Although they managed to stay under the radar all the while, the Los Angeles Dodgers pushed hard for weeks to try to sign Prince Fielder and thought for a while they might have a legitimate shot at their own secret signing. The Dodgers were a surprise entrant in the sweepstakes, making a major push to sign the star slugger with an offer that guaranteed him seven years but provided a sweet four-year opt-out. And for a couple weeks, they looked like a real possibility for Prince.

The Dodgers surely gave a spirited effort to secure Fielder, even flying to meet with him at an undisclosed neutral location a few weeks ago, but somehow managed to keep the entire undertaking under wraps, save for a few internet rumblings from fans speculating that they may have been a mystery team in the mix.

Heyman goes on to state that the Dodger offer was nowhere near the massive nine-year, $214m commitment Fielder just procured from Detroit, figures I wanted no part of. Rather, the supposed Dodger offer would have been “in the low $160m” range, with the first three years coming in at $26m apiece ($78m total), after which Fielder would have been able to opt out, then four years in the low twenties range, totaling about $85-90m and bringing the deal into the $160m range. About a month ago, I heard from a source who claimed that Ned Colletti had offered Fielder a 3/$80m deal, and while I couldn’t confirm it enough to run with it, that it pretty close to the first half of this supposed offer.

If that’s in any way true, well, I like that idea a lot. Sure, paying Fielder $26m a year is somewhat outrageous, but that’s only over his age 28-30 seasons, after which he’s either someone else’s problem or taking a pay cut. That’s also, of course, almost certainly why a deal like this had almost no chance of happening, considering how much more he eventually ended up getting from Detroit; the Dodgers were likely extending themselves just to get that far, hoping that the market would never materialize and Fielder would have no choice but to land with them. (There’s a conversation happening on Twitter right now about whether Victor Martinez‘ injury cost the Dodgers Fielder, since they may not have been in on Prince until they were short a bat; it makes sense, though I’m not sure if I fully buy that simply due to how much they did end up giving to Fielder.)

But that’s all behind us now, because Fielder is a Tiger now, and we won’t be seeing him in Dodger blue until he’s inevitably signed to a back-loaded contract in 2022. If anything, we can be impressed with the Dodger front office for not allowing anything more than unsourced speculation to leak during this process. Of course, the best part of Heyman’s story has nothing to do with Fielder, and the emphasis on this is mine:

The Dodgers tendered their longtime first baseman James Loney a contract and expect him to be their first baseman. They are not unhappy with him at all but merely saw Fielder as a rare opportunity to land one of the game’s best hitters.

Wonderful.

Back in November, the Dodgers locked up outfielder Matt Kemp for the next eight years for the enormous sum of $160 million. At the time, not only was it by far the largest in Dodger history, it was the seventh-largest contract in baseball history and the largest in National League history. While we noted that the deal wasn’t entirely without risk – Kemp was just one year off a hugely disappointing 2010 and tying up that much money in any single player can easily turn sour – we were generally very happy with the outcome. As I said at the time, “if you’re going to make that gamble, making it on an athletic outfielder that you know well and who is just entering his prime is a much smarter choice than doing it on a player already into his 30s who is an uncertain commodity.” Kemp ended up finishing second in an MVP race that he probably should have won, even before Ryan Braun‘s testing issues became public, and the combination of few available free-agent bats likely to be had next winter and Kemp’s youth meaning that he’s only signed through 34 made the deal seem extremely appealing.

Besides, beyond the obvious baseball reasons for needing to retain Kemp, this was a move that had to be made from a pure public relations standpoint. After all the garbage Frank McCourt has put fans through over the last few years, and considering that the Dodgers haven’t had a homegrown star stick with the team in decades – the last two players who made it ten years with the club were the decidedly non-elite Eric Karros & Dave Hansen, who each left after 2002 – the idea of letting Kemp walk was probably more than this fractured fanbase would have been able to handle. If you had to overpay slightly to avoid that, then so be it.

All of which is to say, at the time the deal was signed just before Thanksgiving, we were all pretty happy with it, one of the few Dodger roster moves this winter which was met with something other than disdain.

