One of the running gags of the MLB off-season thus far has been the Dodgers and their new found wealth. A day can't seem to go by without a rumor involving the Dodgers cropping up and that rumor is almost entirely based on the premise that they have endless piles of cash at their disposal. Everyone mentions that as hyperbole, of course. Surely LA and their rich new owners have to have some kind of budget limit, right?
That is what any reason able person would logically deduce because at some point every team has to set some sort of restrictions on the money they can spend and the number of players they can acquire. Not the Dodgers though, they aren't just becoming the "new Yankees" as so many have joked, they are becoming the honey badger of baseball because the Dodgers don't care. They fret not for payroll budgets, luxury taxes or the 25-man roster limit and they are putting their lack of concern on full display at these Winter Meetings.
Take for example this delightful detail volunteered by none other than general manager of the Dodgers Ned Colletti himself:
#Dodgers are talking to 10-12 teams about potential trades, GM Ned Colletti said.
— Dylan Hernandez (@dylanohernandez) December 4, 2012
That's right, the Dodgers have a full rotation and a pretty well set lineup, but he Collett wants everyone to know that they are looking to make deals! Wooo! He's going to trade for everybody if that's what he wants to do. Why because he can? He doesn't even need to keep use a poker face to keep his dealings under wraps because they are the Dodgers and the Dodgers now do as they please.
To Colletti's credit, he did show a little bit of hubris when recapping his first day of action at the Winter Meetings:
"We're 'in' on so many players we may need two or three teams," he joked. "We were an afterthought. Now, anybody that needs us to be involved has us being involved, whether we're involved or not. We're not casting a net for 15 guys, but it's easy to find us being involved in that many scenarios. I've talked to less agents than recent years easily."
Did I say hubris? I think I meant "humble brag." Woe is poor Ned. Nobody wanted to play for the little ol' Dodgers back in the day, but now that he is recklessly spending so much money, everyone wants to LA to be interested in them, even players that he hasn't even spoken to yet! What a plight! What an ego-inflating plight. Whatever will Ned due with all of this attention he and his team are receiving.
Oh, right, he's going to continue to point out all the attention the Dodgers are getting and probably continue to hand out wildly inflated contracts. But, again, that's OK because the Dodgers do not care. They don't care one bit about their payroll. Mind you, this is not an exaggeration based on interpreting Colletti's comments. Dodger people are literally mocking the idea that they have some sort of spending limit:
Asked about their budget, one Dodgers person responded on Monday, "What budget?"
What budget? No, seriously, what is a budget? I am not familiar with this word. Is it Russian? Perhaps Aramaic? You see this word simply isn't in the Dodger lexicon.
At this point one can't help but wonder why they are bothering to have a Winter Meetings at all, well, other than to serve as a three-day long press conference for the Dodgers to parade all their free agent and parade conquests through. At least they were nice enough to invite the rest of the baseball world to Nashville to be spectators at their orgy of decadence, so I guess we really should be thankful.
