LOS ANGELES — Coming off their victory in the 2024 World Series, the Dodgers had one of the most aggressive winters any defending champion has ever had.
They signed two-time Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell for five years and $182 million. They gave Tanner Scott a four-year, $72 million contract, won the sweepstakes for Roki Sasaki and added veterans Michael Conforto and Kirby Yates on one-year deals. They signed Teoscar Hernandez (three years, $66 million) and Blake Treinen (two years, $22 million) to new contracts.
The individual results didn’t match the size of the commitment – nearly $400 million in one winter. Will a second winter as reigning champions prompt a similar investment in the roster?
“I don’t know at this point,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said at the victory parade and rally. “I think for us it’s about really getting a sense of our roster, which obviously we know, but to really dig in and appreciate what areas we want to really target and making sure we have the requisite depth.
“We have a lot of pitching coming back from injury that missed this year as well as our existing pitchers, so I think that automatically puts us in a position to be just way more selective on the pitching front. Position player-wise, because of our roster flexibility, it makes it a little more challenging to think through, which is a great problem to have. So we have to think through exactly how we want to attack that. We’ll spend a lot of time over the next couple weeks really wrapping our arms around it.”
The Dodgers already made a couple of those decisions by picking up the club options to bring back third baseman Max Muncy and relief pitcher Alex Vesia in 2026. The process will heat up this week with the GM Meetings being held in Las Vegas beginning Monday.
“Every year, at the end of the year, there’s key contributors who are free agents, there’s a new free-agent class, there’s potential trade targets,” Friedman said. “So for us, it’s about just organizing our thoughts, really appreciating our existing roster and figuring out exactly how we want to attack the areas of deficiency.”
Those areas primarily are the bullpen and the outfield.
The bullpen that carried the Dodgers through their postseason run last month was built around starting pitchers. Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Tyler Glasnow, Blake Snell, Emmet Sheehan, Justin Wrobleski, Sasaki and Clayton Kershaw (who is retiring) all pitched in relief during the postseason.
All will likely move back into starting roles next season – including Sasaki, who salvaged a disappointing rookie season by stepping into the closer role.
“I think for us, it was about trying to get his delivery back. I feel like we made a lot of progress on that,” Friedman said. “So for us, we’re definitely viewing him as a starter and a really good one, and we’ll continue to work this offseason and put him in the best position to be ready in spring training to help us win again.”
Reinforcements for the bullpen will come mainly from within the organization. Evan Phillips (Tommy John surgery), Brusdar Graterol (shoulder), Brock Stewart (shoulder) and Kyle Hurt (Tommy John) should all return at various points next season. Scott and Vesia (family leave) were not on the World Series roster but will be back next season.
But there are some free-agent relievers (like Edwin Diaz, Ryan Helsley, Devin Williams and Robert Suarez) who might draw interest from the Dodgers – if Scott’s 4.74 ERA and 10 blown saves in 2025 don’t frighten them off from making another big-money commitment to a reliever.
There are fewer obvious options to upgrade an outfield that ranked 18th in the majors with a combined WAR of minus-1.6, 14th in slugging percentage (.415), 18th in OPS (.714), 20th in batting average (.240) and 26th in on-base percentage (.299).
After re-signing Teoscar Hernandez for three years last offseason, the Dodgers took a one-year gamble on Conforto that did not pay off. This winter, the top of the outfield market is very well-defined – Kyle Tucker – with former Dodger Cody Bellinger the best of a thin crop behind him.
Tucker (8.7) and Bellinger (7.0) are the only free-agent outfielders with a WAR over 4.4 last season.
Tucker might be the most sought-after free agent in this year’s class, alongside Philadelphia Phillies DH Kyle Schwarber and Toronto Blue Jays infielder Bo Bichette. Adding Tucker, who turns 29 in January, would allow the Dodgers to get younger while locked into an aging core – Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Muncy and Hernandez will all be at least 33 next season.
But signing Tucker (or Bichette) likely means a long-term contract committing anywhere from $300 million to something comparable to the 14-year, $500 million contract Vladimir Guerrero Jr. signed with the Blue Jays.
Complicating all of this is the looming possibility of a major labor battle before the 2027 season, which could result in significant changes to the salary structure in MLB.
“Like we’ve talked about, we want to create a destination spot where our players want to stay and players from other organizations want to be,” Friedman said. “So I think each year that’s gotten better and better. We have to continue to feed into that and grow it and maintain it. But we’ll have a lot of work to do to figure out how we want to round out the roster.
“Our attention span has been about 2½ minutes to think about the offseason throughout the month of October. So we have a lot of work to do.”
