The Best Free Agent in Baseball Picked the Team That Could Make Him Better

On the night of November 1, 2025, the Los Angeles Dodgers won Game 7 of the World Series in Toronto, defeating the Blue Jays 5–4 in eleven innings on a broken-bat ground ball to shortstop. It was the second championship in two seasons. No franchise had repeated since the 1998–2000 New York Yankees, a quarter-century earlier. The series MVP was Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the Japanese starter the Dodgers had signed to a 12-year, $325 million deal in December 2023. He had thrown three winning starts, including the deciding game, with a 1.02 ERA across the series [1].

The national conversation about this team, as it has been for several years, was about money. The Dodgers carry the highest payroll in baseball. They signed Shohei Ohtani to the largest contract in the history of North American team sports. They added Blake Snell, Tanner Scott, and Roki Sasaki in the same offseason. The narrative is easy: the Dodgers buy championships.

That narrative does not survive close inspection. The 1999 Yankees had the highest payroll in baseball too, and they did not repeat. The 2025 Mets had the second-highest, and missed the playoffs. The Angels share a market with the Dodgers and have had two of the most expensive rosters in the league for most of the past decade without making a postseason appearance. Money buys access. It does not buy outcomes.

What the Dodgers have built, under President of Baseball Operations Andrew Friedman since his hiring in October 2014, is something different and harder to copy. They have turned the franchise into a place where players measurably get better after they arrive. In the language of any other industry, the Dodgers have built three things that compound on each other: an employer brand defined by player development, an internal upskilling system that lifts performance after hire, and a retention engine that keeps high performers from leaving for marginally larger offers elsewhere. The free agents who choose Los Angeles, increasingly, are choosing it because of all three. The drafted players who graduate from the system arrive in the major leagues already remade. The released castoffs the team picks up off the scrap heap turn into All-Stars. The championships are downstream of all of it.

Most teams treat development as the path to the championship. The Dodgers treat the championship as the receipt for the development.

The mistake outside observers keep making is to treat the Dodgers as an outlier of resources, when the actual outlier is the talent infrastructure those resources are pointed at. Andrew Friedman, before LA, ran the Tampa Bay Rays — the lowest-payroll team in the American League — for nine years. He took them to a pennant. The strategy was the same. The lever changed.

Why does the payroll-buys-championships story keep getting the Dodgers wrong?

The payroll story keeps getting the Dodgers wrong because it explains who can show up to the auction and not who wins it. Baseball's free-agent market is functionally an open auction, but the highest bid does not always close. Roki Sasaki, the most coveted international free agent of the 2024–25 offseason, was pursued by most of the league. He could have signed with any team. His agent confirmed he was not committed to the Dodgers in advance [11].

At his introductory press conference on January 22, 2025, Sasaki was asked what he had asked of the teams recruiting him. He said he had given each one a homework assignment: show him how they would improve his fastball, which had lost velocity the previous season in Japan [11]. He compared the responses, met with multiple front offices, and chose Los Angeles over San Diego, Toronto, and others who were prepared to offer more. His explanation, on the record, was specific:

“I had the opportunity to speak to a lot of teams, and they had a lot of appealing features. But overall when I looked at the general consensus, I thought that the Dodgers were at the top.”

— Roki Sasaki, January 22, 2025 [11]

And then, more directly: he had chosen “purely based on where I can grow as a player the most” [11]. The development reputation was not a tiebreaker. It was the criterion. The largest contract he received was not the one he took.

This is the corporate equivalent of a senior engineer turning down a 20% higher offer at one company to join another because the team is known for shipping faster, the engineering culture is known for cross-functional mentorship, or because the alumni from that team are visibly running better companies five years later. Every talent leader has seen a version of this. The candidate names a specific reason that has nothing to do with compensation — “the manager I'd report to,” “the way the team runs reviews,” “the people they hired last year” — and signs for less. That moment is not anomalous. It is the employer brand doing its job. The Dodgers' version of it just happens to involve cameras and a press conference.

This is the part of the Dodgers' position that the payroll narrative misses entirely. Their reputation precedes their checkbook. By the time the bidding begins, the players who have a choice have already weighted the offers by what each team will do with them once they sign. The Dodgers are not just buying talent. They are selected by it — the same way every company with a genuinely strong employer brand is selected by senior candidates before any recruiter picks up the phone.

What does it actually look like when a team is structured to make players better?

