LA Dodgers: Still on My List of Inherently Evil Teams
Looking at the off season acquisitions they've made one might well think that the Dodgers are sitting pretty and that Chavez Ravine will soon be heaven on earth. After all, this is their opening day pitching rotation:
Jason Schmidt
Randy Wolf
Derek Lowe
Brad Penny
Chris Jenkins from the San Diego Union correctly terms that rotation the best in the NL. Given the incompetence of the GMs of my two favorite teams, the Seattle Mariners and the San Diego Padres, you really have to give Ned Colletti credit for strengthening his team in the most important area: pitching.
This coupled with the fact that the Dodgers are no long owned by Rupert Murdock should mean that they aren't on my short list of teams whom I always and unequivocally root against--i.e., The New York Yankees and the Atlanta Braves. These are teams that Amy and I call inherently evil. We do so a) because it's fun to argue that baseball teams are good and evil, and b) because the transactions that those teams make are, in the long run, bad for the game of baseball. If you want to know what I'm talking about, read Bob Costas' excellent analysis of the state of the game, Fair Ball: A Fan's Case for Baseball.
So why the title of this post, you might well ask? Because the Dodgers, despite the fact that they were soundly beaten in the head-to-head contest with the Padres and therefore won the wild card, and not the division championship, despite having the same record as the Padres after 162 games, are claiming that they're the "defending NL West co-champions".
Those aren't the rules, guys. The rules state that if you end up having identical records at the end of the season, then the winner of the season head-to-head contest is the champion. Period. The Dodgers won the wild card, not the division. The Padres, ever lackluster in the post season, did, however, win the division.
That they would claim otherwise smacks of unsportsmanlike conduct--in the front office, which, to my mind, negates any boon they might have garnered by sloughing off the infamous Murdock as their owner.
In short, there are still 3 inherently evil teams on Amy's and my list: Yankees, Braves, and, once again, the LA Dodgers.
May the Dodgers reap the rewards that were visited upon both the Braves and Yankees last year: either a post-season miss or a post-season early departure.
Not that my Padres did any better, you understand....
Thanks to Mom for the Jenkins article.