Blue Jays lose right to complain about Dodgers after stealing strategy for Anthony Santander deal

Step aside New York Yankees, there's a new evil empire in Major League Baseball. The Los Angeles Dodgers have taken the reigns as MLB's most hated team, and for good reason. Twenty-nine fan bases are incredibly jealous of one of the best teams we've seen in recent memory, at least on paper.

Last offseason, the Dodgers added Shohei Ohtani, Teoscar Hernandez, Tyler Glasnow, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto to a team that had already won at least 100 games in each of the previous three seasons. Immediately after winning the World Series, the Dodgers re-signed Hernandez and Blake Treinen while also bringing in Blake Snell, Roki Sasaki, Tanner Scott, and Hyeseong Kim. That's right, they won the World Series and got substantially better.

Assembling this super team is difficult enough for MLB fans to watch, but the Dodgers doing it by deferring absurd amounts of money makes their success even tougher to digest.

The Dodgers have deferred well over $1 billion in the last half-decade or so in order to make building this super team financially feasible. That strategy has alienated the other 29 fan bases to no end, but perhaps none more than Toronto Blue Jays fans.

The Blue Jays have been Los Angeles' biggest competition in most of their free agency expenditures. The Jays competed with the Dodgers for guys like Ohtani, Hernandez, Scott, and Sasaki, yet lost out on all four of those players to Los Angeles. Sasaki's deal was not deferred, obviously, but the other three deals included over $700 million of deferred money.

As frustrating as it has been for Blue Jays fans to miss out on those players, they've lost the right to complain thanks to Toronto's structure in the Anthony Santander deal.

For more news and rumors, check out MLB Insider Robert Murray’s work on The Baseball Insiders podcast, subscribe to The Moonshot, our weekly MLB newsletter, and join the discord to get the inside scoop during the MLB offseason.

Anthony Santander deal takes away Blue Jays fans' right to complain about Dodgers contract strategy

At least $35 million and as much as $50 million will be deferred on Santander's deal, which guaranteed the slugger $92.5 million and can go up to $110 million. That isn't quite Ohtani deferring $680 of the $700 million he's set to receive from the Dodgers, but that's still a lot of deferred money nonetheless.

Why the Jays wanted Santander to defer money is quite simple. Doing so lowers his AAV hit, making it easier for the Jays to pay others. Could this lead to the team signing a guy like Alex Bregman to play third base? Could this make it easier to extend Vladimir Guerrero Jr.? These are questions certainly on Ross Atkins' mind right now.

With how things are set up right now, more teams ought to follow the Dodgers blueprint when it comes to deferred money. Not every team has the ability to go to the extreme lengths that the Dodgers have, but this option is available for all 30 clubs and the league would be more competitive if other teams used it more often.

Had the Jays never deferred money themselves, they might've had a legitimate reason to complain about the Dodgers' dominance. Now that they have deferred a substantial amount of the Santander deal, there's nothing they can really complain about. At the end of the day, the Dodgers are the far more appealing landing spot for most free agents, which has nothing to do with deferred money.

We can argue whether deferring money ruins baseball or not, but again, this is an option available to all 30 teams. As long as it's available, the Blue Jays should be among the teams taking advantage of that, especially with them having the financial means to get away with doing so, instead of just complaining about the Dodgers being smart. Hopefully, the Santander deal is only the start.