A team structured to make players better invests in development infrastructure with the same seriousness most teams reserve for scouting or analytics. In the Dodgers' case, that means a 10,000-square-foot Performance Lab at the team's Camelback Ranch spring training facility, completed in early 2024 — the spring before the team won its first of two consecutive championships [16], [17]. The building contains instrumented hitting and pitching lanes, motion-capture and biomechanical analysis equipment, and offices for the Dodgers' Performance Science department, a group composed predominantly of staff from STEM fields [16].

That facility is one visible artifact of a much larger investment. According to Baseball America's 2020 directory, the Dodgers employed 86 professional and amateur scouts (fourth most in the sport) and 54 player development staff (tied for seventh most). They were one of only two teams to rank in the top seven in both categories [18]. The internal philosophy, articulated by Dodgers manager Dave Roberts, is that the franchise targets players who already have contact skills and plate discipline, on the theory that those traits cannot be taught and that power can be added through swing adjustments to players who have the underlying athletic ingredients [18].

The proof of that philosophy is in the careers it has rebuilt. Justin Turner was non-tendered by the New York Mets after the 2013 season. He had been a utility infielder with an unremarkable line — .260 average, eight home runs across 301 Mets games. That winter, he rebuilt his swing at a private hitting facility in the San Fernando Valley called the Ball Yard, working with hitting instructor Doug Latta and the former Phillies outfielder Marlon Byrd. He added a leg kick, lowered his hands, shifted his weight forward through the swing [7]. The Dodgers signed him to a minor-league deal on February 6, 2014. He hit .340/.404/.493 in his first season in Los Angeles. He became the offensive heartbeat of the team for the next decade [7].

Max Muncy is the cleaner example because the Dodgers themselves made the change. Muncy was released outright by the Oakland Athletics in the spring of 2017 after posting a .195/.290/.321 line across 245 career plate appearances. Every other team passed on him. The Dodgers signed him to a minor-league deal and assigned him to their Triple-A affiliate in Oklahoma City. A swing change followed. In 2018, Muncy made the major-league club, hit 35 home runs, and finished 15th in MVP voting [9], [10]. He has since won three World Series and is the longest-tenured player on the current Dodgers roster [9].

Will Smith, the catcher whose 11th-inning home run won Game 7 of the 2025 World Series, was a college player at Louisville with elite hit tool but minimal college power — nine home runs across three years. Drafted by the Dodgers, he accepted a swing change in the minors. He tied a major-league record with 12 home runs in his first 28 career games [13], [14]. The pattern is consistent enough that Baseball America described the Dodgers' development engine in 2020 with a single sentence: they look for athletic, versatile hitters with contact skill and plate discipline, believing they can teach those players to add power through swing tweaks [18].

Translate this directly to a company and the parallel sharpens. Most learning and development functions are designed for the average employee at the median moment of their tenure — compliance training, generic management courses, a Pluralsight subscription. What the Dodgers built is the opposite: highly individualized upskilling, delivered by dedicated specialists with measurement infrastructure, applied at the moments where a specific person can compound. The corporate equivalent is the company that pairs a senior hire with an embedded coach for the first six months, runs systematic skill-gap analysis tied to actual performance data, and reorganizes the work itself so the person can apply the new skill the week they learn it. That is rare. It is also the difference between L&D as a cost center and L&D as the engine that makes the rest of talent strategy work.

Players the Dodgers acquired who got measurably better after arriving

Why does this turn a championship team into a talent attractor?

This turns a championship team into a talent attractor because, over time, the players who have choices begin to choose based on what will happen to them after they sign, not on the size of the check on signing day. The dynamic is asymmetric. A free agent comparing offers is comparing two unknowns: the team that pays the most, and the team that will get the most out of them. The bigger the player's ambition, the more the second number matters. The smaller the player's confidence, the more the second number matters too. Both ends of the talent distribution end up gravitating toward the same place.

Sasaki is the clearest recent example, but the pattern long predates him. Yamamoto, the 2025 World Series MVP, came to the Dodgers in December 2023 on a 12-year deal that included a fully guaranteed contract structure several competing teams had refused to match. The deciding factor for Yamamoto, as he told reporters in spring 2024, included the team's track record with Japanese pitchers and its development infrastructure. Shohei Ohtani's decision to defer the overwhelming majority of his contract was structured so the team could afford to keep adding around him; the development engine could keep running. Even players like Clayton Kershaw, who could have signed elsewhere as a free agent multiple times, have publicly described the front office's collaborative approach to player work as one of the reasons they stayed [19]. The corporate parallel is retention. Kershaw is a senior leader who has fielded competing offers throughout his career and has chosen, repeatedly, to stay. The mechanism is not loyalty in the abstract. It is the daily working relationship with a development structure that makes his job better at it than he would be elsewhere. Every company has senior people facing the same calculation. The ones who stay are usually the ones who have a specific answer for what the company is doing for their craft that they would lose by leaving.