Two months later, Kemp’s contract has been absolutely blown away by the mega-deals received by Albert Pujols (ten years & between $246m-268m from the Angels, depending on incentives and personal-services deals) and the nine years and $214m Prince Fielder collected from Detroit yesterday. Considering what Kemp brings to the table that neither Pujols or Fielder do, the fact that the Dodgers kept him for $54m less than Fielder and about $100m less than Pujols – over a shorter term than either – makes the Kemp deal look even better than it does the day it was signed.

Compare Kemp to Pujols. As much as I love Kemp, it’s crazy to argue that he’s a superior or even equal hitter to Pujols, who will probably be one of the five best to ever play the game when he’s done. I mean, Pujols hit .299/.366/.541 with 37 homers last year, and people were complaining it was a down year; the man is a beast. But Pujols, who turned 32 earlier this month, is nearly five years older than Kemp, and perhaps more, if you believe the constant (yet unverified) rumors that his age may not be accurate. He’s a very good baserunner, but of course doesn’t offer close to the speed Kemp provides on the bases. While he’s an excellent defensive first baseman, one of the best in the game, the mere fact that he’s limited to the least-important defensive position curtails his value. You can argue both the accuracy of WAR and how it rates Kemp on defense, it’s for that reason that only once has Pujols had a season that beats Kemp’s 2011 in rWAR, back in 2003 when he put up an obscene 10.9 mark that ranks as the 16th-best season since World War II.

Younger, $100m cheaper, more dangerous on the basepaths, playing a far more valuable defensive position, and not coming off his worst (though of course, still great) season? I think I know which deal I’d rather have.

What about Fielder, whose own youth – born just four months ahead of Kemp in 1984 – was a major selling point for him? Fielder is of course an offensive force, since his .981 OPS last year was nearly the equal of Kemp’s and because has surpassed that mark twice before. The obvious big problem with Fielder is that not only is he a first baseman, he’s a bad first baseman, ranking as perhaps the worst in the sport since he became a full-time player in 2006. While his youth is an asset, his body type most certainly is not; you could argue that on hitting alone, he’s maybe better than Kemp, but when you consider baserunning and the enormous defensive gap between the two, Kemp seems like a better bet for the future. Not only that, Fielder is getting a year more and comes with $54m in additional risk.

I liked Kemp’s deal a whole lot in November, and I like it even more now. That’s in large part because unlike Pujols and Fielder, Kemp had not yet reached free agency, when the ability to negotiate with other clubs would almost certainly have inflated his price. Great job by the Dodgers to get him secured now, before an entire season of questions about his status and an even bigger payday next winter.

As has been reported by every outlet short of smoke signal and carrier pigeon over the last thirty minutes, Prince Fielder has finally come off the board, agreeing to a nine-year, $214m contract with the Detroit Tigers. This ought to allow Dodger fans to put the idea of signing Fielder – which was never going to happen, sadly – behind us for good, and resign ourselves to another long, cold year of James Loney and the Fun Bunch. That sounds kind of depressing when you write it like that, but… well, I don’t quite know how to end that sentence.

More importantly, though… holy crap. How does Scott Boras keep doing this? Nine years! Two hundred and fourteen million! Particularly when it’s coming from a team that already has a stud first baseman in Miguel Cabrera and has to deal with $35m more to another 1B/DH type in Victor Martinez, at least after he returns from his knee injury next year. After weeks upon weeks of hearing how the Fielder market was depressed because traditional spenders like the Yankees, Red Sox, Dodgers, Mets, and Phillies weren’t involved, Boras goes and pulls this out of his hat. Though many personify Boras as everything that’s wrong with baseball today, I can’t even be angry with him. Frankly, I’m just impressed. The man is simply a wizard.

Back to the Dodgers, well, if this is what it was going to take to secure Fielder, then I’m just as happy to pass. It’s one thing to swallow hard and choke up ~$160m when you’re already paying Matt Kemp and have to deal with Clayton Kershaw (especially when his closest comparable, Tim Lincecum, is extracting $40.5m over two years from the Giants because he hasn’t been locked up yet). It’s quite another to commit nearly $24m per year for nearly a decade to a bad-bodied player when you don’t have the luxury of the designated hitter to shift him to in a few years.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled moping over the Dodger offense, at least until we get further news on the ownership bidding process.

