The Lockout Accelerationism of Kyle Tucker’s Contract

Despite searching through the new and unimproved Google for this quote, I have been unable to find where Larry David or Jerry Seinfeld refer to Seinfeld as “the last golden ticket.” Even if the quote doesn’t exist the sentiment stands: Seinfeld was the last of the great American sitcoms to make its creators’ children into trust fund recipients. The new era of television is Tony Soprano realizing he came in at the end. I don’t doubt great sitcoms still exist, but most seem in a perpetual state of boomerslop with a dearth of an audience comparatively. Years from now, after the lockout of 2027, Kyle Tucker will be the line of demarcation for the last bloated contract golden ticket.

Personally I don’t think Kyle Tucker is to blame for his contract. We all know what 2027 had in store without some monumentally overzealous contract that, to make a TV pun, jumps the shark. But we at least got to live in a fantasy land where there was a chance Rob Manfred would, for the first time, used his administrative power to fix the problem and make baseball better. Now, much like that asteroid from last year if you asked AI posters on TikTok, there is an impending moment of destruction.

Due to my age, the Dodgers are a new-era good team. Before you eviscerate me for my lack of ball knowledge, understand that my formative baseball years were the 2000s. The Dodgers were almost comically bad at that time. This wasn’t the Patriots who had, at most, two bad seasons in the 2020s; the Dodgers faced a decade-plus of administrative and on-the-field incompetence. But, all it took was some financial dark arts for the Dodgers to go from last-place hell to ruining baseball every year.

The Dodgers’ Lockout

I’m not going to sit here and write out some introduction to explain why the Dodgers are causing the lockout. This would be rude of me. For the past two years I have added “who are pulling an Enron” onto the end of every sentence that involves the Dodgers. Despite the fact that everything they are doing falls under the “technically legal” moniker, the Dodgers seem to be the only team that has taken the deferred money option to its logical extent. The Competitive Balance Tax (CBT) has to have become some sort of running joke in the Dodgers front office. I find it almost refreshing to see a team taking advantage of Manfred’s inability to centralize any sort of authority. And, ironically, the Dodgers’ corporate hubris will, almost certainly, be its downfall.

There are two main counterarguments I’ve seen to the ruining baseball accusation. The first is the “this is allowed under the rules” argument. Which, yes, the action the Dodgers are performing is fully allowed. But, much like the Costco return policy for major appliances, you’re not spiritually meant to return the air conditioner every summer.¹ This isn’t technically abuse, but like every Russian action during the Obama administration, walking up to the red line and dancing on it saying “well I’m not really doing the thing” will eventually lead to consequences.

The other, more insidious, argument is that the Dodgers are still paying a CBT on all the deferred contracts. It genuinely irks me when Dodgers’ fans make this argument. One, because their grasp of adult literacy is tenuous at best, but also because it’s such a misrepresentation of the actuality that I would say its akin to failing a Rorschach test.² Yes, there is payment on the deferred payments. But paying tax on only $46 million of Shohei Ohtani’s $70 million a year contract does seem like gaming the system a bit.

The Kyle Tucker CBT Problem

I had forced myself into an annoying battle with Sportrac numbers to try and determine what the tax hit would be if the Dodgers didn’t defer any money. Despite my insistence that basic Excel knowledge means I could work backwards into a higher number, I could only come up with ~$144 million luxury tax if nothing was deferred, compared to the current $168 million tax hit from Sporttrac.³ But that’s because CBT calculations are the work of magic, where Blake Snell’s contract and CBT hit continue to haunt me like RAP in property law; it hurt my brain.

The bottom line is this: the Dodgers CBT payroll is ~$416.8 million in 2025. Without deferrals (and without Kyle Tucker) they’d be paying $495 million. To me, it is wholly unfair that a repeat-offending team is paying $80 million less than it should because they have exploited a rule as written. And it’s not like they have to continue paying once the contract is up. Over the course of Shohei Ohtani’s contract they will be paying taxes on about $240 million less salary than if the deferrals did not exist or have some kind of cap.

I also don’t want to put all the blame on the Dodgers. The Mets are incompetently sitting over there throwing around contracts to geriatric players (and Bo Bichette) as though Steve Cohen has found his second Bernie Madoff. There is something to be said to the other owners of not diving into the poorly written loopholes allowed on the CBT. But, I’m not all that worried about the owners themselves. I’m worried about the bigger implication.

How does this relate to Kyle Tucker? The Dodgers could most likely tank the tax hit, even if they were calculating without deferrals. The deferrals themselves did not give the Dodgers cash to acquire Kyle Tucker; it gave them the CBT flexibility to bring him on more cleanly. Because the luxury tax hits of guys like Ohtani, Betts, and Freeman are lowered because of deferrals,⁴ the Dodgers lowered their reported payroll in a system that taxes spending progressively and punishes marginal dollars most severely. The Dodgers are already repeat offenders in the highest tax bracket. In that sense, every dollar not counted toward a player’s true AAV, makes the signing of a new player even easier. The deferrals didn’t make Tucker cheaper or allow the Dodgers to get him; the deferrals made it so that the consequences of signing the $60 million a year man were artificially smoothed.

