How will Mark Walter impact the Lakers? Here are 5 key tenets of his Dodgers reign

New York Times

6 hours ago

LOS ANGELES — Days after Mark Walter's Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series last fall for the second time in five years, he met with the team's president of baseball operations, Andrew Friedman, to discuss an offseason strategy. The team had stunned the baseball world with its spending the year before, inking Shohei Ohtani to a record-setting $700 million contract during a $1.4 billion spending spree. Friedman wanted to know what Walter prioritized as a new season dawned.
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'Mark's mindset,' Friedman told The Athletic earlier this year, 'was to be even more aggressive.' He added, 'He was like, 'Hey, let's keep going.'
And Walter, aiming to reify this time as the 'golden era of Dodgers baseball,' doled out another $456 million on new players for 2025. Turns out, there was even more spending for Walter on the horizon. Walter and his holding group, TWG Global, are entering an agreement to purchase the Los Angeles Lakers for a franchise valuation of $10 billion.
Walter, the 65-year-old financier from Chicago, has become the king of Los Angeles sports. The overlap between Dodgers and Lakers fans is significant. But there are plenty of folks in the South Bay, and spread across the basketball landscape, wondering how Walter will guide his new franchise.
For those curious about Walter, here are five key tenets gleaned from his stewardship of the Dodgers. Not all are directly applicable to the Lakers. But they offer insight into the priorities Walter has displayed during the past 13 years in charge at Chavez Ravine.
Long before the Dodgers landed Ohtani, Walter engaged in shock-and-awe spending to resuscitate a club that had fallen into bankruptcy and disrepair. A few months after purchasing the team in spring 2012, Walter chartered a jet that carried Adrian Gonzalez and several other exiles from the Boston Red Sox, a package of players that cost more than $250 million and brought instant credibility to Walter's ownership group.
The tone was set for Walter's tenure. Without the restrictions of a hard salary cap, the ownership group has supported a top-five payroll every season since 2013, leading the sport in spending in seven of those seasons. The Dodgers have also not missed the postseason since 2013. This is not a coincidence.
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Of course, in a league with a salary cap, the Lakers cannot exert the sort of advantage the Dodgers do. But the club has demonstrated a dexterity in spending in recent years through the usage of deferrals. The trend reached its apex with Ohtani, who agreed to defer 98 percent of his windfall until after his playing contract ends; the team is paying him just $2 million per season while using his celebrity to rake in untold millions through new sponsorships with Japanese companies. The club has turned the Ohtani contract into a credit card, using the money to lure talent to Los Angeles while convincing the new arrivals to defer salary for down the road.
The Dodgers have about $1.04 billion in deferred money on their books and are still paying a premium up front for it. Their luxury tax bill a year ago was $103 million, the highest in baseball history. Between payroll and luxury tax, they're expected to pay more than half a billion dollars in 2025.
Again: There are limits to how Walter's money could shape the Lakers' roster — after all, the NBA's second apron appears to be a far more prohibitive and punitive punishment for high-spending teams than Major League Baseball's tiered luxury-tax system. There are other things an owner can buy.
Like a second plane.
This season the Dodgers introduced what they've called a first-of-its-kind travel system to transport their massive traveling party; the players take one plane, and the rest of the staff takes another. In addition, the team just completed a multimillion-dollar renovation of their home clubhouse at Dodger Stadium — expanding the space, revamping weight rooms and training rooms, and adding saunas and restrooms to go with Japanese-style toilets that helped sway coveted Japanese pitcher Roki Sasaki to sign with Los Angeles. Another small perk: adding a coffee stand in their player dining room for players ahead of day games.
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'I think he does everything he can to provide resources, support,' Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. 'He wants to win. He feels that the fans, the city deserves that. I think that's never lost.'
The Dodgers won the National League West in 2013 and 2014 but fell short of a championship in each season. Ned Colletti, the team's general manager at the time, had built an admirable roster, one loaded with stars. But Walter and team president Stan Kasten believed there was a better choice available to run the baseball operations department. So the Dodgers pushed Colletti aside and lured Friedman, who had built the small-market Tampa Bay Rays into a competitor, out West.
A year later, manager Don Mattingly met a similar fate after crashing out of the postseason early for the third season in a row. The team replaced him with Roberts, who has produced the best winning percentage of any manager in the history of Major League Baseball.
What does this mean for Rob Pelinka and JJ Redick? Perhaps nothing. Walter does not conduct himself like George Steinbrenner, firing underlings seemingly at random. He stuck with Friedman and Roberts after the club lost the World Series in 2017 and 2018. Pelinka just signed a new extension, and Redick is only one year through a four-year deal. However, Walter has demonstrated his willingness to part ways with successful employees if he believes there are better choices available.
And he spends to surround those top-level executives. The Dodgers employ one of the largest analytical departments in baseball and one of the largest scouting staffs. In an era when teams have been shedding non-player jobs to save money, Walter has done the opposite.
Clayton Kershaw. Mookie Betts. Shohei Ohtani. The Dodgers have never lacked for stars under Walter. He has paid the cost to secure their services. The team has maintained ties with Kershaw, a homegrown star, through several rounds of free agency. After Friedman swindled the Red Sox to acquire Betts in 2020, Walter inked the former American League MVP to a contract extension worth $365 million.
As for Ohtani, Walter found a way to connect with the two-way sensation's competitive spirit during negotiations after the 2023 season. When Ohtani met with Dodgers officials, Walter insisted he viewed his time running the team to be a failure — because the club had won only one title during those years. The comment stuck with Ohtani and helped convince him to sign. (The $700 million didn't hurt, either.)
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So it would be reasonable to expect the Lakers to hunt for stars to build around. Good news for Walter: the team already has LeBron James and Luka Dončić. Can the Lakers capitalize on their fame as the Dodgers have with Ohtani? The Dodgers found every way possible to leverage their unique market position, flooding just about every crevice of Dodger Stadium with advertising while also having their leadoff hitter serve as a walking billboard.
If the Lakers start to announce partnerships with companies from Slovenia, you'll have an answer.
Walter doesn't appear often at Dodger Stadium. He rarely speaks to the media. He kept brief his remarks at the White House earlier this year. He tends not to meddle in baseball decisions, trusting the expertise of Friedman, Kasten and general manager Brandon Gomes. In this way, he represents the ideal of an owner, a man with deep pockets and plenty of trust for his staff.
Said Roberts: 'I think a good owner in my eyes is a person that lets the people that he hires do their jobs.'
Walter does that. But he can also afford a hands-off approach because the club has not stopped winning. Friedman is generally considered by his peers to be the sharpest executive in the sport, with his front office capturing top honors in The Athletic's annual poll for the second straight year. The combination of Friedman's ingenuity and Walter's stability appealed to Ohtani, who added a 'key man' clause into his contract, which would allow him to enter free agency if either Friedman or Walter leaves the organization during the 10 years of the deal.
'Everybody has to be on the same page in order to have a winning organization,' Ohtani said at the time. 'I feel like those two are at the top of it, and they're in control of everything, and I feel almost like I'm having a contract with those two guys.'
So will the Lakers receive the same treatment from Walter? Will he afford the same autonomy to Pelinka and Redick? Time will tell. But there is reason to believe Walter's priorities with his basketball team will be the same as the priorities with his baseball team. He wants to win.
(Top photo of Mark Walter during the 2013 playoffs, early in what has been a successful tenure with the Dodgers: Scott Cunningham / Getty Images)