With the confirmed signing of closer Kenley Jansen and an expected agreement with third baseman Justin Turner, the Los Angeles Dodgers will have 11 players under contracts of at least three years in length. Here will be their ages when their deals end: 39, 36, 35, 35, 35, 35, 34, 34, 32, 31 and 28.

Generally speaking, signing a bunch of guys well into their 30s is not how a smart baseball team does business. It’s a sign of desperation, something to which the Dodgers, in their more honest moments, would cop, seeing as they’re run by a president and general manager who made their bones in the business dealing players precisely before they got to their 30s.

And yet when you’ve got a TV contract bigger than the GDP of a small country – actually, bigger than 50 countries’ – and a World Series drought going on three decades and the best pitcher in the world, well, sometimes you’ve got to be smart like Homer Simpson.

The idea that the Dodgers “needed” Jansen and Turner – and needed them at five years for $80 million and four years for $64 million respectively – is reasonable through only a pair of prisms: that the world is ending after 2017 – thanks, Trump – and that there is something to buttress the odiousness of the president (Andrew Friedman) and the GM (Farhan Zaidi), late of small-fry shops in Tampa Bay and Oakland, giving out $16 million-a-year deals to a guy who may pitch 70 innings and another almost certainly on the downslope of his career.

Seeing as mutually assured destruction isn’t something worth betting on, it’s a good thing that second prism casts a rainbow for the Dodgers. Because that something – it exists. It is Corey Seager. It is Julio Urias. It is Cody Bellinger and Alex Verdugo and Willie Calhoun, Yadier Alvarez and Jose De Leon and Walker Buehler, Yusniel Diaz and Austin Barnes and Brock Stewart and Chase De Jong and Josh Sborz and Trevor Oaks and holy hell is it scary when the deepest farm system in all of baseball belongs to the team that’s also going to carry a quarter-billion-dollar payroll this season.

When Friedman and Zaidi joined the Dodgers in the offseason after 2014, they didn’t bring with them some sort of small-market juju. There was actual substance to their approach: go piecemeal for a short while until the development system in which they have invested as much as any team turns into a talent spigot that won’t stop. The problem with the bloated Yankees of the 2000s and into this decade wasn’t all their bad contracts. It was that the team developed next to no talent alongside it.

The Dodgers do not suffer such a malady. Seager was the second-best player in the National League last season as a 22-year-old rookie. From his third start on, with a majority of them coming as a 19-year-old, Urias struck out 77 in 69 1/3 innings, allowed just two home runs and posted a 2.73 ERA despite balls in play dropping more than 36 percent of the time. That is an annual MVP contender and an annual Cy Young contender in the same rookie class. And it’s just the start.

The rich get richer as the Dodgers re-signed Kenley Jansen and are close on Justin Turner. (AP Photo) More

Alvarez, a 20-year-old Cuban for whom the Dodgers paid $32 million, could be one of the five best pitching prospects in baseball by this time next season. He throws an easy 100 from the right side. Bellinger, 21, is the most-asked-for player in trade talks and the heir apparent to Adrian Gonzalez at first base. Calhoun, 22, may take over at second if the Dodgers don’t acquire one this offseason. Verdugo more than held his own last season in Double-A as a 20-year-old. Diaz, another costly Cuban, should spend all season at Double-A as a 20-year-old this season. De Leon could crack the Dodgers’ rotation at some point in 2017. Barnes is the rare legitimate 27-year-old prospect. Buehler and Stewart and De Jong and Sborz and Oaks all will pitch in the big leagues sooner than later. And that’s just the start.

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