Edwin Díaz never had the Dodgers in his mind until a phone call from Kike Hernandez set off the chain of events that sent the closer from New York to Los Angeles. Hernández sent Andrew Friedman a three-minute voice memo shortly before the Winter Meetings in December, and the message was simple: Díaz was real about the Dodgers, and he was not using them as leverage.
“If you want to keep winning, this is your guy,” Hernández told Friedman. That was enough to move the conversation along at a time when the Dodgers began the offseason with very little confidence they would land Díaz at all.
Hernández knew the club well after spending nine of his 13 major-league seasons in Los Angeles, and he knew Díaz well enough as a close friend to make the pitch matter. He told Friedman that the Mets had not yet made an offer, that Díaz genuinely wanted to play for Los Angeles and that the interest was sincere. In a market where top relievers were moving fast, that mattered. Raisel Iglesias had already re-signed with the Atlanta Braves on a one-year, $16 million deal in mid November. Ryan Helsley later took a two-year, $28 million deal from the Baltimore Orioles. Devin Williams then landed a three-year, $51 million contract with the Mets.
By the time Díaz’s decision was taking shape, the Dodgers believed he would command a four- to five-year contract, a price range they had not been eager to chase for relievers. But the market had thinned, and the path to a deal narrowed to the Dodgers and the Mets. Díaz later said that when talks began, it was either one club or the other, and that Los Angeles moved fast. “But with the Dodgers, we did everything quick,” he said.
The friction in the story is that the Dodgers started out cold on the idea, even as Hernández was telling Friedman there was a real opening. They expected a longer deal, preferred shorter reliever contracts and had little confidence they would win the bidding. Yet the memo, the friendship and the market all pointed the same way once the other elite options came off the board. Díaz eventually switched coasts from the Mets after six seasons in New York, a move that changed the balance of both bullpens.
The timing now gives the move an immediate backdrop. The Mets are scheduled to play a three-game series in Los Angeles starting Monday, less than three weeks into the season, with Díaz facing the team he left and the city he chose. What began as a quiet message from Hernández to Friedman ended with the Dodgers getting the closer they had once barely expected to have.