This in itself is enough to create a lockout.

But, to me, this section is not the dangerous lesson being taught to everyone. I don’t think most casual observers have realized it yet, and I’m not sure it has made its way to the people who I’m worried about have either.

TV Contracts Without Reservations⁵

One of the more annoying parts of the Dodgers’ ownership structure is that its backed by Guggenheim Partners. As an Astros fan, there’s a part of baseball that wants me to continually apologize to for the 2017 scandal. Not only do I love that the Astros did what they did, it made me almost appreciate the Wall Street conglomerate. The Astros also never pushed baseball toward a lockout.

As much as corporate synergy preaches bringing in new voices to unrelated fields to create new ideas, the Andy Elliots of the world have a point.⁶ That’s what makes me so annoyed about Guggenheim Baseball Management. If it wasn’t obvious above, there seems to be an implicit understanding among baseball owners not to abuse the rules to their logical extent. Sure, a manager can exploit a double switch, but usually the powers that be nip that in the bud. In that course, it’s a bit encouraged, if still frowned upon. But some rules are not meant to be taken to their logical extent.

The Dodgers are owned, essentially, by a financial investment and advisory firm. Sure there’s a consortium and a management group and Magic Johnson, but I don’t enjoy engaging in unnecessary pretense in pursuit of being annoyingly technical. Guggenheim Baseball Management’s power, much like the US dollar, is backed by the more powerful entity it is inherently tied to. That’s what makes me mad about the TV deal. It’s not the Dodgers going to every other team a la Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network.

Global investment firms are soulless entities only focused on the dollar; much like private equity and much shareholder value, it’s a soulless pursuit of an ever-inflated dollar. It does not care if it destroys baseball or creates a lockout. The Dodgers are investment product. Lockout be damned, as long as valuation increases, well, who cares?

What makes this arrangement so corrosive isn’t simply that the Dodgers are rich; baseball has always had rich teams. It’s that the Dodgers are rich in a way that is fundamentally post-baseball. Their television deal isn’t a clever exploitation of a market inefficiency, so much as it is the inevitable outcome of financial logic being allowed to run unimpeded inside a sport that still pretends it operates on gentlemanly constraints.⁷ The ownership class (old and new) understood, at least tacitly, that there were lines you didn’t cross too aggressively. You could win, but you weren’t supposed to optimize. Optimization wasn’t so much as frowned upon as it was understood that optimization leads to destruction.⁸

Guggenheim doesn’t understand that distinction, because there is no analogue for it in finance. If a rule exists, it is to be maximized. If a revenue stream can be locked in, it should be securitized. If risk can be externalized, it must be. From that perspective, the Dodgers’ TV deal isn’t controversial because it is logical. And that’s precisely why other owners should be furious. They aren’t angry because the Dodgers broke the rules; they’re angry because Guggenheim exposed that the rules were never enforceable to begin with.

This is why appeals to “competitive balance” ring hollow. The issue isn’t that the Dodgers spend more. Their spending is underwritten by a revenue source that no longer exists for anyone else, and never will again. Baseball is now caught between two eras: one governed by informal restraint and shared vulnerability, and another governed by permanent capital and guaranteed returns. Guggenheim chose the latter, correctly, ruthlessly, and without sentiment.

And that’s the real sin. Not cheating. Not dominance. But indifference. The Dodgers don’t need baseball to be healthy. They only need the Dodgers to be valuable. The Dodgers are just an investment. A baseball team in ever-expanding portfolio of sports properties meant only to increase in value for a better return if Guggenheim ever decides the math says to sell.

The Dodgers don’t need baseball healthy. But everyone else does. Lockout is just a quick devaluation of an investment that has already made money back threefold. Lockout is not devastating; like economic downturn it is baked into a risk assessment slide in a deck.

Ownership Accelerationism

Above is listed the reasons that will be put forward to the public by the owners to justify the CBA negotiation stalemate leading to a lockout. Obviously, the players will want more higher-paying contracts; the owners – some who are cheaper than me once my I see the dangerous adult playground that is Target – will see the logical conclusion of poorly written policy. This is not to let certain owners off the hook for their poor behavior and inability to put some cash into contracts. I’m all for getting rid of those owners without their approval, because they actively make the sport worse.

Incompetent owners are a mainstay in any sport. As a non-fan of these pits of joyful despair, I almost find it comical watching fans grasp at anything to give them hope, while their owners eats wonderfully in the box he attends sparingly. This is a feature, not a bug, of professional sports, as any well-meaning capitalist will explain, losers are a necessity. While Trump seeks a 10% APR cap on credit cards, those with hundreds of thousands of earned through financially responsible means scramble before the coming dilution.

