The Los Angeles Dollars
In the wake of the Los Angeles Dodgers' latest failure to beat the Cardinals in the postseason, Deadspin has a story up defending the L.A. club for their organizational strategy of spending a shitload of money on players.
Says Tom Ley, "One of the cool things about MLB is that it provides teams with avenues that simply don't exist in leagues that have salary caps. A GM can only get so clever when filling out a roster is akin to balancing an equation, but baseball allows teams to color outside the lines. All different sorts of team-building philosophies are allowed to bloom."
I oppose a salary cap, but I think the point being made against the Dodgers is that these multiple "avenues" only exist for the Dodgers and for three or four other clubs. For a few (not the Cardinals), the only option is building from within. But how I wish the Cardinals could afford to make financial mistakes like giving Chad Billingsley $35 million, Carl Crawford $100 million, and Andre Ethier $102 million. But they can't. In fact, for the Dodgers, those can't even be classified as mistakes. There's more where that came from.
And the Cardinals don't suffer from the fact that "there aren't many of (us fans)," as Ley would have you believe. The difference in income between the two teams isn't that the Dodgers have more fans, it's that they are less spread out, that they play in a city that contains many fewer eyeballs for television in general. It's a city whose baseball environment is further enhanced by the Dodgers sharing the city with another team.
Incidentally, nobody is calling the Dodgers "trash" today except for a few Dodgers fans.
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On a related note, maybe it's not that the Cardinals draft better than other teams. Maybe it's that they teach baseball better than other teams.
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Here's a partial list of players the Cardinals acquired just from one amateur draft-- June 2009:
Shelby Miller (1st round)- 25 regular season wins over last 2 seasons, NLDS Game 4 starting pitcher
Joe Kelly (3rd round)- World Series veteran starter traded to Boston at the deadline for Game 3 winner John Lackey
Matt Carpenter (13th round)- six extra-base hits in the NLDS including three homers
Trevor Rosenthal (21st round)- saved all three wins in the series
Matt Adams (23rd round)- Game 4 home run hero
I wish my fantasy football team had this type of drafting success. Of course, our league is like MLB: "All different sorts of team-building philosophies are allowed to bloom."
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I think Mike Matheny should select Clayton Kershaw to start over Adam Wainwright in Game 1 of the NLCS. He's had the better season.
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Statistic of the day: Number of postseason games won (thru Wednesday) since Albert Pujols signed with the Angels on December 8, 2011.
Cardinals: 18
Angels: 0
posted by CM @ 9:39 PM
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