Friday, December 11, 2009

Buster Olney Sounds Positively Bullish On The Dodgers

Olney's recap on our favorite team's inertia at Winter Meetings (insider only for the full article):

And then there were the Dodgers.

There were trades and more than a dozen signings here. New Blue Jays GM Alex Anthopoulos impressed his peers with the way he is preparing for a trade of Roy Halladay. Almost 200 free agents are looking for jobs. But the Dodgers are really the biggest story of these winter meetings, by doing nothing. "It's incredible that you have one of the most storied franchises in all of baseball, and they're not even involved in talk for the best free agents," one agent said wistfully.

Imagine Bill Clinton going into a conference on health care and saying nothing. Imagine Al Gore going to a summit on global warming and uttering no words. Imagine George W. Bush at a roundtable on terrorism and remaining silent.

That's the Dodgers at these winter meetings: frozen in inaction.

Dodgers executives have been saying that in spite of the on-going divorce proceedings between Frank and Jamie McCourt, it's business as usual. They really can't say anything else publicly; they have to maintain that posture. But executives with rival teams and agents just assume that the Dodgers' baseball operations are essentially locked down.

Back when I was in high school, if you just signed your name on the exam sheet, and didn't fill in a single circle on the SAT, you still got 400 of a possible 1600 points. Maybe Colletti was trying that approach, and hoping for a bottom-quartile player to fall into his lap?

10 comments:

Fite Club said...

The Dodgers pretending to be doing something they are not is the most frustrating thing for me as a fan. For Colletti or Mannion to say, "business as usual" when it's clearly not, it's much more insulting and troubling than if he just told the truth.

Nostradamus said...

Well, fuck me in the bottom quartile.

Mr. LA Sports Czar said...

It could be worse.


This could be Sons of Terry Bradshaw.

Steve Sax said...

Terry Bradshaw's wikipedia entry includes a discography.

My head hurts.

rbnlaw said...

In all reality, it's not a whole lot different from last winter. We still might sign an aging infielder (Loretta) or a back-end starter (Wolf) by January, but I doubt it.

I agree with the idea that the top brass is playing the average fan for a fool.

Josh S. said...

The only upside is "No contracts = no BAD contracts".

Steve Sax said...

Oh, we'll get our share of bad contracts. Don't you worry.

There's an Andruw Jones out there in the 2009-2010 off-season market, and we'll find him!

Dean H. said...

The irony is that doing nothing would have been the right move back when Trader Ned was spinning off prospects to patch holes in '05.

Now that we have a contending team in their prime? Nothing.

The McCourts suck.

karina said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

"Maybe Colletti was trying that approach, and hoping for a bottom-quartile player to fall into his lap? "

Hey, it's what he did last year, and he ended up with Randy Wold and Orlando Hudson. Spring Training is still a long way away......