The teams that compound the best players don't out-recruit other teams. They make recruiting unnecessary, because the player has already chosen them before the negotiation begins.

The internal mechanism is what Friedman has described in different settings as a willingness to take “the last mile of player development” inside the major-league environment, rather than waiting until a player is finished before promoting them [12]. When Sasaki struggled through eight starts in 2025 with a 4.46 ERA, the team did not demote him to fix his mechanics — they kept him in the rotation while working through the adjustments, on the explicit logic that the gap between Triple-A and the majors was something he needed to live inside to close. He emerged in October with a 0.84 ERA across 10.2 postseason relief innings, and his rotation work has continued to be the team's long-term investment thesis [12].

That kind of patience is only possible inside an organization that has internalized development as its operating premise. A team that treats players as already-built assets has to demote a struggling one. A team that treats players as in-progress has the option to keep building them in place.

How does the Dodgers' development engine show up outside the Dodgers?

The Dodgers' development engine shows up outside the Dodgers because the executives who built it have been hired by other organizations to recreate it. Andrew Friedman has now spent eleven years in Los Angeles and almost two decades total in front-office roles. The people he hired, trained, and worked alongside hold senior positions across the league, and most of them were brought to their new clubs explicitly to do the same kind of work.

Chaim Bloom, who spent most of his career under Friedman in Tampa Bay before becoming chief baseball officer of the Boston Red Sox, took over as president of baseball operations of the St. Louis Cardinals after the 2025 season. The Cardinals signed him to a five-year deal on the public premise of rebuilding their player development pipeline. Bloom's first sentence in his introductory press conference was about catching up to the teams who had pulled ahead on development. The Cardinals chairman, Bill DeWitt Jr., described the move as “a significant investment in player development” [20].

James Click, who worked under Friedman in Tampa, ran the Houston Astros to the 2022 World Series title. Erik Neander, who joined Tampa under Friedman, now runs the Rays. Peter Bendix runs the Miami Marlins. Matt Arnold runs the Milwaukee Brewers. The Friedman tree, charted in any baseball publication, fills more senior positions in the sport than that of any other living executive [15].

Senior baseball-operations executives who came up under Andrew Friedman

This is the secondary signal that the original engine is real. An organization that produces a single high-performing executive can be explained by talent. An organization that produces seven of them, hired into the most senior roles available at other clubs, can only be explained by the conditions inside the original organization. The conditions that produce exporters are the same conditions that produce results.

What is the leadership move most CEOs miss when they look at this?

The leadership move most CEOs miss when they look at this is the part that happens before any individual hire. The Dodgers' development reputation is now self-reinforcing — Sasaki picks them, Yamamoto picks them, the next Japanese phenom will pick them — but that reputation took a decade to build and was built deliberately. Friedman was hired in October 2014. The internal restructuring of the front office, the buildout of the development staff, the hiring of player-performance specialists, the construction of the Performance Lab: those are decisions whose payoff did not arrive until 2024 and 2025, ten years later.

Most companies want the attractor effect on a one-year horizon. They benchmark salaries against the market and conclude they cannot compete, or they make one prestige hire and expect a recruiting tailwind that does not arrive. Both reactions are downstream of the same misunderstanding: the attractor effect is not a function of any single decision. It is a function of the cumulative experience of every employee who has worked at the company before the candidate in front of you. What did the company do with them? Did they get better? Were they promoted internally rather than passed over? Was the manager they reported to actually good at developing people? Did anyone leave with a story other people in the market still tell? If the answer is yes, the next candidate has already weighted the offer accordingly before the conversation begins.

