Clearing the Bases Before I Skip Town
I'm packed for my six-day Spring Training trip, which begins on Wednesday. I counted about seven different baseball-themed shirts as I packed. Bought a new scorebook for the occasion (one of those softball-style vertical ones that can handle lots of substitions; hey, I'd keep score at a tee-ball league), and a brand new ball to toss around. I've already broken out the mitt and feel comfortable telling Joe Torre or Jim Tracy that I can give them a few innings on back-to-back days.
Joining me on this trip will be my girlfriend's brother Aaron, a Milwaukee resident and die-hard Brewers fan who has been dying hard for just about any other brand of baseball one could offer ("I'd settle for Mudville vs. the Indianapolis Clowns!" he wrote). If everything goes as planned, we'll be seeing six games over the next five days:WED: Indians at Yanks, Tampa (night)
THU: Marlins at Dodgers, Vero Beach (day) & Devil Rays at Mets, Port St. Lucie (night)
FRI: Cardinals at Dodgers, Vero Beach
SAT: Twins at Yanks, Tampa
SUN: Yanks at Tigers, Lakeland
I planned this trip when there was three feet of snow on the ground, and I'm going to enjoy this as if it were the first sunshine I'd seen all spring.
• • •
I'm taking my laptop with me to Florida. With any luck I'll be posting the occasional update later this week. Here are a few links to point out before I go:
• The New York Times ran a timely piece for my puposes on Sunday. Mark Shapiro, author of
The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together, comes to terms with a modern view of the Dodgers move, one in which Walter O'Malley isn't the bad guy:
O'Malley was not just my villain. He was Brooklyn's. He was the man whom Pete Hamill and Jack Newfield famously placed in their own triumvirate of evil, along with Hitler and Stalin. But, as I began to learn more about O'Malley and about the circumstances of the Dodgers' departure, I began to discover that perhaps - forgive me, Pete and Jack - Brooklyn's hatred was misapplied. Could we all have been hating the wrong man all these years?
Shapiro, who as one might guess grew up in an abandoned Brooklyn, now sees O'Malley as fighting the losing end of a battle with Robert Moses, a much heavier hitter in city history. Moses was the master architecht of New York City for 40 years, building the bridges, highways, parks and other structures that have shaped this city. And he wouldn't give O'Malley the time of day. Writes Shapiro:
O'Malley pressed on. His letters to Moses suggest a little man in a boxing ring, dancing around a very big opponent. O'Malley used whatever leverage he could muster, all but begging for his support. Moses, it becomes ever more clear, could not abide him, nor did he have any intention of letting him build anyplace near the heart of Brooklyn.
Moses never wrote that he spurned O'Malley because he did not like him. But he made his disdain clear: as far back as 1954, he complained of O'Malley's "beefing, threatening, foxing and conniving." He had other plans for the Dodgers, or the New York Giants. He wanted them in Queens, in the stadium he was planning to build in Flushing Meadows. O'Malley took the best offer he had, which came from Los Angeles. That it also came at Brooklyn's great and enduring expense made him a villain, especially because the move made him rich.
Having grown up a Dodger fan west of the Mississippi River, long after the team left for L.A., I must admit that the extreme view of O'Malley as a villain never resonated with me. As far as my family's concerned, he brought the majors out west a time when it was long overdue, making it a hell of a lot easier to get Dodger games on the radio. That view survives even now that I live in New York. To indulge in some cloud talk, it would be nice if there were still Dodgers here and if Bill Veeck were a hero for taking the Browns westward, as he tried to before the Dodgers lit out. But what then of Fernandomania? And the rest of baseball history -- would Koufax have put it together in Brooklyn? What of the Miracle Mets? Or the Baltimore Oriole way?
I don't have any illusion that Walter O'Malley was a nice guy. But the baseball world he shaped has given me a pretty fair shake over the years, so I don't need to forgive him. Michael Shapiro feels that Brooklyn does. He writes: "...while Brooklyn may never love Walter O'Malley, it is time to forgive him. Nothing grand has ever risen on the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, where his dream palace might have stood. It makes the mind dizzy, contemplating that phantom stadium as a gift to Brooklyn from the man we always believed had broken our hearts."
• Jonathan Leshanksi, who runs the site
At Home Plate and is the commissioner of my fantasy league, has a positive review of
Shapiro's book, which has just been published.
