When the Pope Hosts the 700 Club - Is the Los Angeles Dodgers Farm System Officially Dead?

MAJORBLOGS.NET - 11.02.07 - If you asked a die-hard Dodger fan if Joe Torre could become the skipper of their club, chances are you would hear: "When the Pope hosts the 700 Club!" While Benedict XVI won't be subbing for Pat Robertson any time soon, the unthinkable has happened in LA: Owner Frank McCourt has hired the Yankees' Torre to helm the Dodgers.

Cats and Dogs. Catholics and Protestants. Dodgers and Yankees. You can't find two baseball clubs on the planet so wholly different than the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees.

The rivalry which was born in the boroughs of New York, and included the much-hated Giants, has lost no intensity over the years or the miles now separating the three clubs that once called the Big Apple home.

Maybe it was all those years of being called "dem Bums" in Brooklyn, but any time that the Dodgers and the Yankees have met on the field, it is for all of the marbles. Dodger fans have no love lost for either Yankee pinstripes or their bombastic owner, George Steinbrenner.  The Yankees and the Dodgers have appeared in no less than 9 World Series contests, twice in back-to-back years.  It is the pre-eminenant grudge match in all of baseball.

McCourt, clearing the decks for a dynasty that has yet to emerge, has been using some industrial-grade tradition-stripper to remold the Dodgers in his own image.

Dodgers fans who believe in Tommy Lasorda and his mantra that God is Dodger Blue have had a series of rude awakenings under McCourt. 2005 saw the hiring of Giants AGM Ned Coletti as the new Dodgers GM. The Giants?!  The 2006 move was a surprise too: Surprise, Arizona, to be exact. The Dodgers front office announced that Spring Training would me moved from history-soaked Vero Beach to the Cactus League in 2009.

Does the Torre hiring signal the end of more than 76 years of a player development system that has generated some of the brightest names in professional baseball, even those that didn't wear major league Dodger unis, from Duke Snider to Pedro Martinez?

Blend seems to be the name of the game these days, though, with the Red Sox winning rings with both high dollar talent and promising prospects (See: World Series Championships Like Fine American Whiskies, Are A Blend). The Dodgers have a handful of top-drawer farm talents, but no one coming up has the star power of a Mike Piazza or a Sandy Koufax. Insta-draws are hard to come by straight off the farm. To hit the balance right for a modern World Series contender, they need not just free agents, but veterans who will want to stick around and follow someone into battle. That someone, as of yesterday officially, is Torre.

Joe Torre was a near perfect manager for the Yankees. Beyond being a great tactician, he was an exceptional superintendent of the titan egos banded together by the Godzilla of Ego Baseball, Steinbrenner.

Torre understood the Yankee system. Open checkbook, sign superstar. That was the sizzle that kept the New York sportswriters happy and YES TV switched on. How to keep his big dollar, mercenary veterans playing together at a high level was truly his genius.

Who would want to come to work in L.A. for Joe? A-Rod is an outside shot, according to my sources. The Dodgers went on to his potentially acceptable list with Torre on board. There will be others. McCourt enters the Winter horse trading season with some ammunition, and a lure that might keep the big names loyal to the club for a period of years.

On the winter shopping list? Fast-fix vets. The Dodgers' once-flawless farm machine is a combine with a few teeth missing. Mike Scioscia, former Dodger great and now Halo honco across town, has adopted the methods of his mentor, Tommy Lasorda, to power up the Angels' farm system. The formula works, but you need the right people running it.

LA doesn't have those people. Yes, they still have some of the best instructors in the game, and they have great minor league coaches. The front office is betting that a larger-than-life coach who commands the organization is the component that turns the lights on in the clubhouse.

Torre definitely fits this bill. The Dodgers, who used to change managers with the slowness of an engineering grad student changing socks, have been trying on skippers under McCourt like they were hats on sale at Filenes.

Joe Torre is the Easter bonnet, the force of will that will get the LA media to stand up and take notice, and kick start the Dodgers' championship engine.

If Torre can eliminate the notion that Dodger Blue fades from their minds, Coletti will be remembered alongside past Dodger GM superstars Branch Rickey and Larry MacPhail. If he fails, he leaves the door open to the Halos across town to retake the city that they were driven from in the 1950s when the Dodgers marched into town fresh off their World Series win.  That "of Anaheim" is rapidly falling off the Angels brand, and it has been more than 20 years since the club has been at the big dance.

To their great credit, McCourt and Coletti's gamble with this signing shows some cahones. Signing Torre, for the Blue Crew faithful, is only slightly easier than selling Republicans on the idea of replacing George Bush with Osama Bin Laden.

Yet Torre is really no stranger to the team. Young Joe was a kid from the streets of Brooklyn during the twilight years of the team's tenancy at Ebbets Field.  Maybe little Joey, back in the day, from da neighborhood, had himself a B cap and played stick ball and fancied  himself to be the next Pee Wee Reese, or  Leo Durohcer.

A lot of bodies have floated out of the East River since those days, though. Torre is big ticket, big dollar. The Dodgers are a culture grown from the frugal Irish roots of the O'Malley family that owned them for many years. Blue theology is promote-from-within, grow-your-own. No manager is an island. Dodger dogma may be tough for Torre to bend to his mighty will.

Coletti and McCourt are worrying less about the aging Dodger faithful, though, and more about their ESPN-stimulated offspring who are tomorrow's season ticket holders. The Greatest Generation is being replaced by the video game generation. They want big names, and SportsCenter highlight-speed results. If Hollywood can part the Red Sea in less than three hours, surely an L.A. club can win a World Series title in one season.

What is next to unfold is whether Blue is going gold,  assembling a Yankee-style A-Team with A-Rod, foregoing the farm, or if it will be a more tempered blend of free agents and farmhands in both the Yankee and Dodger traditions.

Watch the hirings and firings over the off-season, and the menu at the ballpark. If they dump the Dodger Dog for Nathan's Famous, and put it on Franciscan sour dough rolls, the purge is on, baby.

- Brian ROSS

Comments

[JFishSports]

What a snag for Los Angeles. The Yankees are going to be sorry.