Over at Dodger Thoughts today, Jon Weisman links back to a piece he wrote several months ago that the Dodgers could and should sign Fielder, and there’s absolutely no argument with that from me. On the field, Fielder is a massive improvement over James Loney and would be an ideal partner for Matt Kemp. In the front office, you look at a 2012-13 free agent market that has a ton of great pitching – Matt Cain, Cole Hamels, Zack Greinke, and Dan Haren among them – but little in the way of power bats beyond the always questionable Josh Hamilton and realize that obtaining a bat while you can is a great strategy, especially when first base (Loney) and right field (Andre Ethier) are both staffed by imminent free agents. Off the field, signing Fielder would be a huge public relations boon to a team that so clearly needs one. So no, you’ll get absolutely no pushback from me that signing Prince Fielder would be a great thing for the Dodgers, other than perhaps a slight reluctance to add a third $20m+ annual salary, assuming Clayton Kershaw will soon be at or near that level along with Kemp.

Here’s the thing, though; there’s a pretty big difference between “does it make sense” and “is there really a sliver of a prayer that this could actually happen”, and that’s where I’d argue that it really isn’t feasible. You can forget about the fact that new ownership is coming in, because as I mentioned yesterday, that’s at least three months away. Camp starts in thirty days or less for most teams, and big-ticket free agents like Fielder don’t remain unsigned after camps open – they just don’t. That means if by some miracle Fielder makes it to Los Angeles for this season, it’s going to be because Frank McCourt gives the go-ahead, not because a new owner is making it happen.

So what’s McCourt’s motivation to do that? Simers and others have argued that adding a star like Fielder would increase the sale value, but I’m not convinced it’s that simple; as we’ve seen, the club is almost certainly going to go for $1.5 billion or more, shattering the previous MLB record. This isn’t a situation where interest is lagging and McCourt has to do something to excite bidders; besides, bids are due on the club tomorrow, so unless we have an immensely entertaining evening ahead of us, potential owners are bidding on a Dodger club that does not include Prince Fielder. (Since the bids are just opening bids, they could possibly increase later if Fielder was around, but that’s no guarantee; Bill Shaikin has suggested adding a $150m+ liability could actually depress bidding.) You could argue that McCourt wants to salvage what’s left of his reputation by giving fans a big gift before he goes, but as ego-driven as he might be, I don’t think even that is going to allow him to show his face in town after all he’s done – not to mention the question of whether he’d want to be on the hook for the first two payments of Fielder’s contract in April.

Like the rest of you, I’d love to see Fielder in blue. It makes a ton of sense. It’s also increasingly tiresome to have the emotions of Dodger fans played with each time this comes up. So please, Seattle, or Washington, or Texas, or whomever else is interested, sign the man already. For all of us.

Across the country, most baseball fans are counting down the days until Opening Day (73 for the Dodgers, until April 5 in San Diego) or until pitchers & catchers report (30 for the Dodgers, until February 21). But as Dodger fans, we’re forced to approach things from a different perspective, and that means that as of tomorrow, our primary number is 100 days – the time left before April 30, the deadline for Frank McCourt to complete the sale of the team. It’s very possible that the sale is completed somewhat earlier than that, so we could even be under 100 days at this point, but then again, who among us really trusts this guy to do anything but drag the process out as long as he possibly can?

It’s currently been 2,914 days since McCourt officially took over on January 29, 2004, just shy of precisely eight years. By the time he’s gone, he’ll have been in charge for something very close to 3,000 days. I can’t pretend they’ve all been bad – plenty of good times in 2008 and ’09, you know – but let’s also not act like everything was totally peachy right up until the day we learned of his separation from Jamie.

2,914 days down, 100 or fewer to go. I say this every year at this time, as winter freezes over, the sports calendar empties out, and baseball news generally slows until camp starts, but never has it meant as much as it does now: the next three months simply cannot go quickly enough.

