Don’t Hate the Dodgers for Dominating So Much, Hate the Bankruptcy Court That Helped Them Do It

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Make some smart financial moves this week.

Apologies if today’s photo also made you physically ill. But I’m not here to coddle you. We’ll talk about MLB and the Los Angeles Dodgers, followed by a quick hit on FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s dumbest move yet. We’ll close with a quick review of a new pickleball movie.

• Remember last week when the Protect College Sports Act, a major regulatory scheme for the NCAA, was on its deathbed? Suddenly the Big Ten and SEC are backing the bill, and it could pass the Senate this week.
• Great read: “Is sports betting really that bad?“
• Subsidies galore for mid-tier sporting events: NASCAR wants taxpayers to help cover the costs of another street race in downtown Chicago, while North Carolina is prepared to spend $40 million to keep a Greensboro golf tournament in the PGA’s top-tier schedule (the state had two other tournaments this year).
• After the World Cup was played entirely on natural grass, NFL players are mad they don’t get to do the same. Now the Browns are switching to turf in their new stadium. (Remember: This is because venues want to be able to host more nonfootball events and make more money, which is difficult to do on natural grass that can die.)
• The United Football League is moving on from Birmingham, Alabama, and Houston, two cities with relatively long connections to the league.
• Very lame: NHL teams are increasingly ditching radio-specific play-by-play and instead just broadcasting audio from the TV broadcast. (If the Red Wings ever do this to Ken Kal and his famous “Score!” call, there will be a riot.)
• Billionaire Ken Griffin is again funding Mauricio Pochettino’s contract to coach the U.S. men’s soccer team (the same Griffin who was very weirdly personally targeted in an eat-the-rich video by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani).
• Elsewhere in Reason, in both video and article form: “Did Elon Musk Sentence Millions to Death by Dismantling USAID?“
• Mission not accomplished: Immediately after I told the WNBA to be normal, all of this stuff went down.
  

  1/ Maybe the Seattleiest, richlibbiest Seattle richlib story ever. Keaton’s actually the long-time partner of Storm coowner Lisa Brummel (est. 9-figure net worth). Keaton is a “Feng Shui & Intuitive Consultant” and an “ordained holistic minister.” Don’t worry, there’s more: https://t.co/71YKcv18GG

  — Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) July 29, 2026

The two-time defending champion Dodgers have done it again. Whenever there is a big fish on the trade or free agent market, where do they almost always end up? Dodger Stadium.

Tarik Skubal—who was raised and molded by my Detroit Tigers from a ninth-round draft pick into an unstoppable machine—is the latest Dodgers acquisition. The Dodgers were already a massive World Series favorite, again, but after the trade they surged to a 40 percent chance of winning it all, per Polymarket. (Granted, that still gives anyone else in baseball a 60 percent chance.)

Baseball fans are tired of it (even if last year’s World Series was absolute cinema). Imagine the wailing and lamentations if the Dodgers do it again. Perhaps public opinion doesn’t matter much, but sentiment would very much be on the side of the owners pushing for a salary cap in an attempt at competitive balance.

How did the Dodgers get here? It’s not just the money. As the 47–66 Mets are more than unhappy to show us, having the top payroll in baseball doesn’t guarantee anything. Willingness to give up their prospects, not money, is why Skubal ended up in L.A. instead of with someone else. As I wrote last fall, “the Dodgers won again by spending their money and managing their players more wisely than everyone else.” But there’s a lot more money to burn when your team has a court-ordered agreement in place that shields your money from the MLB’s revenue-sharing agreements.

It may be hard to remember now amid 13 straight playoff seasons, but the Dodgers weren’t always this good or well-managed. They missed the playoffs in most of my formative years (the ’90s and 2000s). In 2011, they were basically out of money, and owner Frank McCourt’s divorce wasn’t helping. A judge invalidated an agreement that McCourt claimed gave him sole ownership of the team, and then MLB Commissioner Bud Selig threw out a 17-year local TV contract worth between roughly $2 billion and $3 billion total because it seemed too advantageous to the Dodgers. In bankruptcy court, everyone had to make up a placeholder number for what the team’s next TV deal would be worth for MLB revenue-sharing purposes. Everyone in court agreed on $84 million a year (which seems absurdly low since the deal Selig threw out was worth roughly twice as much).

