via USA TODAY’s Bob Nightengale:
According to Nightengale, the league’s total tax bill reached a record $401.3 million.
It should be noted that CBT payroll is not as simple as what a team pays the players on its roster. Salaries are averaged over the life of the contract, accounting for inflation in deferred funds, which works out to just $46.1 million per year on Shohei Ohtani’s 10-year, $700 million contract. Funds from buyouts and player benefits are also considered.
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You can see an attempt to tally all of this in Fangraphs’ roster resource.
The Dodgers’ rotation doesn’t come cheap. (Photo by Gregory Shams/Getty Images)
(Gregory Shams via Getty Images)
But you don’t need complicated accounting to tell you that the Dodgers probably spent a huge amount of money last year and the year before that and in the years to come. The team signed seven nine-figure contracts on Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Freddie Freeman, Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow and Will Smith, all of whom were major contributors to this year’s team.
All of these players will be available through 2026, with Edwin DÃaz, Teoscar Hernández, Tanner Scott, Tommy Edman, Blake Treinen and Max Muncy also set to earn eight-figure salaries. According to Fangraphs, the team’s books for next year have reached $395.9 million.
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How can the Dodgers do all this? Well, for a decade they’ve enjoyed the benefits of baseball’s most lucrative local cable deal, own the largest stadium in Major League Baseball and one of baseball’s largest fan bases, and are now enjoying all the financial benefits of the Otani contract, which may be the best deal in sports. The rich get richer, and then get richer.
The issue will come up when Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association sit down to work on the next collective bargaining agreement. The league has been pushing hard for a real salary cap in recent years, and the Dodgers’ recent success has made them an easy monster to deal with, but the players made that impossible decades ago.