Your feelings on Simmons aside, it’s hard to argue with a staff that includes Chuck Klosterman, Jonah Keri, Rany Jazayerli, and Katie Baker, among many others, and today they’ve added a new luminary: baseball stats legend Bill James. James debuts with a list of the 100 best pitcher’s duels of 2011 – completely subjectively, of course, because how else could you do it – and wouldn’t you know it, 10 of his first 42 entries involved the Dodgers. As it turns out – and this is going to come as a huge surprise, I know – Clayton Kershaw is really, really good, and I don’t know if anything was more fun this past season than watching him constantly beat down Tim Lincecum and the Giants.

3. July 20, 2011, Dodgers at San Francisco, Clayton Kershaw against Tim Lincecum

MSTI, July 20:

Now how about adding eight shutout innings with 12 whiffs against just three hits and a walk? By Game Score, which is admittedly imperfect, that was the third best start of Kershaw’s career. That it was also the third best start of his season should tell you a lot about just how good his 2011 has been so far, particularly now that he’s up to 23 consecutive scoreless innings and an MLB-best 167 strikeouts.

5. September 9, 2011, Dodgers in San Francisco again, Kershaw and Lincecum rematch

Looks like I didn’t say anything, because I was traveling for a wedding that weekend. Stupid weddings, part one.

18. September 20, Giants in L.A., Lincecum against Kershaw, Round 3

Stupid weddings, part two. This was my birthday and I was busy getting engaged. Still not sure that choosing those over watching Kershaw / Lincecum was the right move.

23. June 26, Angels at Dodger Stadium, Jered Weaver against Clayton Kershaw

MSTI, June 26:

This is the 12th time in Kershaw’s career he’s put up double-digit strikeout numbers, though it’s the first time he’s done it in back-to-back starts, since he also struck out 11 Tigers last week. It also put him up to 128 K’s on the season, putting him back ahead of Justin Verlander for the most in baseball. That’s impressive, but that’s not what I liked the best about today; it was the fact that he did it without a single walk. Remember when we said that the only thing holding him back from megaultrastardom was harnessing the walks? Yeah, about that: his K/BB rate from 2008-11: 1.92, 2.03, 2.62, 3.66.

Clayton Kershaw, shiny golden god.

25. August 9, Phillies in Los Angeles, Cliff Lee against Ted Lilly

MSTI, August 9:

On the other side of the ball, for all the jokes we have at Ted Lilly‘s expense, the veteran lefty was actually pretty solid against a good Phillies lineup. Lilly allowed just six hits and a walk over eight innings, which ties for his second-longest outing as a Dodger, and he even drilled Shane Victorino in the back for good measure. Of course, it wouldn’t be a Ted Lilly game if he didn’t allow a homer, and that’s how we get back to Lee, who took Lilly out to right field in the 7th inning. That made the score 2-0, though with the way Lee was pitching against the unimposing Dodger lineup, it might as well have been 200-0.

This was also the game where Dee Gordon injured his shoulder attempting to dive around Ryan Howard at first base, nearly causing all of us to pass out in terror.

31. August 2, Dodgers in San Diego, Mat Latos against Hiroki Kuroda

This win merely put the Dodgers to 50-59, and it’s amazing how tuned out we were from worrying about daily results at the time. The second-half improvement didn’t really get going until the latter half of August, and at the time we’d considered this team completely dead in the water, to the point where I was less concerned about recapping a phenomenal Kuroda start than I was about looking ahead to possible waiver moves and September recalls.

32. March 31 (season opener), San Francisco in Los Angeles, Lincecum against Kershaw

MSTI, March 31:

Earlier today, I noted that I had picked Clayton Kershaw to finish 1st in the NL Cy Young Award voting over at Baseball Prospectus. I’m now concerned that I didn’t pick him quite high enough, because Kershaw was absolutely sublime in tonight’s season opener, to the point where San Francisco starter Tim Lincecum allowed just one unearned run over seven innings himself, yet there was still no question about who was the most dominant starter on the mound tonight.

