The rest of baseball's weirdly quiet after Cubs followed Dodgers example with Bregman

The funniest part of the Chicago Cubs landing Alex Bregman isn’t the $175 million headline number. It’s the $70 million in deferrals that came attached to it. Oh, how quickly the sport can collectively pretend it doesn’t have a strong opinion about deferrals anymore. 

Because when the Dodgers did this at a nuclear level with Shohei Ohtani and company, the reaction wasn’t “smart business.” It was “they’re ruining baseball,” “the league has to stop this,” and “it’s a loophole.” And now? The Cubs take the Dodgers’ playbook, photocopy it, staple it to Bregman’s contract… and suddenly the outrage is on a nice little winter vacation. 

The Cubs’ Alex Bregman deferrals sparked an awkward silence around the Dodgers

Here’s the thing Dodgers fans have been yelling into the void for two years: deferrals aren’t a magic cheat code. They’re a weapon. But a weapon the league handed out to everyone.

MLB already accounts for deferrals in Competitive Balance Tax math by discounting the value to a present-day number using a league set rate, which is why the “they’re buying a roster for free” framing has always been a little off. And in Ohtani’s case, the deferral structure was reportedly his idea — the kind of player-driven financial flexibility most teams would love to have offered them if they were the ones getting the meeting. 

So why was the Dodgers version treated like a five-alarm fire while the Cubs version is getting polite golf claps?

Because the Dodgers are the league’s designated villain right now. When the Dodgers get creative, it’s “unfair.” When a different big brand does it, it’s “modern roster building.” When the Cubs do it, it becomes “wow, Chicago is finally going for it.” 

A lot of the anger toward the Dodgers was never really about the mechanics. It was about the optics. Ohtani’s contract was so loud it made people feel like the sport had tilted overnight. But here’s the part that really needs to be said: if you hate deferrals because they’re bad for the sport, you should hate them no matter who uses them. If you only hated them because the Dodgers used them to build a monster, congrats — you didn’t hate deferrals, you hated the Dodgers for being better at it.

If MLB wants to change this, it can. That’s what rules are for. But until the rules change, the Dodgers don’t owe anyone apologies for reading the fine print, exploiting what’s allowed, and getting elite players to agree to it.

The Cubs just reminded everyone that the Dodgers didn’t invent the idea, they just made the rest of baseball look behind.