Los Angeles Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman led an ultra-aggressive approach in free agency as he looked to further bolster a talented roster in preparation for the team’s World Series title defense.
That resulted in the Dodgers adding plenty of high-profile talent in the form of Blake Snell, Roki Sasaki, Tanner Scott and Kirby Yates. Additionally, the Dodgers re-signed key World Series contributors, Teoscar Hernández, Blake Treinen and Kiké Hernández.
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Because of the way his rosters have been affected by injuries the past two seasons, Friedman intended to address as many of the Dodgers’ needs as possible rather than rely on the trade deadline.
“Naively, last February, I was like, ‘The dream is to be in first place and be a seller.’ Because my goal is to not buy in July. I am setting that out there right now. My goal is to do everything we can right now to not buy in July,” Friedman recently said.
“It is a terrible time to acquire talent. So we’re going to do everything we can to put ourselves in a position to not. Obviously as we saw last season, we will if we need to. But our goal is to not. Last February, I naively joked about how we may even be in position to be sellers and be in a good position. I will never make that mistake again.
“We’re going to spend a lot of time on our pitching and injuries, just try to wrap our arms around it more. It’s obviously a big problem in the industry. We’re going to do everything we can to be better at it than we were the year before. I think having depth and starting pitching is never a bad thing. There is no such thing as too much pitching. We learned that last season.”
Even with the disdain for making deals during the season, Friedman has proven masterful with orchestrating deals at the trade deadline during his time with the Dodgers. He has consistently found a way to trade for the hottest name on the market year over year, acquiring Yu Darvish, Manny Machado, Max Scherzer and Trea Turner, in addition to others.
For all intents and purposes, only the Yordan Alvarez trade with the Houston Astros in 2016 has come back to proverbially haunt the Dodgers.
The Dodgers had another stellar trade deadline in 2024 and likely would not have won the World Series without those moves made.
Andrew Friedman: Dodgers feel ‘responsibility’ to Shohei Ohtani
When the Dodgers signed Shohei Ohtani to a 10-year, $700 million contract, a staggering $680 million of it was deferred. In exchange, Ohtani wanted assurance from the Dodgers front office that the savings would be used to continue adding elite talent to the roster.
Friedman and the Dodgers have held true to their word and now look to become the first MLB repeat champion since the New York Yankees won three World Series in a row from 1998-2000.
“Obviously, adding a player of Shohei’s talent helps in that quite a bit and also the pledge that we made when we met with him about how aggressive we were going to be in trying to win,” Friedman said. “We feel some responsibility and obligation to fulfill that. But I think no matter what, our mindset was to be aggressive to add to the core that we have.
“Fortunately we don’t have to spend much time thinking about that alternate reality of not having Shohei. Again, that pledge and commitment we made to him, we take it seriously.”
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