Kershaw scattered just four hits over seven scoreless innings, but even that doesn’t tell the true tale. One of those hits should have been an error on a botched toss from James Loney to Kershaw, and one was a bloop that fell just out of Loney’s reach. But while Kershaw was outstanding all around, it’s not just the few hits he allowed that impressed me most, and it’s not the nine strikeouts he put up. It’s not even how bad he made a handful of Giants look, particularly when he offered his curve. It’s the fact that he walked just one and made it through seven innings with fewer than 100 pitches. In years past, it might have taken him 120 pitches to get that far; in starts that aren’t his first of the season, you’d expect to see him continue into the 8th and 9th.

Need more proof of Kershaw’s progression? This was the 11th time in his career that he pitched at least seven innings without allowing more than one walk. Though he’s been in the bigs since mid-2008, seven of the previous ten came after June 27, 2010 – i.e., in the last half a season. We’ve long known that Kershaw had all the talent in the world, but there’s now a clear pattern of him harnessing the wildness and becoming one of the most dominant pitchers in the bigs. Mark my words, this is the year he gets the respect from the general public he deserves. Oh, and he turned 23 two weeks ago.

35. June 8, Dodgers in Philadelphia, Hiroki Kuroda against Cole Hamels

Kuroda was very good, as I mentioned…

Hiroki Kuroda sailed through the first four innings on a hot night in Philadelphia, escaped some trouble in the 5th, and then was touched for a Ryan Howard solo homer in the 6th. That was the run that put the Dodgers down 1-0 entering the top of the 7th…

…but this game ended up being far more memorable for being one of the low points of a dreadful first half by the offense, as once again, no Dodger other than Andre Ethier and Matt Kemp could contribute even the slightest bit of help:

Down one run, Andre Ethier & Matt Kemp set up the 5-6-7 hitters with two men in scoring position and no outs. To avoid scoring a run in that situation, you basically have to be actively trying to fail. To the surprise of absolutely no one, Juan Uribe, Marcus Thames, and Rod Barajas failed to get the job done. But that’s not news; Ethier and Kemp have been sabotaged by their underperforming teammates all season long. What really got me was the furor on Twitter as this was happening. In rough chronological order…

Tony Jackson (ESPNLA):

horrible AB by Uribe right there. Just horrible.

EephusBlue:

Boy am I glad we kept Thames

Dylan Hernandez (LA Times):

Thames, who batted 3rd Monday, comes up with men on the corners. “It doesn’t matter where you bat him,” someone said, “the game finds him.

Jayson Stark (ESPN):

The Rod Barajas Fan Club will be delighted to know that once that pop-up came down, he was 2 for 37 this year with men in scoring position.

Jackson:

@jaysonst and that .054 average is 54 points better than Thames, who is now 0 for 11 w/RISP

Jackson:

I have never seen a team come up with more creative ways to not score after getting a runner to third with less than two outs.

Kevin Modesti (LA Daily News):

@dodgerscribe It’s another example of we’ve talked about. Ethier & Kemp get on … Uribe, Thames & Barajas coming up — what do you expect?

ChadMoriyama:

That was one of those Dodgers offense moments you sorta knew was coming, but you still feel disgusted anyway watching it happen.

36. July 9, Dodgers in San Diego, Rubby De La Rosa against Aaron Harang

This led to one of my favorite post titles of the season,”Dodgers Win in Most Dodger Way Possible“. This was still a few weeks before the second half surge really got going, and the team was so bad at this point that it was all you could do to laugh at them.

Being no-hit for 8 2/3 innings, nearly wasting six one-hit innings from rookie standout Rubby De La Rosa, and then winning on two miraculous hits from Juan Uribe and Dioner Navarro, two of the worst hitters on the team?

Yeah, that sounds about right.

42. June 19, Houston in L.A., Bud Norris against Hiroki Kuroda

MSTI, June 19:

For 7 1/3 scoreless innings on Sunday, the Dodgers looked likely to set us up for disappointment. Hiroki Kuroda had sailed through the first seven, allowing just five baserunners before Matt Guerrier threw a clean eighth. After a tough turn around the starting rotation, it was a much-needed boost from the veteran. But yet again, there was absolutely no support from the offense, as Bud Norris and Sergio Escalona held the Dodgers to harmless singles by James Loney and Dioner Navarro, and walks by Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier. There’s a reason Kuroda has a losing record both for the season and his career, and it’s because of games like this. How many times have we seen a solid starting pitching performance wasted due to an offense that is barely of a Triple-A caliber? Tony Gwynn flied out to center to start the eighth, and with the bottom up the order due up, it seemed just a matter of time before patchwork bullpen (though buoyed by the returns of Kenley Jansen yesterday and Hong-Chih Kuo today) would allow the Astros to score and complete the sweep.

