Around the League: Dodgers-BoSox Blockbuster!

A blockbuster trade that was widely rumored for much of yesterday and through the night between the Dodgers and the Boston Red Sox was finally announced as complete this morning.  The Dodgers receive much of the core of the melted down Red Sox team:  Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett and Carl Crawford with Nick Punto thrown in for good measure.  The Red Sox receive James Loney and Rubby De La Rosa and a decent package of prospects:  Ivan DeJesus Jr, Jerry Sands and Alan Webster.  De La Rosa will reportedly be named later due to the Toronto Blue Jays claiming him off waivers and the Dodgers pulling him back.

From the Dodgers perspective, this trade provides an substantial upgrade at 1B and to the lineup in the person of Adrian Gonzalez.  Carl Crawford recently underwent Tommy John surgery so is a non-factor this year.  Josh Beckett has a long history of pitching and winning big games but has not pitched particularly well this year and is rumored to have been a cancer in the BoSox clubhouse as a founding member of the beer and fried chicken club.  Longer term, the Dodgers take on approximately a quarter of a billion dollars in contracts with a high probability that none of those players will be good in the last 2-3 years of the contracts.

From Boston's perspective, they were able to divest themselves of several crippling contracts, each of which appeared to be untradeable, in one huge deal.  That they were able to get some interesting prospects in return makes the deal all the more remarkable for them.  Their GM, Ben Cherington, now has the financial flexibility to start over and build the team he wants to build.

There are almost endless ways of analyzing this trade.  It certainly raises a host of questions that are close to unknowable at this time:  Will Adrian Gonzalez be enough of an upgrade to the lineup to put the Dodgers in the playoffs and give them a chance at a WS title and give the new ownership a running start?  Does the apparent loss of Chad Billingsley, possibly for the rest of the season, offset the offensive gains Gonzalez might give?  Will the toxicity of the Boston clubhouse come west with the players?  Do the Dodgers have any payroll limitations going forward?  There has already been hundreds of pages written about these issues and there will likely be hundreds or even thousands more written in the next few days.

I'm going to look at it from different angle and explain why I think the trade will be a failure for the Dodgers.  This was a panic move by Dodger's ownership, but not because the Giants swept them this week.  What caused the panic was a half empty Dodger Stadium for the Bumgarner-Kershaw matchup in the first game of their series and the even more empty stadium for game 3.  The fact that as many as 1/4 of the fans in attendance were Giants fans, did not help quiet ownership fears.

Magic Johnson fervently believes that the way to sell out an arena or stadium is to have stars on the team.  He just as fervently believes that if you want stars on your team, you pay whatever price it takes to get them and everything else will take care of itself.  Magic did not get a backer who owns a company worth a reported quarter of a TRILLION dollars for nothing, nosireebob!  Word on the street is the Dodgers believe Adrian Gonzalez can be that star with the added benefit that he will appeal to latinos, the largest component of their fanbase.  Magic and the Dodgers were willing to take on the enormous added risk of Beckett and Crawford in order to achieve their goal of bringing AGone to LA.

There are several problems with this scenario for the Dodgers:

1.  Adrian Gonzalez was loved by the community in San Diego, but that never translated into great attendance at Padres ballgames.  AGone just isn't a very charismatic player.  He'a a good player, maybe even great.  Just not the kind you say to yourself, "man, I have to drive 30 or 60 miles each way and spend $200 for a chance to see Adrian Gonzalez play!"

2.  Baseball is not like basketball where 1 or 2 superstars and another 2 or 3 role players is all you need to win a championhip or 3 or 4.  Baseball teams have 9 players on the field at any given time as opposed to 5 and have 25 man rosters as opposed to 11 or 12 or however many basketball has(see how much I follow basketball?).  You can't win baseball games by having 16 guys stand around while 2 play one-on-one for 48 minutes.

3.  Unlike basketball, where many fans might choose to go to a game  or buy season tickets just to see Magic Johnson or Shaquille O'Neal or Kobe Bryant most people who go to baseball games do not go to see just one player.  If they do, it's usually to see a particular pitcher pitch, not one hitter who might only come to bat 3 times in the whole game.

4.  The Dodgers marketing problems run a lot deeper than the product on the field.  That is the real message that ownership should have taken away from the Giants series.  The Dodgers were the first place team leading up to the first game and their best pitcher was on the mound.  If a winning product was the issue,  that game should have had lines of fans being turned away from the walkup windows.  More on that in a later post.

This trade MIGHT save the Dodgers' season this year.  The only thing that will prevent it from being a disaster in the long term is if the Dodgers ownership continues to have unlimited money to spend and a continued willingness to spend it.  The reaction to those empty seats in Dodger Stadium would seem to suggest that even the new Dodgers' ownership group has its limits.