Once, when he was just doing his thing in Tampa Bay, there was a time when Andrew Friedman didn’t know a Competitive Balance Tax from TurboTax. Now, he admits, his life is a little different. Now, he’s the president of baseball operations of a $389 million team known as the Los Angeles Dodgers.
He has spent the last two offseasons doling out free-agent contracts totaling in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion. And this week came his most exhilarating accomplishment of all: He got to appear on the latest episode of the Windup’s Starkville podcast, with me and Doug Glanville.
Cue the confetti drop. Advertisement “I feel,” he said on the show, “like I finally, really made it.” All right, he was laughing as he uttered those words.
But along the way, he dropped a whole lot of knowledge — and revealing stories — on topics ranging from Shohei Ohtani to his manager’s increasingly noteworthy contract status. You should listen to the whole conversation. It’s fun and informative.
But if you’d like a taste of what you missed, here are Five Things We Learned from Andrew Friedman’s Visit to Starkville. (Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.) 1.
He’s pretty sure the Dodgers are not the Evil Empire Even Yankees chairman Hal Steinbrenner now thinks the Dodgers have grabbed the Yankees’ longtime throne as the Evil Empire. And if that’s what the Yankees think, you don’t even want to know what fans of the Pirates, Royals and Rays think. But all his team.