Jaws dropped last March when the group led by Mark Walter and his Guggenheim Partners agreed to buy the Dodgers for $2.15 billion.

That was wildly more than anyone imagined. Virtually everyone asked how the new owners expect to get the baseball team to pay it back.

For five months now, we’ve been waiting to hear the answer. But the new Dodgers owners have remained pretty dodgy themselves, never quite answering.

The question is important because a baseball team is like any other business. No business can lose money indefinitely. Investors can be patient for a while, but eventually they want their money back, plus a reasonable return. And when a buyer way overpays for any business, it makes the payback all that more prolonged and painful, and maybe even impossible. For a baseball team, imagine high cable bills, towering ticket prices and years of painful budget cuts and woeful on-field performance.

Which is why the $2 billion price has implications – bad implications – for the team. Do the new owners have some magic payback plan? Or is there some thing else we don’t know? Maybe there’s a benevolent billionaire in the investment group who doesn’t care if he gets his money back? (The investment team reportedly includes insurance companies, which tend to be patient investors. But even insurance companies want a return on their investment sometime.)

So I was interested when the team’s new general manager, Stan Kasten, sat for a 45-minute interview with the Business Journal’s Alfred Lee and David Nusbaum. (The article was in the Aug. 13 issue.) The reporters pressed him: What’s the plan for making big money? But alas, he wasn’t very illuminating.

He did say that a blockbuster TV rights deal will be negotiated in the coming months, and the new owners should know the contours of that by Dec. 31. He said sponsorships will be beefier but wasn’t specific. And without elaborating, he mentioned that the Dodgers will be more of “a platform for growing our larger business” – much like Anschutz Entertainment Group uses teams as part of its bigger enterprise.

OK, fine. Maybe so. But insiders and experts have considered those same things and still can’t get near $2 billion.

Several have been quoted, some anonymously because they had agreed not to speak publicly, saying pretty much this: The Dodgers were worth $1.1 billion-$1.2 billion on a good day. If you assume a startlingly huge media rights deal – bigger than anyone imagined – you can get to $1.4 billion or so. (One expert at the time of the auction last March said $1.4 billion was a “crazy” number.) And it was about at that level where the bidding stopped. But the Guggenheim guys stepped up and shockingly bid $2 billion for the team and the stadium plus $150 million for a separate parking lot deal.

Just to put a point on that sum: It is greater than the combined sale prices of the last three teams that sold. (Texas Rangers, $561 million in 2010; the Houston Astros, $615 million in 2011; and the San Diego Padres, which reached a deal last week reportedly worth about $800 million.)

One of the losing bidders told me (also not for attribution) that he was stunned at the big price, sure, but he was mystified as to why the Guggenheim guys didn’t bid $1.6 billion or so. Probably no other bidder would have matched that amount. It was as if they were bored with the bidding process and decided to blow a few hundred million just to put an end to it.

Is there any way the Dodgers could be worth $2 billion? I asked. “There’s not,” he said, “unless they know something the rest of us don’t.” He paused. “Either that, or they made a mistake.”

Yes, that’s the situation exactly.

If the Guggenheim guys know something the rest of the experts don’t – if they have some secret plan – then it would be good for them to outline it. But since it sure looks like they made a crazy deal, they should explain why they didn’t.

And the longer they don’t do that, the longer they remain dodgy on this important point, the more we fans start wondering: Maybe they did make a mistake.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].