Already appearing to be on a collssion course with a third straight World Series championship, the Los Angeles Dodgers were able to pull off a huge move at the MLB trade deadline. The best team in the sport is now even better with the promise of Tarik Skubal toeing the slab every fifth day. A juggernaut has become even more terrifying and it’s good luck and God bless to every other team in baseball that wants to end the Dodgers’ dynasty.
Every baseball fan who does not root for the Dodgers has good reason to hate the latest development. It hardly seems fair that some MLB clubs can build superteams with bottomless pockets and others are forced to throw week-old hamburger out there. It’s a perfectly understandable reaction to seeing the rich get even richer but to the victor go the spoils.
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Stephen A. Smith, in a rare moment where he weighs in on baseball, gave pretty decent voice to that frustration on Monday’s “First Take.”
“It’s bad for the collective whole of baseball,” Smith said. “The public is going to look at something like this and say ‘yo, everybody can’t do that.”
Perhaps that’s what everyone’s thinking. But we already knew that there are a few teams in baseball that can spend and spend and spend. We already knew that the lack of equitable spending makes for an uneven playing field. So what I want to drill down is the idea of whether the Dodgers should care a single iota about what’s good for the collective of baseball.
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Because even ruining that would probably be worth three straight World Series wins. Which they aren’t doing.
A big-market team has used its resources and cleverly figured out a way to become nearly unstoppable. At the end of the day, all the whining is just sour grapes. One that that the collective should be careful about is complaining about this issue to the point where the end result is players getting paid less and owners getting even richer. That’s really the danger here.
It’s great that Smith highlights that the Dodgers aren’t doing anything wrong. The collective can be mad that their favorite teams aren’t doing it but this perceived problem of imbalance should not be hung around Los Angeles‘ neck. Perhaps it’s a problem. It’s just not their problem.
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