It should not be lost in this discourse, in an era where fans are begging their individual owners to spend money, that the team spending the most money is owned by a consortium backed by a $350 billion AUM investment firm backed by one of the preeminent Old World families. Pirates fans, instead of asking Mark Cuban to save them from financial irrelevancy, should be reaching out to the Rothschilds. 

And I think that is the crux of this blog and my main worry about what’s happening in sports ownership. Unless you’re somewhat terminally online in political circles, the title of this blog seems simple enough – Kyle Tucker’s contract will cause a lockout. But it’s more of a double entendre. Yes, Kyle Tucker’s contract is causing the baseball ecosystem to spiral toward a 2027 lockout, which screws players out of playing time.⁹ But the accelerationism I was referring to is that of Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin.

Accelerationism is a somewhat fringe political theory¹⁰ that wants to push capitalism and tech to their absolute limits to break the system and usher in a new age of authoritarian order with some sort of corporate monarchy or tech overlords.¹¹ How does this relate to baseball? My fear that the lesson in all this is not don’t push the beautiful game of baseball to its limits and force a lockout. My fear is that the lesson future consortiums are taking is that baseball – and sports in general – are ripe for exploitation. The old boys club of owners, despite maybe disliking each other personally, knew that you should not break baseball. Even Steve Cohen knew that certain rules do not need to be taken to their logical extent.

The system is being broken before our eyes. It’s not about the endless amount of money the Dodgers can theoretically back themselves with, because that’s really not the issue. There is a well-oiled machine of target school graduates ready to exploit a rulebook made for a group still beholden to unwritten rules. And the bigger question is this: what happens when other consortiums and investment groups and, sometimes, countries figure out that the Dodgers increase in valuation was not some sort of accident dependent on an S&P 500-like steady return rate? Maybe the Rays or A’s will be safe from these vultures, but what happens when the Cubs or Yankees or Red Sox receive an offer that shouldn’t be possible?

What pushes this lockout beyond a normal labor fight is how it becomes an accelerationism case study: stress the system, expose its weak points, and let the sharks begin to circle. Baseball’s rulebook, like liberal institutions more broadly, assumes good-faith actors bound by long-standing custom with an inherent want to not break the system.

Accelerationism rejects that premise entirely. If exploiting loopholes, deferrals, and valuation arbitrage breaks the sport, that isn’t a failure, it’s proof the sport was ready to be exploited for resources. In that framework, a lockout isn’t collateral damage; it’s a cleansing event that clears the way for tighter control and fewer, more powerful owners. The owners become a powerful group of financial overlords wielding feudal power over baseball markets.

Once baseball is shown to be a reliable financial instrument, investment firms and consortiums won’t hesitate to follow. They won’t buy teams to win a World Series; they’ll buy them to create more capital for shareholders. Kyle Tucker’s contract isn’t the cause, but it is the canary in the coal mine of a toxic symptom. It’s a signal flare that baseball can be accelerated past tradition, past parity, and, eventually, past the people who thought the game belonged to them. Them, even in the loosest sense being us, the fans.

The upcoming lockout isn’t just a lockout. I see this upcoming pause in America’s pastime as the start of an accelerationist takeover of baseball’s soul. Sure, a salary cap and floor may provide a much needed bandage, but wasn’t that the point of the luxury tax?

Kyle Tucker is causing a lockout. But that’s not the true implication of his contract. I truly hope the Call of duty transactions are worth it.

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1. Just for the record, everyone who does this should be disallowed from buying any sort of appliance every again, forced to subsist on Rent-A-Center APR. ↩︎
2. “You can’t fail a Rorschach test!!!” Trust me, Dodgers fans will find a way. ↩︎
3. According to that same webpage, the Dodgers are only paying ~$161 million in taxes in 2026. ↩︎
4. Betts and Freeman much less so than Ohtani, but still lowered nonetheless. ↩︎
5. After writing this section, I realized I assumed that you knew about the Dodgers’ TV deal. If you need a refresher, please read this. ↩︎
6. I hate Andy Elliot with a passion, but I know of no other corporate speakers. ↩︎
7. I bring up the Pirates of the Caribbean scene all the time, but there are so many situations where it rings true. ↩︎
8. Optimizing three pointers to make a team better, but the overall product much, much worse. ↩︎
9. A lockout in 2027 most likely means that Jose Altuve won’t reach 3000 hits. ↩︎
10. Curtis Yarvin was interviewed by The New York Times and Nick Land has some sort of cult-like status. It’s fringe in knowledge, not in influence. ↩︎
11. Those of you aware of what I’m talking about will be somewhat annoyed I’ve dubbed neo-reactionary accelerationism as just accelerationism. Neoreactionary accelerationism is the main form from a cultural standpoint, and it was easier than posting a full explainer of Marxist accelerationism and the remaining types. ↩︎