Kasten, Friedman Celebrate Dodgers’ Championship

There was a time, not terribly long ago, when the Brooklyn Dodgers, later to be transplanted to Los Angeles, frequently participated in the World Series. It was the mid-1900s and the Dodgers, whose pitching staff was anchored by Jewish Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax, were extraordinarily popular in Brooklyn, a borough with an immense Jewish population, perhaps even more so than the dynastic crosstown Yankees.

It was, in fact, the heyday of the fabled franchise . . . until, apparently, this decade, in which the LA Dodgers have won two of the past five World Series, including this year’s Fall Classic over the Yanks, prompting President of Baseball Operations Andrew Friedman to remark, “My ultimate, big-picture goal is that, when we are done, that we’re able to look back and say, ‘That was the golden era of Dodger baseball.’”

Throughout the early part of his run as President of Baseball Ops, Friedman was often gun-shy about dishing out massive contracts to splashy free agents, even though he had vast financial resources at his disposal courtesy of the Guggenheim Partners ownership group. That all changed this past December when the Dodgers’ front office, which includes longtime Atlanta multi-sport executive Stan Kasten – a member of the Jewish community who was front and center of the World Series trophy presentation at Yankee Stadium on Oct. 30 — went on an unprecedented billion-dollar-plus spending spree, greenlighting the free-agent signings of the once-in-a-lifetime talent that is Shohei Ohtani and his fellow Japanese countryman, pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

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Of course, there is no guarantee that shelling out bigtime dollars to free agents in December will translate to October success. But it did for this year’s Dodgers as the Friedman-led LA front office pulled the right strings to fine-tune an already stacked roster as the club’s injury-riddled season played out, positioning the Dodgers for a sustainable 2024 postseason run – and likely for future Octobers to come.

“I think it’s just how cohesive and collaborative we are as a group,” Friedman told the media before Game 1 of the World Series, which the Dodgers captured in five games for their first championship in a non-truncated season since 1988. “We’re not afraid to make mistakes. We make plenty of them, but collectively learn from it. And it’s something that we are very mindful. We’ve seen larger revenue teams in the past that have had a run of success and then fallen off a cliff and taken years and years to build back.

“We have worked very hard at the art of how to balance the now and the future to put us in position to have a chance to win a World Series every year. That’s our goal, and that is our focus obviously right now and in each year. I think it’s just how cohesive all the various departments and people are together that’s enabled that or helped in that.”

For all the talk of cohesion and collaboration that were hallmarks of this year’s world champions, the Dodgers instantly became a global sensation last winter when Friedman brokered a deal to land Ohtani for 10 years at $700 million; less than a year later, it is rather apparent that the Dodgers’ investment, while perhaps considered outlandish at the time, has proven to be justifiable.

With Ohtani in Dodger Blue (next year he potentially will be pitching in addition to hitting), an already extremely deep-pocketed Los Angeles franchise drew close to four million fans into Dodger Stadium this season, coming in at an MLB-best 3,941,251 (48,657 per game), while pacing Major League Baseball in road attendance (36,253 per game). A report in USA Today stated that the outfield wall of Dodger Stadium was slated to generate $6.5 million in advertising revenue this year, after bringing in $500,000 in 2023. All told, the ballclub was estimated to have generated more than $30 million in new revenue in 2024, tops among U.S. professional sports teams this year.

“We have always been, I think, the most popular team in Asia,” Kasten told Sports Business Journal last month. “But now it’s reached a whole other level, in a way we could not have predicted. I can’t walk to any part of my stadium on any day that I don’t run into a tour group. It’s been an amazing thing. As I have said from the start, and MLB will confirm: The combination of our profile and Shohei’s profile is really baseball putting its best foot forward. It’s good for baseball domestically, and really good for baseball internationally as well.”

With a core of big-name veterans, which includes, of course, former Braves great and 2024 World Series MVP Freddie Freeman, nicely complemented by more unheralded players Friedman has acquired, the Dodgers loom as a perennial title contender for the balance of the 2020s, perhaps ushering in a “golden era” for the franchise. At the very least, irrespective of how the winter months play out – LA will surely be in the mix for one of the Jewish free agents (Max Fried, Alex Bregman, Joc Pederson) – it’s hard to imagine that for next year’s presumably far healthier Atlanta Braves team, the road to the 2025 World Series won’t go through Los Angeles.