• Also on the subject of Dodger history,
former GM Fred Claire reflects on trading Pedro Martinez in 1993:
I will be the guy who traded a young Pedro Martinez. It was a major mistake on a couple of fronts. First of all, it wasn't difficult to recognize the talent of a young Pedro. Secondly, it was even easier to see that this was a very special young man who had a great personality and a great inner spirit to go with his talent.
It's the type of mistake a general manager can make when he gets too focused and tries too hard to fill a hole in his everyday lineup. Is that an excuse? No, there is no excuse for trading a Pedro Martinez.
Claire's soul-searching admission is offered up a sort of rambling open letter to the Boston Red Sox not to let him get away. Ssssssh, dummy, maybe the Dodgers can snag him back...
Yes, it was a stupid deal, trading Pedro to Montreal for Delino Freakin' Deshields in 1993. But in the grand scheme of Dodger history, Claire's got a pretty good entry on the positive side of the ledger as well: he signed Kirk Gibson in 1988. They still fly that Series flag and they still play the tape of Gibson's home run, so Fred's all squared with me. No further apology needed.
•
Elephants in Oakland has had a good back and forth with a reader about the Miguel Tejada Situation and owner Steve Schott's intentions. Our elephantine friend also has an
entertaining rant about the way the Internet has blown several recent baseball stories out of proportion.
Off to the Grapefruit League...
In the baseball website racket, keeping a fantasy team is as much obligation as hobby. Gotta have a side to wear the corporate colors, after all, and some poor middle infielder to jettison after a losing streak. And lest you get the idea that you're the smartest guy on the block, a sorry-assed roster full of slow first basemen with bad hammies, sore-armed third starters, and disgraced former closers will remind you otherwise in a big hurry. When all else fails you can spend a column bitching about it. Not that I've had to, of course. With a first-place and a second-place finish in the past two years, I am clearly MENSA material.
Or else the only one paying attention. I spent my recent years in the Homer Bush League (ESPN) competing against near-total strangers in almost deafening silence -- my Mendoza Line Drivers last completed a trade in 2000. So for some human interaction this season, I accepted an invite to join a league with the writers of several other sites (including At Home Plate,
@theballpark,
Elephants in Oakland,
Historical Baseball,
Jim and Bob's Palatial Baseball Site, and
The Southpaw). For ballast, we've got a couple of my long-lost college pals along as much for their trash-talking skills as for their ball-talking. Since they're both functionally illiterate moral degenerates, I can freely slander them in this space. But I'll hand it to those boys for bringing two of the league's better names into the fold: Rick Burleson's Army and Morgan's Porno Stash (the owner has it on good authority that Joe is a big fan of skin mags).
Before this year, I'd never done a live draft, and this is also the first time I've played with a full-MLB player pool (or with a full deck, for that matter). I'm well-versed in ranking all of the players at a single position in a single league until the Cal Pickerings come home, but ask me to estimate the value of a good closer relative to a good slugging third baseman and you might need a mirror to tell if I'm still breathing. I spent the weekend leading up to the draft arming myself with data, and I ignored most of it except when it supported my gut instincts. Forty-five mintues before the first pick, I was outside playing catch. Suffice it to say I didn't overthink the situation; it was like telling Shawon Dunston not to worry about the strike zone. I was hacktastic.
It didn't help that I drew the 12th draft spot, meaning I had two picks in a row (last of one round and first in the next). When you draft like that and then have to wait 23 picks until your next shot, you spend more time indulging in witty banter than serious research. How many snappy comebacks does a guy need for drafting C.C. Sabathia in the 13th round? And why should it burn a Sox fan's red ass (that would be Rooster Boy) if I pick Jose Contreras in the 19th? Jeff Kent -- now there's a porno 'stache.
When the smoke cleared late Monday, this was my roster:
C Jorge Posada
1B Jason Giambi (1st pick at #12)
2B Roberto Alomar (a relatively late pick)
3B Eric Chavez
SS Jose Hernandez (Cooooooooooors)
OF Gary Sheffield (hate the player, love his game)
OF Ken Griffey Jr. (another sleeper I couldn't bypass)
OF Jermaine Dye
CI Robin Ventura
MI Jerry Hairston Jr. (hate him, but I have the need for speed)
Util/Bench: Jose Cruz Jr., Bobby Kielty, Aubrey Huff, Kevin Mench
SP Roy Oswalt, Roy Halladay, Javier Vasquez, Tomo Okha, C.C. Sabathia, Andy Pettitte, Jose Contreras (Like Steinbrenner, I couldn't resist a 7-man rotation when I saw Contreras still available)
RP Troy Percival, Franklyn German
I'm short a second catcher, wagering on German to win the Detroit closer job, heavy on corner infielders, outfielders and Yankees, and light on speed. I've got a few big OLD question marks, particularly Alomar and Griffey, and Oswalt makes me more nervous than a #1 starter should (hence the stockpiling). But I feel good about my squad. I know they'd run through a wall for me just to kick some Rooster Ass. As the Futilitarians say: bring it on!
