I still don't know the exact mechanics of the salary cap, but the dribs and drabs I have heard during the year were, first, that if the Red Sox are over some threshold for this year, then will get zonked with something like a 40% penalty on their overage for the next two years and then that percentage would recede over the next two years, and that was why they shied away from some affordable filler deals earlier this year when Oswalt was thought to still be available, as they wanted to be able to squeeze him in without triggering an additional tens of millions of dollars worth of penalties. Then, it was later reported that the Red Sox somehow had gone over the penalty level anyway, but if the final calculation is based on total dollars actually paid out over the year, then jettisoning these three high salaried players plus Punto when they are owed maybe $15 million between them for the remainder of the season just might let the Red Sox escape the luxury tax penalty they seem to be facing.
The Dodgers now believes, probably correctly, that they are in a market situation like that of the Red Sox and Yankees, where their large revenue is downwardly inelastic enough that they can give out 6 or 7 year mega-contracts because even when things fare poorly, as they did for the Red Sox last season, their revenue will only drop slightly. I think Philadelphia has deluded itself into thinking it is in that class. Whether the California/Anaheim/Los Angeles Angels are now in a revenue situation that enables them to commit long run, as they have with Pujols, remains to be seen. In the early 1980s, Gene Autry tried to replicate the Yankee's late 1970s success by buying up four former MVPs, but the economics didn't work for him. Maybe poor player choices contributed to the lack of success, and maybe the fact that the television income was a smaller share of total revenue than it is now makes today different than yesterday, but I still don't think the Angels are as strong a "brand" as the Dodgers are and so I still fear that California will choke on the out years of its Pujols contract, whereas the Dodgers could digest such a contract even if the a player's production declined significantly in the future.
I'm not convinced that the Dodgers are overpaying for those players, at least from a salary-only standpoint. Gonzalez's production in his first two seasons with the Red Sox was worth $21 million a year or more. To me, Crawford is, when healthy, a $15 million a year ball player with a $20 million a year contract, so maybe the under-over on how much he stands to be overpaid over the remainder of his career is $25 million. Then you have Beckett. His situation is an unfavorable, $35 million gamble. His arm seems at least temporarily intact and his mechanics seem OK, even though they wind up delivering too many pitches to the wrong spots, so there is a gambler's chance he will rise again or that he will show enough value to get traded for a double A prospect if the Dodgers pay his salary. So maybe the Dodgers are paying $50 million more all together than they would have to pay if there were a Rotisserie or Strat-o-Matic (my generation) league store where you could choose the players for your team that had the best value for the prices, but there isn't. Now, factor in that, 1) the Dodgers are in a pennant race and winning it is worth more than $50 million, 2) Gonzalez is more valuable to the Dodgers as the new "face" of the Dodgers (Sandy who?) than he ever could be to the Red Sox, and, 3) new ownership only gets one chance to make a first impression, and yeah, that adds up to enough to make it a pretty good business decision in a financial sense.
