LOS ANGELES -- For most of the baseball world, the monster trade that sent four players and $262 million worth of contracts to the Los Angeles Dodgers this weekend was a stunning pronouncement of wealth, ego and largesse.

General managers across the land were appalled. Rival owners cringed. Agents salivated. Pundits gasped for air. Fans were dizzy with joy. Sabermetric wonks threw their calculators at a wall.

It was impossible not to have a reaction to the trade that sent Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett and Nick Punto and more than a quarter billion dollars from the Boston Red Sox to the Dodgers.

It was impossible. Unless you're the man who authorized the financial outlay.

You know what that man, Dodgers controlling owner Mark Walter, calls it?

With stellar reputations to uphold, Mark Walter and Magic Johnson can ill afford to handle top-tier deals haphazardly. Kirby Lee/US Presswire

"Payroll."

I'll let him explain.

"I think when you look at the size of this market relative to the size of other markets, our payroll isn't out of line," Walter told ESPNLosAngeles.com on Saturday afternoon after completing the historic trade.

"I mentioned the Cubs' payroll earlier. A few years ago their payroll was around $165 million. Our payroll was around $100 million. A hundred? That's way down. Way down for a market like this."

In other words, get used to this. After their latest moves, the Dodgers now have 19 players under contract for next season totaling $183.45 million. The team's Opening Day payroll this season was $105.4 million.

Walter and his partners weren't kidding when they said they would run the Dodgers more like the New York Yankees than the notoriously stingy hand former owner Frank McCourt guided the franchise with from 2004-12.

During the McCourt years, the Dodgers often operated like a small-market club. Those days are long gone, even if it will take a long time to forget them.

But with every swaggering, big-market kind of move this new ownership group makes, the more apparent how different things are now.

"I think the value of this franchise is represented in the price that we paid and what other people would've happily paid," Walter said. "That doesn't go up or down with one or two players' salaries.

"We feel like we're trying to build something for the long term. I think that's important, too. Obviously we want to win now. But we also want to win a decade after that. So if that's what we have to do, we will."

I asked if there was a ceiling to that commitment.

"Somewhere, I suppose," Walter said blithely.

Before we go any further, you should know that Mark Walter isn't just a wealthy man who bought a baseball team for all the accompanying "psychic benefits."

He's a wealthy man who still spends the first part of his day as the CEO of Guggenheim Partners, a global financial services firm that manages hundreds of billions of dollars in assets. The Dodgers are now a tiny speck in that empire.

So you can imagine just how inconsequential $262 million in payroll is to a man who oversees $125 billion (that's billion, with-a-B!) in assets.