The Lakers are getting a new owner. And in Los Angeles, he’s already a familiar name.
Thirteen years after buying the Dodgers and transforming the team into a juggernaut in Major League Baseball, billionaire businessman Mark Walter is in line to become the new majority owner of the Lakers.
Suddenly, the once anonymous Chicago-based investment manager is about to have both of the Southland’s most prominent professional sports teams in his portfolio.
For Lakers fans, Walter’s arrival will mark a massive shift following decades of family ownership of the team by the Buss family. But, they won’t have to look far to find examples of how Walter has operated another iconic Los Angeles sports brand.
Read more: Q&A: Dave Roberts says Mark Walter will help make Lakers a perennial title contender
“He’s really committed to the city of Los Angeles in various ways,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said Wednesday, after the stunning news of Walter’s impending purchase of the Lakers first emerged. “He’s going to do everything he can to produce a championship-caliber team every single year, and make sure the city feels proud of the Lakers and the legacy that they’ve already built with the Buss family.”
As Walter’s ownership of the Lakers prepares to begin, here are four things to know about his stewardship of the Dodgers over the last decade-plus.
Money is (almost) no object
When Walter’s Guggenheim Baseball group bought the Dodgers in 2012, the once-proud franchise was mired in embarrassment and mediocrity.
Under Frank McCourt’s ownership, the team was in bankruptcy. It had not fielded a top-10 MLB payroll three years running. And it had only won the National League West three times since the turn of the century, seemingly miles away from ending what was already by then a decades-long World Series drought.
But then came Guggenheim — making huge infusions of cash, followed by a sudden return to contention.
Since 2013, the Dodgers have exceeded MLB’s luxury tax threshold (the closest thing baseball has to a soft salary cap) eight times and topped the league in spending seven times.
They’ve splurged repeatedly on star talent, from lucrative extensions for Clayton Kershaw, Andre Ethier and Kenley Jansen; to blockbuster acquisitions of Adrián González, Hanley Ramírez and Zack Greinke; to the more recently transformative arrivals of Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and Shohei Ohtani.
And in that span, they’ve never once missed the playoffs, won their division 11 of the past 12 seasons, and reached the World Series on four occasions — finally breaking through with championships in 2020 and 2024.
“He wants to win,” Roberts said of Walter. “He feels that the fans, the city deserves that.”
Walter’s Guggenheim group has made major outlays beyond the roster as well. They invested in what has become one of the most renowned farm systems in the sport. They have built a robust analytics department in the front office. They’ve made multiple major renovations to Dodger Stadium, upgrading fan areas and the players’ clubhouse facility.
Read more: Lakers selling majority ownership of franchise to Dodgers owner
There have been moments when the team has shown financial constraint, most notably when it strategically stayed under the luxury tax in 2018 and 2019 — to the chagrin of some fans at the time.
But in the past two offseasons, the Dodgers have spared almost no expense, this year becoming the first team in MLB history to boast a $400 million luxury tax payroll.
“The commitment from our ownership group from the minute I got here has been incredible,” president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said this offseason. “It has always been, ‘Hey let’s push. Let’s go. Lets’ get better.’”
Business is booming
Shohei Ohtani, center, gestures to teammate Yoshinobu Yamamoto, left, as Roki Sasaki, right, looks on during a press conference in Japan in March. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
For all the money the Dodgers have spent, they’ve had little problem super-charging revenue streams at the same time.
Shortly after Walter’s Guggenheim group bought the team, it struck a ground-breaking 25-year, $8.35 billion television deal with Time Warner Cable, leading to the creation of a Dodgers-exclusive SportsNet LA cable channel (albeit, one that many fans could not access through their television providers until the 2020 season).
In recent years, the team has also sought to expand its brand internationally — an effort that was significantly amplified by the $700 million signing of Ohtani in December 2023.
For years leading up to Ohtani’s free agency, the Dodgers had identified an opportunity to capture the Japanese baseball market. They saw the chance to sign him, as well as other Japanese stars like Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki, as a way to become that nation’s most popular MLB team.
That reality came to fruition at the start of this season, when the Dodgers opened their season in Tokyo in front of sold-out crowds painted almost entirely in shades of Dodger blue apparel.
According to Sportico — which valued the Dodgers at $7.73 billion this year — the team was estimated to have also eclipsed $1 billion in revenue during the 2024 season, with Ohtani’s arrival leading to an influx of Asian sponsorship agreements, skyrocketing merchandise sales and even a team-run fan club based in Japan.
Stability in leadership
When Walter’s Guggenheim group first came into the picture, the Dodgers didn’t make sweeping personnel moves right away.
Stan Kasten was inserted as team president, but pre-exisitng general manager Ned Colleti and manager Don Mattingly maintained their posts all the way through the 2014 season.
Changes did eventually come in the front office and the dugout. Friedman, then seen as the most promising young executive in the sport, was hired ahead of the 2015 campaign. Roberts replaced Mattingly a year later.
But ever since then, leadership in the organization has remained largely the same.
Rather than rock the boat in times of trouble, Walter has practiced patience when it comes to personnel decisions.
Roberts’ 10-year managerial tenure has best epitomized that preference for stability. At multiple junctures, factions of the fan base have called for his firing — such as after the Dodgers were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs in 2019, or won just one postseason series in the three years after their 2020 title.
But the Dodgers stuck the course with Roberts, who was then hugely influential in guiding the team to last year’s unlikely run to a championship, navigating his way around a rash of pitching injuries.
Now, Roberts is the highest-paid manager in baseball in annual salary, and will be under contract for four more seasons after this year.
A hands-off approach
Other than the money his Guggenheim group has spent, the defining trait of Walter’s ownership of the Dodgers might actually be the hands-off style with which he has run the team.
Walter is typically seen in-person around the club on only a handful of occasions over the course of the regular season. He delegates much of the organization’s day-to-day operations — on the business and baseball fronts — to Kasten, Friedman and their respective lieutenants, including chief marketing officer Lon Rosen and general manager Brandon Gomes.
Roberts framed that approach as a positive on Wednesday.
Read more: Plaschke: Lakers had a great ride with Buss family, but Dodgers owner will give team new life
“I think a good owner in my eyes is a person that lets the people that he hires do their jobs,” Roberts said. “[Walter] does a great job of letting Stan and Andrew and Gomer, all those guys, Lon, do their jobs, right? But also kind of holding us all accountable and also providing resources when we need it.”
Under that system, however, the Dodgers have nonetheless run into occasional controversies — from the signing and suspension of Trevor Bauer in 2021, to the decision to rescind, then reinstate, a Pride Night community award to a trans-rights group amid public backlash in 2023.
Even this past week, the Dodgers came under fire for their delayed response to recent immigration raids that have unsettled the city, though the team was expected to announce plans for assistance to immigrant communities on Thursday.
In each of those situations, Walter refrained from offering any public comments. And generally, he has been reclusive with the media ever since buying the Dodgers, having rarely been made available to reporters to answer questions about the state of the club.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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