Andrew Friedman’s bare feet alighted cautiously on the hardwood floor next to his bed, but there was no shock of cold. He stood, fumbled for his slippers, wandered to the kitchen and opened the cupboard. The Lucky Charms were in his bowl and his body was sunk halfway into the chair in front of his television before the cobwebs were completely cleared, so his diet would have to wait a day. Between bites, he reached for the remote, as the TV still sat there in front of him, black, blank, an expensive and inefficient 108-inch mirror.

Hey! Wait a minute!

The remnant of a dream preparing to fly away with the cobwebs lingered just long enough for Friedman’s mind to grab hold. He rolled it over in his head. There had been something about a cross-country flight, and a three-way trade, and an ocean view…

He sat up straight, swung around and stared out the window behind him, the window that was where a wall ought to be, the window looking straight out at the Pacific Ocean.

“Aha!” he yelled, turning back toward his monstrous TV, taking in, for the first time, the irony of the Tampa Bay Rays’ general manager owning such a thing. But then, if this was reality, maybe those concerns belonged to the past.

He began to head back toward the kitchen, but stopped to pick up the spoon he had dropped on the floor—and there laid the proof. Inset into the heated marble was a four-foot seal, the President of the United States’s seal, only with ‘United States of America’ swapped out for ‘Los Angeles Dodgers,’ and with Tommy Lasorda holding a quiver of arrows in his talons.

It hadn’t been a dream at all! Andrew Friedman really ran the Los Angeles Dodgers, and they really didn’t give a damn about money. Friedman rushed to his bed, grabbed his phone (a real iPhone! Not a flip phone, and not one of those cheap knockoffs that only looks like a smartphone!) and called Farhan Zaidi.

“Get Beachy!” he hollered. “Screw it, give him $3 million, take it out of petty cash, or off the minor-league meal budget. No one will miss it.”

And that’s how the Dodgers agreed to sign Brandon Beachy, 11 months after his second Tommy John surgery, to a one-year deal, with a club option for 2016, guaranteeing him $2.9 million in the process. It’s probably money down the tubes, but if you would bet three dollars on something at six-to-one odds, the Dodgers would bet $3 million on it.

Epilogue: Gabe Kapler walks in, to find that Friedman, again, awoke with no recollection of having been hired, and has already made his own breakfast. Kapler sighs, tosses his hands into the air, and begins resignedly unloading groceries into a badly overstuffed refrigerator. Fin