As the Dodgers officially welcomed their latest gazillionaire pitcher to a remodeling Dodger Stadium on Tuesday, the churning of the bulldozers in the infield was momentarily drowned out by the whining around the baseball world.
Boo-hoo! The Dodgers are buying another championship!
For shame! The Dodgers have an unfair advantage!
It’s not right! The Dodgers are ruining baseball!
On and on the tears flowed, from Pittsburgh to Minnesota, from Northern California to South Florida, with many blubbering that signing two-time Cy Young Award-winning Blake Snell to a $182-million contract officially makes the defending World Series champions bad for the game.
Stop it. Just stop it.
Read more: Signing of Blake Snell is Dodgers’ latest financial flex: ‘This is where you want to play’
Far from being a blight on the major-league landscape, right now the Dodgers’ front office is everything that is good about the game.
They are smart, savvy and fearless. They base decisions not only on analytics but also attitude. They spend a lot of money, but only because they make a lot of money, and since when is reinvesting revenue into your fans a bad thing?
Many think the Dodgers should be grateful to win the World Series this year and humbly behave like other recent defending champions by cutting corners and reducing costs and receding back into the pack.
Forget that.
These Dodgers are intent on running it back, going even harder for an encore, sparing no expense in an attempt to become baseball’s first back-to-back champions in a quarter-century.
Deal with it. Endure it. Maybe even learn from it?
The Dodgers need not apologize to anyone for doubling down on a Commissioner’s Trophy, because they have created a championship the right away.
They’ve built it, not bought it.
Andrew Friedman spent nearly a decade creating the sort of smart culture that strengthened the clubhouse and stocked the farm system.
Stan Kasten spent that same time running a Guggenheim business model that restored the fan experience at baseball’s largest stadium, selling record numbers of tickets while enduring much justified criticism to score big TV money.
Finally, with the infrastructure in place and the new money flowing, the Dodgers then opened their fatted wallet for the players that…