Kuroda didn’t get the win in the boxscore today – Guerrier did – but I think we all know who deserves that W next to his name.

Just barely avoiding a sweep against the lowly Astros. How did we survive the first half of the season again?

Perhaps more pertinent to the current situation, I wonder how this list might look if it were redone after 2012, now that Kuroda is gone and De La Rosa is injured. To be fair, Chad Billingsley does appear twice in the second half of the list, Harang was very good in the De La Rosa game, and Chris Capuano had the single best-pitched game of 2011 as judged by Game Score. (To be even more fair, this is a completely subjective list that’s very easy to tear apart and by definition requires both pitchers to be excellent at the same time, something which the mediocre Dodger offense probably had a big hand in.)

Ever since news broke that Frank McCourt had finally agreed to stop fighting MLB and sell the Dodgers, we’ve been somewhat cautious in our jubilation. Sure, the idea that there might finally be a light at the end of the tunnel after the years of litigation and embarrassment was fantastic – but who among us actually trusts this man to do anything he says? It’s massive distrust like that which makes hysterical conspiracy theories like this one actually seem viable. While the idea put forward there that McCourt might actually just be playing a long con to keep the team through the court system was probably never close to realistic, we’ve always been concerned about the provision in his agreement with MLB that allows him to keep the parking lots around Dodger Stadium, if he so chose. (You can chalk that up to sin #2 on his large list of offenses, splitting the team and property into a variety of different entities, thus allowing him to claim that the parking lots weren’t under MLB’s overview.)

It’s this potential pitfall which serves as the focus of the first of two ownership-related Bill Shaikin stories in the Los Angeles Times today:

The Dodgers are in bankruptcy, but the McCourt entity that controls the Dodger Stadium parking lots is not. In order to get McCourt to sell the team without a round of litigation over the parking lots, Major League Baseball agreed to grant him “sole and absolute discretion” over whether to keep or sell the land.

The agreement stipulates that prospective buyers “may submit bids that include the purchase of the parking lots.”

If the lots are not sold with the team, the new owner would lease them from McCourt for $14 million a year. The annual lease payment would rise in 2015, and every five years thereafter.

As Shaikin goes on to detail, there’s competing schools of thought on this, one side claiming that McCourt is just using this as a tactic to drive the price up, and the other suggesting that he’d attempt to develop the land in an effort to further bolster his bank account and restore his horrible local reputation. My gut feeling is that McCourt probably will sell the lots, take his hundreds of millions, and wipe his hands of the entire thing, but until every last contract is signed I won’t stop worrying that we’ll never actually be rid of him. And who would actually want to go park in the lots, knowing that the cash you hand to the attendant would go right to McCourt?

Shaikin also follows up with news on a few of the potential groups we looked earlier this month, suggesting that Peter O’Malley’s group might team up with the Stanley Gold / Disney family group to make a bid. That’s mildly interesting, but here’s something a bit more juicy:

Also Wednesday, federal agents arrested Jon Horvath, a New York technology analyst; he is charged him with insider trading. The Wall Street Journal reported that Horvath works at a division of SAC Capital Advisors, whose founder Steven Cohen is bidding for the Dodgers.

Two former SAC fund managers have pleaded guilty to insider trading charges, but this is the first time such charges have been leveled against a current SAC employee, according to the Wall Street Journal. Horvath’s attorney said his client has done nothing wrong.

Neither Cohen nor his firm has been charged. Still, the development is particularly ill-timed for Cohen, as Major League Baseball conducts investigations on potential Dodgers bidders. The league has agreed to approve up to 10 bidders, after which outgoing owner Frank McCourt will select the winner.

Despite possibly being the most wealthy bidder in the field, I’ve been pretty pessimistic about Cohen from the start. Here’s to hoping this news torpedoes his candidacy before it even gets started.