This is the validation point for recruiters and TA leaders inside companies that are trying to compete for senior talent against better-funded competitors. The intuition that the company “can't compete on salary alone” is correct, but the conclusion that the company therefore can't compete is wrong. The actual competitive question is what happens to a senior hire in the two years after they sign: the manager they get, the team they join, the internal mobility opportunities open to them, the upskilling investment the company makes in their craft, and whether the system around them is going to make them visibly better at their work. Those are HR-function decisions — investments in manager quality, in internal mobility, in learning and development, in employer brand — that most companies treat as overhead and the Dodgers treat as the product. That experience, once it exists for enough people, becomes the most expensive thing for competitors to copy and the cheapest thing to convert into a hiring advantage.

Talent attraction is a lagging indicator of talent development. By the time the best people are choosing you, the decisions that made it possible were already five or ten years old.

What does the Dodgers playbook actually translate to for a company?

The Dodgers playbook translates to a company as a set of three commitments that have to be made simultaneously, not sequentially. The first is that development is a real budget line, with staff, infrastructure, and operating ritual. Not a slogan in the careers page, not a learning-and-development team retrofitted into an existing org chart. In a company, this is concrete: a real L&D budget, dedicated manager-development programs, technical-coaching capacity attached to engineering teams, sales-enablement infrastructure attached to revenue teams, and internal-mobility programs that move people sideways before they leave. The Dodgers' Performance Lab is a 10,000-square-foot building. The Performance Science department is a permanent function with STEM-trained staff. The corporate equivalent is dedicated headcount, named programs with measurable outputs, and resourcing on the same scale as recruiting itself.

The second is that the function has to be visible from outside the company. Sasaki could enumerate, in public, the specific reasons he chose the Dodgers: what their pitching infrastructure would do to his fastball, what their analytics group would tell him about his mechanics. The reputation was legible because the work was legible. Companies who do development quietly do not get the attractor benefit. They get the cost without the return. The corporate version of legible work is the employer brand: public artifacts, named alumni who speak openly about their growth, careers-page content that describes specific development programs by name rather than in generic language, and the testimony of senior hires who have stayed three, five, ten years and can articulate why. Those signals do the recruiting before the recruiter calls.

The third is the part most leadership teams resist: the team must be willing to keep developing people in the seat, including through visible underperformance, because that is what the talent pool is watching for. When Sasaki struggled, the Dodgers did not demote him. When Muncy struggled in 2020, they did not release him. The signal that goes out to every future free agent is that this organization does not give up on talent it has decided to invest in. In a company, the corollary is the senior hire who has a rough first quarter and gets coached rather than managed-out. Every other senior candidate in the market hears about both outcomes. The cost is visible in the short run. The compounding return is invisible until a phenom across the Pacific chooses you over a richer offer.

What does the Dodgers' run prove about how organizations actually compound?

The Dodgers' run proves that organizations compound by becoming places where talent measurably gets better, and that the consequence of that — championships, market position, the ability to attract more talent without overpaying for it — is the second-order effect, not the first. The franchise has the largest payroll in baseball, but the payroll is what was possible because the development engine made the spending efficient, not the other way around. Friedman noted as much in February 2026: the current level of spending is not sustainable, which is a way of saying the Dodgers know the moat is not the budget. It is the system underneath the budget [21].

Every company building toward a future state contains some version of this question. The market for senior talent is competitive everywhere. The candidates who are easiest to recruit are also the candidates who can be re-recruited away. The candidates worth keeping are the ones who measurably improve where they are. An organization that gets serious about that — investing in manager quality so employees stay, in upskilling so they grow, in internal mobility so they don't have to leave to advance, in employer brand so the market knows all of this is happening — produces a chain of effects that show up in recruiting velocity, retention rates, valuation, and market position years later. The chain is not optional. The order of the chain is not negotiable. Development comes first. Retention follows. Attraction follows that. The hiring advantage is the last thing to appear, not the first.

Organizations do not grow into success. They hire into it, develop into it, and become the place the next hire is already choosing before the offer is sent.

The Dodgers will not win every World Series. No team does. But the question of whether the next great free agent picks Los Angeles, or whether the next generation of front-office executives apprentices there, is no longer in doubt. It is not because of the checks the team writes. It is because of the work the team has been doing on the people inside the building for the last eleven years. That is the lever. The lever was always available. The Dodgers picked it up first.

