Fill in the Blank: The Los Angeles Dodgers will not win another World Series until Bill Plaschke _____________.

It is always a bad idea to allow sportswriters to run your team. There is an inherent conflict of interest: a good GM needs to find the players best suited to win games, while a sportswriter, not bound by the traditional journalistic tenets of strict objectivity, has a vested interest in protecting players who are polite to him in the locker room, and/or give "good copy". Most sportswriters, and particularly baseball writers, are white, so they have a cultural bias in favor of white players over non-whites, who tend to be "moody" and disrupt "team chemistry", especially if they are like (to quote Mr. Plaschke this morning) the "malingering Odalis Perez".

When the scribe is as stupid, as intellectually dishonest, and as bound to the use of hoary cliches and racial code as his guiding philosophy as the aforementioned Mr. Plaschke, who occupies the seat in the LA Times Sports section that Jim Murray used to hold, it can be a nightmare for all concerned. Murray, of course, won bushels of journalistic awards, including the Pulitzer, as a witty vox populi, until old age and illness turned him into a golf writer at the end of his tenure. Plaschke, an all-around know-nothing, has used his pedestal to conduct fatwas against whomever in the Dodger organization expresses a disinterest in kissing the great man's ring, including, it appears, Paul DePodesta.

DePodesta had been the GM for exactly two seasons, one of which they actually managed to win a division title and their first playoff game since 1988. He inherited a team that hadn't seen the playoffs in eight years, with almost no offense (other than the occasional Paul LoDuca single or Shawn Green solo shot), but with a solid rotation and perhaps the most dominant stopper in baseball history. He traded for Milton Bradley, signed Jose Lima, had the good fortune to witness one of the great fluke seasons in baseball history by Adrian Beltre, then acquired Steve Finley with a month to go in the season. And he traded LoDuca, a favorite of the beat writers and fans, and the principal reason Dodger fans eventually got over the Mike Piazza trade,
that same weekend, for Brad Penny and Hee Seop-Choi, neither of whom played much of a role down the stretch in 2004. Finley, of course, did, hitting one of the most dramatic home runs in franchise history to clinch the division.

The 2004 Dodgers were clearly a project assembled for one year, tops; unlike the 1996 Yankees or the 2002 Angels, the players on that team, other than Gagne, Beltre and (maybe) Cesar Izturis, were not going to be a factor on any Dodger team the day they enter the Promised Land of a World Series. LoDuca, while a quality major-league catcher, is not the type of backstop who will turn a loser into a winner; trading him wasn't as stupid, as, say, trading Pedro for Delino DeShields, or Paul Konerko for Jeff Shaw (to name two trades in which Tommy Lasorda, the McCourts' new factotum at the top, played a pivitol role). The McCourts blundered in not resigning Beltre, but the players they did sign in the off-season (Kent and Drew) were more than acceptable substitutes, especially considering the disappointing year Beltre had. Then Gagne pulled up lame in June, followed by Drew and Odalis Perez, and the Dodgers collapsed.

The Dodgers were going to have to start a rebuilding process, pronto, based on the fruits of their minor league system, if they were going to avoid the problems afflicting the team since 1996. But any GM who follows such a philosophy is bound to have problems with the media, since, again, sportswriters have an institutional bias towards players/sources they know, rather than kids playing in some far-off minor league town that they don't. Because free agency is a viable option with large-market teams, that problem will be exacerbated in a town like Los Angeles.

The Dodger farm system has consistently been one of the most productive in all of baseball, as evidenced by the major league-leading total of Rookies of the Year awards its players have won, but if there has been a recurring theme in our local media, it's that our farm system doesn't produce, and our prospects always flop. Ironically, Lasorda, who first drew attention managing one of the all-time great minor league teams, the Albuquerque Dukes, in the early-70's, was a proponent of this view, and he normally wouldn't play a rookie unless management held him at gunpoint. After it took him two years to make Pedro Guerrero a full-time player, the GM at the time, Al Campanis, finally decided that the only way to give a kid a chance was to take the decision out of Lasorda's hands; some of the oddest, most one-sided transactions in team history came when the Dodgers dismantled their great but aging team from the '70's, in order to give time to players like Mike Marshall, Orel Hershiser, and Steve Sax. A similar process happened in the early-90's, when Mike Scioscia, Eddie Murray, Alfredo Griffin and the aforementioned Mr. Hershiser were cast off to give their spots to another generation of players, including Mike Piazza and Hideo Nomo.

And each of those moves was unpopular with the local media. And every time a rookie didn't immediately produce, there were demands from the likes of Mr. Plaschke to trade the loser. The aforementioned trades of Pedro Martinez and Paul Konerko were cheered locally, since it meant the Dodgers were picking up a known quantity, and not risking their future on some unproven kid. For all the goodwill he brought the franchise over the years, Tommy Lasorda's impact on the organization as a whole was akin to a viral pandemic. The talents of a great motivational speaker are not the same as a great baseball mind.

This year, the decision to go with the untried was made easier for the Dodgers. There were so many injuries from Day One that the manager had to use untested players, or else he couldn't field a team. When DePodesta decided not to gut the farm system at the trade deadline in order to give a team that was already ten games below .500 a shot at catching San Diego, he made the right move for the long haul.

The wisdom of playing for the long haul, in order to build something lasting and good, is hard to grasp if you are a sportswriter less interested in the pursuit of the truth than in getting your column into print three times a week. Matt Welch has a good summary of Mr. Plaschke's greatest hits, but I have my own favorite, which of course had to do with a code-filled tirade of his against an African-American player for the Angels, Garret Anderson, during the 2002 World Series. Local fans are inclined to blame the owners, the McCourts, for this incompetent move, and I can't say there isn't some merit to that, but the real blame has to go to the moron, who, from his prominent perch, created the atmosphere that made this firing inevitable.