In early January, a rumor surfaced that Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation might sell the Dodgers. To anyone capable of counting on their fingers, this hardly came as a surprise. Count five: having purchased the Dodgers in 1998, News Corp's five-year window to depreciate player contracts had just closed. The five-year rule (
brainchild of Bud Selig in his Seattle Pilot-jacking days) allows half of a franchise's purchase price to be allocated to player contracts and depreciated over that span, creating an artificial loss which reduces the owner's tax liability. Disney's move to
sell the Angels and the entire sordid succession of Florida Marlins owners (Huizenga to Henry to Loria, oh shit!) are prime examples of the corporate inclination to bail once that window closes. Why should the high-class folks who brought you quality entertainment such as
Joe Millionaire and
Man vs. Beast be any different?
On Rupert's watch, the Dodgers went from a solidly profitable marquee franchise to a spectacularly unprofitable cautionary tale. From 1990 to 1997, the Dodgers averaged a gain of $8 million a year in operating income, according to
data from Financial World. From 1998 to 2001, they averaged a loss of $20 million a year in operating income, according to
Forbes Magazine figures. Those losses were the largest in baseball in each of those seasons. Contributing to them, of course, was a massively inflated payroll which shot from $48.5 million pre-sale in 1997 to $94.2 million in 2000 and has kept pace as the game's third-highest ever since.
Who can't afford Mike Piazza?
Forget the money. What the Dodgers lost goes beyond dollars. Rupert and his henchmen destroyed a fifty-year trend in organizational continiuty and stability that had held place under the O'Malley family -- a stability that survived Walter O'Malley engineering the most controversial upheaval in the history of sports, the Dodgers' move from Brooklyn. Regardless of which coast they were on, or whether father Walt or son Peter was running the team, the O'Malleys built a franchise that was competitive year in and year out. The Dodgers rebounded after their rare down years without resorting to the histrionics of firing their manager. They had exactly two of those from 1955 to June 1996, from Walter Alston's first one-year contract to Tommy Lasorda's heart-attack-induced retirement, and in that same span they won six World Championships and eleven pennants, making fifteen postseason appearances.
From the get-go, the Foxies produced an organizational soap opera worthy of
Melrose Place. While the ink was barely dry on their purchase, they traded Mike Piazza rather than meet his $100 million contract demands. A month later, they used Lasorda to engineer a bloody coup which toppled his mild-mannered managerial successor, Bill Russell, and GM Fred Claire. They eventually hired GM Kevin Malone, a loudmouth who described himself as "the new sherrif in town" and proceeded to embarrass the Dodgers with his mouth and his personnel decisions. The Dodgers made Kevin Brown the richest player in the game with a ridiculous 7-year, $105 million contract, squandered millions on busts such as Carlos Perez, Darren Dreifort, Devon White, and Eric Karros, traded Charles Johnson for sore-armed Todd Hundley, and feuded with petulant superstar Gary Sheffield. Malone picked fights with manager Davey Johnson, Padres GM Kevin Towers, and finally,
a Padres season-ticket holder before being jettisoned into oblivion. Floundering around .500 and coming nowhere near the postseason, in three years the Dodgers burned through as many managers as they'd had over the previous 45.
They also drove away this fan of over 20 years. From the time I began to understand major-league baseball (c. 1977), the Dodgers had been my team. My family bled Dodger blue; ours was a rooting legacy passed down from my grandfather through my father, and as a youngster I delighted in hearing about Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Sandy Koufax and others while watching my own Dodger heroes -- Davey Lopes, Ron Cey, Fernando Valenzuela, Pedro Guerrero. As I grew up, they rewarded my loyalty with contenders, championships, and continuity. The Murdoch era did away with all that, and proximity drove me into the arms of the team's most hated rival, the Yankees.