References

• [1] 2025 World Series — Wikipedia (series result, game-by-game summary, Yamamoto MVP, 1.02 ERA, first repeat champion since the 1998–2000 Yankees) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_World_Series
• [7] “The secret behind Turner's big breakout” — MLB.com (Mark McGwire on Turner; Marlon Byrd and Doug Latta swing rebuild; Turner's pre-Dodgers line and post-arrival production) — https://www.mlb.com/news/secret-behind-justin-turners-big-breakout/c-132701636
• [8] “Justin Turner Has Completed His Rise from MLB Castoff to Heart of the Dodgers” — Bleacher Report (rebuild specifics; signing date; Tim Wallach recommendation; first-season line) — https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2736946-justin-turner-has-completed-his-rise-from-mlb-castoff-to-heart-of-the-dodgers
• [9] Max Muncy — Wikipedia (Oakland release, Dodgers minor-league signing, 2018 breakout, World Series titles, current contract status, longest-tenured Dodger) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Muncy
• [10] “Max Muncy Was Just Another MLB Project. Then He Joined The Dodgers … And Became A Superstar.” — FiveThirtyEight (pre-Dodgers career stats: .195/.290/.321 in 245 PAs, 70 wRC+; swing change at Triple-A Oklahoma City; 2018 breakout) — https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/max-muncy-was-just-another-mlb-project-then-he-joined-the-dodgers-and-became-a-superstar/
• [11] “Roki Sasaki Reveals Why He Chose Dodgers in Free Agency” — Dodgers Nation (Sasaki at his January 22, 2025 introductory press conference; “purely based on where I can grow as a player the most”; rejected richer offers from Padres, Blue Jays, others) — https://dodgersnation.com/roki-sasaki-reveals-why-he-chose-dodgers-in-free-agency/2025/01/22
• [12] “Why Dodgers Feel Big-League Development is Key for Roki Sasaki” — Yahoo Sports / Dodgers Nation (Friedman quote: “With certain really talented young players that we really believe in, we think that last mile of player development is generally better served at the major-league level”) — https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/why-dodgers-feel-big-league-220740890.html
• [13] “They're The Model: How The Dodgers' Player Development Machine Rolls On” — Baseball America (Dodgers development philosophy; Will Smith Louisville stats; swing change and 12 HR in first 28 games; 86 scouts, 54 player development staff) — https://www.baseballamerica.com/stories/theyre-the-model-how-the-dodgers-player-development-machine-rolls-on/
• [14] 2025 World Series — Wikipedia (Will Smith Game 7 extra-inning home run, first player in MLB history to hit an extra-inning home run in a Game 7) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_World_Series
• [15] Andrew Friedman — Wikipedia (Friedman's executive alumni network including Bloom, Click, Anthopoulos, Zaidi, Bendix, Neander, Arnold; managers including Roberts, Maddon, Martinez) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Friedman
• [16] “The Dodgers Player Development Machine” — LA Dodger Talk (Performance Lab at Camelback Ranch, completed for 2024 spring training; motion tracking, STEM staffing of Performance Science department) — https://ladodgertalk.com/2024/03/12/the-dodgers-player-development-machine/
• [17] “Dodgers Performance Lab” — Mortenson (10,000-square-foot multi-lane hitting and pitching performance lab, instrumented technology, rehab workspace; completed early 2024) — https://www.mortenson.com/projects/dodgers-performance-lab
• [18] “They're The Model: How The Dodgers' Player Development Machine Rolls On” — Baseball America (development philosophy; staffing levels in scouting and player development per 2020 Baseball America Directory; Dave Roberts quote on openness) — https://www.baseballamerica.com/stories/theyre-the-model-how-the-dodgers-player-development-machine-rolls-on/
• [19] “Clayton Kershaw Credits Andrew Friedman & Brandon Gomes For Building 'Trust'” — Dodger Blue (Kershaw's comments on Friedman's front office and the player relationship; LA Times sourcing) — https://dodgerblue.com/clayton-kershaw-credits-andrew-friedman-brandon-gomes-for-building-trust/2026/01/15/
• [20] “Chaim Bloom to take over as Cardinals president of baseball ops in 2026” — ESPN (Bloom's five-year deal beginning 2026; Cardinals' player development reset; Bill DeWitt Jr. commitment to development investment) — https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/41538590/chaim-bloom-replace-john-mozeliak-st-louis-cardinals-president-baseball-operations-2026
• [21] “Andrew Friedman Acknowledges Dodgers Current Spending Isn't Sustainable” — Dodger Blue, February 2026 (Friedman's on-the-record acknowledgment that the current payroll level cannot continue, framed as a moat-not-budget signal) — https://dodgerblue.com/andrew-friedman-acknowledged-dodgers-current-spending-isnt-sustainable/2026/02/22/