Treinen’s Contract Conundrum: Dodgers Deferrals and Salary Cap Implications

Juan Soto hasn’t yet signed, so Blake Snell still holds the top payday so far this offseason. His $182 million contract with the Dodgers, as well as Tommy Edman’s $74 million extension, each contain just over a third of the total salary deferred into the future.

“It played out the way people around me felt comfortable with. I felt comfortable with it, they felt comfortable with it,” Snell said Tuesday during his introductory press conference at Dodger Stadium. “We talked, and found something that worked for both of us.”

Coupled with Shohei Ohtani’s megadeal and others last winter, the Dodgers now have over $1 billion in deferred salaries to be paid out from 2028-46. It’s a big number and has gotten a lot of ink this week.

Evan Drellich at The Athletic wrote a nice explainer about how deferrals actually work, and how the Dodgers are far from the only team using them:

The Dodgers would be expected to flex their financial muscle whether or not deferrals were outlawed. The owners proposed getting rid of them when the 2022-26 CBA was negotiated, while the players wanted them to remain. The league office would prefer to minimize the number of long term liabilities teams have on the books. Those positions will likely be the same when the next deal is negotiated, although clearly some owners don’t mind the system.

Marc Normandin at Baseball Prospectus dug deeper into some of the reaction to the deferrals.

The Dodgers have the money, yes, but more importantly, they’ve built the kind of reputation and organizational culture where players trust deferrals to be worth it. If there’s any unfair advantage to be spoken of, it’s that one, but the solution to stopping the Dodgers from benefiting from it isn’t a salary cap. It’s for these teams to change something about their own reputations and spending habits, to put themselves in a position to keep the Dodgers from being able to act like this.

Blake Treinen is a free agent, and we don’t yet know whether his next contract will contain deferrals, and we don’t know whether he’ll return to the Dodgers. He’s open to the latter, at least.

The relief pitcher was a guest on Foul Territory on Thursday. His interview, which starts at the 48-minute mark, included a fun story about his relationship with Alex Vesia. But I mostly enjoyed this quote from Treinen about the bullpen mindset: “If you don’t like it, they’ll find somebody else, so you either dwell in the chaos that is the success and failures of being a reliever, or go check bags at Walmart.”