Lakers Sale
LOS ANGELES — Days after Mark Walter’s Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series last fall for the second time in five years, he met with the team’s president of baseball operations, Andrew Friedman, to discuss an offseason strategy. The team had stunned the baseball world with its spending the year before, inking Shohei Ohtani to a record-setting $700 million contract during a $1.4 billion spending spree. Friedman wanted to know what Walter prioritized as a new season dawned.
“Mark’s mindset,” Friedman told The Athletic earlier this year, “was to be even more aggressive.” He added, “He was like, ‘Hey, let’s keep going.”
And Walter, aiming to reify this time as the “golden era of Dodgers baseball,” doled out another $456 million on new players for 2025. Turns out, there was even more spending for Walter on the horizon. Walter and his holding group, TWG Global, are entering an agreement to purchase the Los Angeles Lakers for a franchise valuation of $10 billion.
Walter, the 65-year-old financier from Chicago, has become the king of Los Angeles sports. The overlap between Dodgers and Lakers fans is significant. But there are plenty of folks in the South Bay, and spread across the basketball landscape, wondering how Walter will guide his new franchise.