In reality, the ongoing TV deal is worth an average of $334 million a year, and lasts until 2038. So the Dodgers get $334 million a year from their local TV deal, but MLB’s revenue-sharing rules were forced to pretend the Dodgers only got $84 million a year (the Dodgers owners decided to increase this to $130 million, with some modest annual increases, because even they realized how good a deal this was—but MLB has no power to simply change the Dodgers number on its own). It’s basically a huge annual windfall for the Dodgers, more than enough to cover the salaries of a few star players with some help from deferred money. (All the numbers in this paragraph are estimates from various media sources, with some saying the Dodgers are saving about $50 million to $55 million this year, some saying it’s $66 million, and others saying more.)

That brings MLB to the current labor impasse. Everyone is trying to fix this imbalance but doesn’t agree on how. The owners want a salary cap so that it doesn’t matter how much money the Dodgers or anyone else is getting, because each team wouldn’t be allowed to spend above a certain amount on payroll (granted, this also keeps the owners’ labor costs down). The players union wants a larger portion of TV money to get pooled in a way that would allow teams with smaller local TV contracts to keep more of their money than the big teams.

Dodgers fans are also free to argue against the concepts of salary caps, luxury taxes, and revenue sharing all they want—but it doesn’t mean their team should get to benefit from a special deal. These days they basically print money anyway thanks to huge sponsorships and merchandising revenue and would probably still be able to outspend everyone else.

Sports fans will find any reason to hate on a team that’s dominating the league and signing players at their own fans’ expense. I don’t begrudge the Dodgers for being so good at baseball and business—again, money certainly isn’t the biggest reason why Skubal got sent to the Dodgers (that would be an idiotic front office that quit on a good team). But it’s fair for baseball fans to be mad that the Dodgers were run into the ground financially and then lucked their way into a financial deal in bankruptcy court that is shaping MLB for a quarter-century.

For a guy who managed to get elected as FIFA president, and who managed to navigate a World Cup under U.S. President Donald Trump, it sure seems like Gianni Infantino doesn’t know a lot about politics, even within his own organization.

A lot was riding on the 2026 World Cup, and it came away as, by far, FIFA’s most commercially successful event. That’s when Infantino thought it’d be a good idea to double down—by spinning FIFA’s commercial side into a subsidiary, with 20 percent of that subsidiary sold to investors outside of FIFA’s member organizations. Infantino even had the deal all lined up; he just needed approval from enough FIFA members.

The investing firm to be involved was linked to Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner (Trump’s son-in-law’s brother). Critics said Infantino was selling soccer off to private equity, but Thrive Capital is actually a venture capital firm (not that it makes much difference to those critics).

In any case, less than a week after the plan was unveiled, Infantino withdrew the plan due to backlash. His FIFA presidency suddenly seems to be in jeopardy.

FIFA, like every other sporting entity, has every right to work with investors to maximize its profits. But this was bad internal politics. Threatening members with a sudden ultimatum (get on board or get your funding cut) was never going to go down well. The optics of investors getting involved in the World Cup was never going to go down well. The Kushner name—even if this Kushner apparently isn’t actually well-connected to Trump—was never going to go down well. Reports that Infantino was hoping for a $24 million raise were never going to go down well.

As I wrote back in December, if FIFA doesn’t want people to think it’s corrupt, it should stop doing things that look corrupt.

Once upon a time my wife and I were regulars of a pickleball league. Unfortunately, I haven’t played in awhile, but you don’t need to play pickleball to enjoy Apple TV’s new movie The Dink. My wife and I are huge Jake Johnson fans, so there was no way we were going to miss this.

The plot, to be fair, is kind of annoying—an exaggerated tennis vs. pickleball, good vs. evil, father vs. son tale. (A romantic subplot involving a large age gap is even more annoying.) But the jokes land very well, and there are good laughs to be had throughout. Aaron Chen does great as the suck-up sidekick. Andy Roddick shows up and holds his own. I would have guessed Ben Stiller had better things to do, but as a producer he might as well show up in a couple scenes, and he had one of the funniest bits in the film.

The Dink could have been better, and could have been worse, but I recommend it as a good way to spend an hour and 42 minutes. When you’re done, you should read an award-winning Reason magazine article about pickleball that will not take you nearly as long to get through.

Professional women’s baseball is back—and I regret to inform you the Los Angeles team is doing well there, too.

That’s all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the week on Friday, when the San Francisco Firebells play the Los Angeles Queens in the Women’s Pro Baseball League.