The McCourts Continue to Remake the Dodgers - Will There Be Anything Left?
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by Mlnsports
armchairGM Exclusive from MLN Sports - The L.A. Dodgers inked another contract yesterday, but not with a player. Dennis Mannion becomes the next Chief Operations Officer (COO) , the guy who oversees all of the business side of the club, from tickets to concessions to the guy who figures out if Joe Torre's towels are soft enough. How does Dennis Mannion matter one whit to what goes on the field?
Plenty. It's another sign that the McCourts are actively and radically remolding the Los Angeles Dodgers organization yet again in search of returning the club to some prosperity. The Dodgers have not really been a championship contender since the O'Malley family sold the club to Fox back in the day.
The theory that seems to be moving the club internally is that the system is horribly broken. I can go with that. 26 years after the last World Series ring you don't have to work hard to make that case.
How to fix the problem has been the 400lb gorilla in the room.
Mannion comes from Philadelphia, where he worked for the only two Phillies championship clubs of the latter half of the 20th century, and the Ravens during their Super Bowl years.
How much does Mannion have to do with any of that? About as much as you can take credit for getting struck by lightning, unless of course you wear a little rod on your head when you play golf, in which case you had a slight edge on fate. Mannion does not.
It is the pedigree though, that the Dodgers are pushing through their media communiques this morning. The message is loud and clear: Frank McCourt is bringing anyone and everyone that he thinks will put the Dodgers on a winning footing into the organization.
Championships in any sport, let alone dynasties, are a mercurial mix. You can have some of the greatest minds in the game under one roof, as happened in San Francisco with the 49ers, and still produce less victory on the field than you did with the people who made those championships happen. Carmen Policy was the right guy at the right time, along with the coaches, players and staff. Jerry Buss, the Lakers owner, has tinkered a time or two with the mix. Phil Jackson has had some good years in LA, but nowhere near the kind of record that Pat Riley built.
The ultimate fate of the Dodgers rests in the hands of McCourt's go-to-guy, GM Ned Coletti, who came over from the Giants in 2005. With moves like Torre, and now Mannion, along with the shift of the Dodgers into Arizona for Spring Training, what the club seems to be doing is a total tear-down. The waves that you're seeing between the front office and the coaching gigs are going to come crashing into the field side, which is what sports fans really care about.
The Dodgers have had several of these bold makeovers. Fox did a couple before they gave up the ghost and sold the place to the McCourts. In turn, the McCourts have been under intense pressure to bring the club back to its glory days, the last run of which stretched from the 1950s all the way into the 1980s. This coach. That GM. This free agent signing. That player that didn't work out. The last really big player to come off the farm was catcher Paul LoDuca, and they didn't want to promote him because there were people in the development system who thought that he was too short to be a major league catcher!
Meanwhile, a lot of the people who used to make the Dodgers engine hum have been quietly filtering their way down to Anaheim to sign up with the Angels. If Tommy Lasorda is the Yoda of the Dodgers, he should be looking over the steering wheel of his golf cart and mttering: There will be another... Mike Scioscia is the last vestige of the old Dodger farm system, and he has been using the ways of the old Blue Jedi in Anaheim to build another club that delivers waves of some of the great players of the game.
The problem is that farm system development is a five year investment. The Red Sox began their development curve for their current runs almost ten years ago. The Tigers retool is just starting to show dividends. In a world of ESPN-I-want-it-yesterday, the farm system model seems painfully slow, even if it produces results. The high mercenary road has not paid dividends either.
So the McCourts are trying to find the Dodgers way through pulling this piece and that piece together. With a GM from Frisco, and a COO from Philly and a manager from New York, they have the baseball equivalent of the United Nations, but will they have a club that anyone gives a damn about? Perhaps it was fitting that McCourt changed the uniforms to Los Angeles from Dodgers. It is becoming increasingly hard to find any of the Dodgers championship ways underneath those unis today.
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