Six Dodgers players are eligible for salary arbitration this season, including five relief pitchers. The date for players and teams to exchange salary figures is next week.
It’s a new year, and the 2024 season reviews are complete. It’s time to look ahead to the Dodgers in 2025. Early on the agenda in January is salary arbitration, which affects eight players currently on the roster.
Salary arbitration is a collectively-bargained way for players to earn more than the minimum salary in their final three seasons before achieving the six years of service time necessary to reach free agency. In some cases, players can earn four years of arbitration, beginning if they are a Super Two player, among the top 22 percent in service time among players with at least two years but not yet three years of service time. Evan Phillips and Brusdar Graterol were Super Twos ahead of the 2023 season, for instance.
The arbitration system is set up such that players and teams negotiate towards a deal. If they can’t agree on terms, they will face off in an arbitration hearing, during which a three-person panel will pick the submitted salary of one side or the other. Per the collective bargaining agreement, the hearings will be scheduled from January 26 to February 20.
First up is the exchange date, which this year is set for Friday, January 10. That’s when players and teams submit their salary figures if they haven’t already come to an agreement. The exchange date often serves as a soft deadline of sorts, even though there is nothing preventing the two sides from continuing to negotiate up to the scheduled hearing.
In the previous 10 offseasons of the Andrew Friedman-led front office, 80 Dodgers players have entered January eligible for salary arbitration, and 73 have signed (91.3 percent) by the exchange date. Five others who exchanged salaries later worked out multi-year contracts. The last arbitration hearings for the team were in 2020, with Joc Pederson and Pedro Báez. Those are the only two arbitration hearings in the last 17 years.
Last year, all 10 arbitration-eligible Dodgers in January agreed to 2024 contracts by the exchange date.
At the beginning of this offseason, the Dodgers had nine players eligible for salary arbitration. Connor Brogdon was sent outright off the 40-man roster in November and elected free agency. On November 22, the team reached one-year deals for Tony Gonsolin ($5.4 million) and Dustin May ($2.135 million), with both pitchers re-upping for the same salary as in 2024 after missing the entire season following elbow surgeries.
That leaves six Dodgers with unresolved salary arbitration cases — second baseman Gavin Lux and five relief pitchers.
Over the next week, we’ll dig deeper into each of these players, looking at comparable players at their various service-time levels.