But even a blind squirrel trips over an acorn now and again. So it was with the Dodgers hiring Jim Tracy as their fourth manager since Lasorda. Passing over name-brand skippers such as Felipe Alou, they chose an unheralded, untested candidate whose persona resembled the man who'd held the job for 22 seasons before Lasorda, Walt Alston. Saddled with expensive mediocrities such as Karros, Mark Grudzielanek, Marquis Grissom, and Tom Goodwin, and with pitching staffs decimated by injuries (Brown, Dreifort, Perez and Ashby were paid $38 million to make 38 starts in 2001), Tracy nevertheless has kept the Dodgers in contention up until the final week in each of his two campaigns. He's milked productive seasons out of the likes of Grissom and Alex Cora, found significant roles for journeymen Paul Lo Duca, Eric Gagne, and Dave Roberts, and instilled two of the most expensive clubs in baseball history with the plucky spirit of the underdog. Though his teams have come up even shorter than Bill Russell's, against the backdrop of the Foxies' ineptitude, Tracy's Dodgers have won moral victories and the respect of this disenfranchised fan.
Moral victories don't buy much these days, at least not enough for Rupert Murdoch. Though the team freed up significant payroll this offseason, they shunned big-name free-agents such as Jeff Kent and Cliff Floyd, content to cut losses and send Tracy into battle undermanned yet again.
Now they want to get fiscally responsible?
You'd think this fan might rejoice at the rumor that Rupe's ready to sell. But the news that the Dodgers' potential knight in shining armor is
none other than Dave Checketts is enough to make me recoil to embrace Rupert's regime. Checketts and I have a history.
In 1979, a woeful professional basketball team moved to my hometown of Salt Lake City. The Utah Jazz, on the lam from New Orleans, gave its fans four seasons of dreadful basketball as an excuse to watch the Dr. J's, Larry Birds, and Magic Johnsons of the NBA run rampant. But in 1983-84, they began turning things around, both on the court -- their first .500 season and first playoff appearance-- and in the front office, hiring a 27-year-old local, Checketts, as their Executive Vice President and General Manager. Through excellent scouting and drafting, including two relatively unheralded players in John Stockton and Karl Malone, the team became a perennial contender on Checketts' watch, though much of the credit is due to Scott Layden. Checketts left the Jazz in 1989 a much stronger franchise than he inherited, a legacy that endures today, The Jazz's string of postseason appearances has continued uninterrupted via the core of Stockton, Malone, and coach Jerry Sloan. Fifteen years and two thousand miles away from Utah, they've given me a team that remains near and dear to my heart.
Checketts made his way to the bright lights and big city. After two years of working for the NBA league office in Manhattan, he became president of the Knicks in 1991 and then of MSG Sports Group (parent company of the Knicks, the Rangers hockey team, the WNBA Liberty, and Madison Square Garden) in 1994. Inheriting two championship-caliber teams, he ran them into the ground, with horrible contracts, inflated payrolls and a distinct lack of imagination. His network maintained a third-rate look, skimpy on graphics, personality, and bulb wattage. He developed a reputation for
corporate ruthlessness as well, with such stunts as a bold power move to unseat the previous MSG president, a behind-the back pass at Phil Jackson while Jeff van Gundy was still coach, and a GM fired over dessert. Upon his
resignation in May 2001, the Garden lay empty, without either of its expensive, uninspiring teams in the playoffs for the first time in 25 years.
Since leaving MSG, Checketts has tried to purchase the Boston Red Sox and the Orlando Magic, with no success. But now his bid for the Dodgers has gained the backing of two billionaires, George Soros and Eli Broad, and they are reportedly prepared to offer $600-650 million for the Dodgers, their stadium, and Fox Sports Net 2, the Dodgers' cable home. Murdoch
purchased the team and the stadium for $311 million in '97, plus $14 million in charities to the O'Malley family and another $25 million of assumed debt.
While the bid is reportedly "in the ballpark" of the assets' value, it's unclear whether Murdoch is willing to sell the cable network. Only recently has Fox's regional network strategy begun paying off. But the channel is obviously the apple of Checketts' eye, and it would be highly surprising to see him pursue the deal without it. He already owns
SportsWest Productions, a Utah-based network that carries Mountain West Conference basketball, and his appetite is apparently geared more towards a cable empire than a baseball dynasty.
So you'll forgive this deposed Dodger fan for hoping the regime which sent him into exile hangs tough until a more suitable suitor comes along. I want my Dodgers back, but I don't want Dave Checketts anywhere near them. I'll take my chances with the next S.O.B. who comes along instead.
