The McCourt Full-Court Press on Torre & A-Rod - Iwo Jima or the Alamo?

BALLHYPE EXCLUSIVE from MLN Sports - Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt wants to do the unthinkable, and out-Steinbrenner the Yankees in the A-Rod bidding war. The question is, will this be his Iwo Jima, driving on to World Series Victory, or, like the Rangers' deal with A-Rod, will this be McCourt's last stand at the Alamo?

Before the sports pages were rife with A-Rod-to-LA mania, yours truly had reported first, and here, that both Torre and A-Rod were on the move (http://ballhype.com/story/dodgers_sign_torre_a_rod_adds_blue_to_bidding_war/)

There are a lot of people in the baseball biz down here. Agents, coaches, players.  My source I generally only tap up for minor league beat information, but they thought that Grady got a raw deal out of the Dodgers in the way that his exit was handled and decided to give me a bit of advanced news.  There is more to the story, though, than just what is surfacing through SI and E-SPIN.

Baseball teams are, if nothing else, hide-bound tradition factories.  Your team can suck for a half-billion years, as any fan of dozens of teams can attest, but you live for the great players that come through your system, and the hope that one day, like the Red Sox, your team's time will come.

From about 2005, you have to ask yourself  what in the hell has McCourt has been thinking?

•  Signing Ned Coletti as GM: Ned Coletti is a competant guy. He's also from the Giants organization, which, in both in LA and historic New York team terms, is sleeping with the enemy.  Fans don't have to be rational. They're fans. This is where they get to vent and do otherwise opinionated and anti-social things that their wives, husbands, or bosses wouldn't put up with. That the Giants suck and that all things attached to them are inherently evil is about as much a given as breathing for the hardcores.
• Signing Jeff Kent: Good player. Coletti knows him, but Dodgers fans made a career out of hating the guy, and there were other guys out in the free agent space at least that good and less damaged at the time. At his first Spring Training in Vero Beach, Tommy Lasorda was giving him grief about the guy who replaced him. Kent walked up to him while Lasorda was doing a television interview, put his arm around Tommy with a bat in his hand and said, pointing to the pick's pinnacle: "See that Tommy: Jeff Kent, Los Angeles Dodgers. Doesn't that just piss you off?"  The show was for a Taiwanese TV company that probably didn't use it.
• Moving the Dodgers out of Vero Beach: The Dodgers have had several historic spring homes, but none for so long, and none so full of the history as Vero Beach, the Bethlehem of Baseball. Love or hate the Dodgers, their farm system has irrefutably spawned more great players than the club could even use. From Pee Wee Reese to Koufax to Pedro, from the 9 hole golf course that the O'Malley family built to let black players have a place to play when local country clubs were restricted, to the old dining room where you can still see some of the greats of the game catch lunch when the players come in from the morning workouts, Vero is part of the Dodger psyche and soul.  Walking into this temple of the game has given many a young player pause, something that will not happen in the Cactus League in 2009.
• Revolving Skippers on Deck: Tracy then Little then Torre.  This is not Tinkers to Evers to Chance by any stretch of the imagination. McCourt screwed up big time by not promoting Mike Scioscia from the Albuquerque Dukes, then the Dodgers Triple-A farm club. Scioscia understood the system, and has promptly transplanted its heart into Halo Red instead of Dodger Blue. McCourt's picks have been a souless lot who have nice pedigrees but don't "get" the system that generated championship-calibre ballclubs for more than 35 years.
• Signing Joe Torre - The only team more reviled by Dodgers fans than the Giants is the New York Yankees. Signing Joe Torre to a contract to manage the Dodgers is a bit like God kicking St. Peter to the curb to bring in Satan to manage Heaven.  Joe is a big-ticket player's manager. He doesn't have a great love for rookies or much patience for them. He is the big ego handler, the Lion Tamer in the center ring. What this, and the long laundry list of free-agent walking wounded now under consideration by the club, suggests, is that the Dodgers' much-vaunted farm system is dead.  Torre was not an accidental signing. It seems very clear that he was chosen with an eye towards attracting A-Rod and other big ticket players.
  
  
• Entering the A-Rod Derby - By doing the unthinkable, and blasting fiscal nuclear weapons through the player salary system, McCourt is to baseball what Kim Jong Il of North Korea is to international politics. Steinbrenner, the Mohammar Quadhaffi of salary escalatio, is backing off of the arms and bats race because it isn't winning championships. Marlins. Angels. White Sox, and even to some extend the Red Sox all are powering up World Series wins on a lot of young and very underpaid players. For McCourt to indulge Scott Boras' insanity shows the level of desperation to which he has lowered himself.

These moves may become Frank McCourt's swan song.  By debasing Dodger Blue so repeatedly, and by turning it into Yankees West, he is trying to put a championship product on the field.  Sometime even admirable goals are sullied by the execution, though. If Torre, and A-Rod if he joins the club, cannot produce a World Series ring in short-order, fans imbued in the storied tradition of the Los Angeles Dodgers organization will be taking up a collection for the grandchildren of the O'Malley family to buy the club, and running the tarred-and-feathered figure of Frank McCourt out of town strapped to the front of the nearest Metroliner.