Unfortunately for purveyors of high comedy, we won’t get a chance to envision that, since Loney has avoided arbitration by agreeing to a one-year deal worth $6.375m. If that sounds like a lot for a player of Loney’s talents, well, just remember that the arbitration process isn’t exactly the free market. And if he’s anything like the Loney we saw over the last two months of 2011, he’ll actually be underpaid. (When he’s not that Loney, of course, feel free to commence moaning.)

Updating the numbers from earlier today, the Dodgers now have about $79m committed to 16 players under contract for 2012, plus the approximately $5m or so that will be spent on minimum salary pre-arbitration types like Dee Gordon, Kenley Jansen, and A.J. Ellis. The only outstanding arbitration case, Kershaw, still looms…

#Dodgers arbitration-eligible All-Star OF Andre Ethier agrees to 1-year contract for $10.95M + PBs.

I’m pleasantly surprised by that, actually. Ethier made $9.25m last year on the back end of a two-year, $15.25m contract signed before 2010, and despite most of us knowing he had a relatively disappointing and injury-prone season, a 30-game hitting streak, All-Star appearance, and Gold Glove usually go a long way in contract negotiations. I had pegged $12m as Ethier’s likely salary through arbitration, and Eric Stephen had guessed $13m was probable, so coming in at just under $11m (plus likely incentives, which we’re not aware of yet) seems like a pretty good deal on the club’s part.

With Ethier settled, the Dodgers now have $72.60m committed to 15 players under contract for 2012. That doesn’t include the approximately $5m or so that will be spent on minimum salary pre-arbitration types, the approximately $23m spent on deferrals and buyouts, or the club’s two remaining arbitration cases, Clayton Kershaw and James Loney, who will likely add $15-18m between them.

As you’ve probably seen just about everywhere on the planet by now, the Yankees have had a helluva night, signing former Dodger Hiroki Kuroda – as I sort of predicted days ago by pointing out that his translator had already joined the Yankees – and shockingly trading Jesus Montero and Hector Noesi to Seattle for Michael Pineda and a prospect. (As a sidenote, it’s amazing to see what a young catcher who can hit gets in trade, isn’t it? Blargh.)

I imagine that a lot of Dodger fans are pretty upset that Kuroda left for an East Coast team after refusing a trade in July, particularly when the $10m deal he’s reportedly accepted is less than the $12m he made with the Dodgers last year. If you’d have told me this was going to be the outcome in July when he wouldn’t accept the trade, I’d probably have been all fire and brimstone about it. Now, I’m not so sure about that, because I feel like we don’t know exactly why Kuroda’s return didn’t work out; despite appearances, I’m not convinced it’s as simple as “Kuroda didn’t want to leave in July, but he had no problem doing so now.”

Think about it; over the last two offseasons, Ned Colletti has shown a clear preference to do as much of his free-agent shopping as soon as he possibly can. (As prices start to drop, by the way, this is only going to make some of the deals we’ve seen look worse, a situation I’ll look at more closely in a few weeks.) Conversely, we don’t know how long it took Kuroda to decide whether he wanted to stay in America or return to Japan. Reports only surfaced over the last few days that Kuroda wanted to play in MLB in 2012 for sure, and by that time, the Dodger rotation was long since filled – despite reports that Colletti was reportedly in contact with Kuroda’s agent as recently as last week. It could very well have been merely an issue of timing, not an issue of “loyalty”, and I’m guessing we’ll never know.

So best of luck in New York, Hiroki. It’ll be fascinating to see you on the big stage.

In the meantime, here’s some various combinations of 2012 Dodgers that will add up to $10m:

Juan Uribe ($8m) + Matt Treanor ($0.85m) + Adam Kennedy ($0.8m) + Mike MacDougal ($0.65m) = $10.3m

Juan Rivera ($4m) + Aaron Harang ($3m) + Mark Ellis ($2.5m) + Tony Gwynn ($0.85m) = $10.35m

Matt Guerrier ($4.75m) + Chris Capuano ($3m) + Jerry Hairston ($2.25m) = $10m

That doesn’t take into account, of course, that many of those are the lower-priced first year of a two-year deal which will increase in 2013.