Todd Boehly, a partner in the Dodgers’ ownership group, Guggenheim Baseball Management, recently had a long interview with Forbes.
According to the website, Boehly personally owns twenty percent of the squad and has access to an additional seven percent through his co-founded and CEO position at Eldridge Industries, an investment firm.
The Dodgers have been extravagant since entering the ownership group in 2012; during their first summer of ownership, they traded for expensive stars like Adrián González and Hanley Ramírez. What was the outcome? Over the past ten years, the Dodgers have by far the best winning % in baseball.
The Dodgers have qualified for the playoffs eleven times in a row since 2013, and they won the World Series in 2020.
The squad is currently valued by Forbes at $4.8 billion, which is 140% more than what Walter and Boehly’s consortium spent for it.
Shohei Ohtani’s big seven hundred million dollar contract, which he defended by claiming, “Ohtani cares a lot about winning and we care a lot about winning, so our passion and his passion lined up really nicely,” was also decided upon by Boehly’s decision-making group.
The Dodgers’ prominence was elevated to a new level with Ohtani’s signing.
Nine million people watched each of the five World Series games in 2016 on average. Approximately 70 million individuals watched Ohtani’s news conference. In the 48 hours following the revelation, he sold more shirts than Lionel Messi, the star soccer player from Miami.
Ohtani’s contract is so team-friendly—deferring $680 million and agreeing to receive $2 million annually—that the Dodgers were able to recruit more players to surround him, including Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Teoscar Hernández.
Boehly is aware that the Dodgers will endure a decade or more of being called every imaginable epithet under the sun, but it is all part of the business.
