I wrote this at end of previous thread; reposting:
600 I dunno if I'm ready to lump Furcal in with the other guys, or give him away. He had an injury-slowed year but when he's healthy he's one of the best shortstops in baseball, on defense and offense. I'd want him back next year.

Abreu's hitting has already dictated that, I'm sure Kent will get some days of though.

Yep, all four parts, I did it on the computer, it took for-EVER...

--

This is almost like a Dodger roster cold war. We all fear one day someone will push the button and we'll instantly go back to 1999.

Camille Johnston, to be fair, is the PR spokesperson for the McCourts and tends to deal with company rather than team issues. If they find some of the bobble-head dolls were made and China and are covered with lead-based paint, then you'll see Camille quoted. She talks about concessions, parking, ticket prices, stadium refurbishing, etc.

Having done this for a living for quite a few years, I can tell that if Camille is saying anything to McCourt or Colletti, she's saying "be unavailable." Any further comment would just fuel this thing. She realizes it's a bad story, but there's no reason it has to continue day after day. The quickest way for it to die is for the reporters to get absolutely nothing new from anyone who counts. You want to "deprive the story of oxygen," if you're a pro in these circumstances.

I'm sure the McCourts would love to weigh in on this. They're probably pissed as hell at somebody and want to unload. But if Camille is doing her job, they're both locked in their offices, duct tape all over their mouths, their phones replaced with replicas that aren't plugged into anything.

By now, Kent -- not a stupid man -- probably knows he committed a faux pas. His code of masculinity won't let him apologize or back down, but I'm sure he realizes now that he should have said nothing this incendiary.

I think we'd all love it if that were true. But it isn't. Just ask Paul DePodesta down in San Diego.

first of all, I don't think anything rash is going to happen to the roster, but I made the analogy to express what I felt could happen.

ok, now, speaking of sports:

Milton Bradley out the rest of the year, tearing his ACL for having an... argument with an umpire? Plus, the umpire baited him into it. I'm a little behind in sports news... but wow!!!

http://tinyurl.com/2napjf

my first tinyurl :]

starting 5

Penny
Lowe
Bills
Loaiza
Schmidt (if healthy at the bigining or do we sign Wolf?)

Bullpen

Beimel (Lefty specialist/acational stopper)
Brazoban (assuming he's healthy for '08)
Proctor/Meloan
Broxton
Saito

our hitting should be solid & assuming we get a power bat (A-Rod preferably) it can only get better.

And he smuggles Ken Tremendous into SI!

from everything I heard the umpire TOTALLY baited him, I really hope MLB/commissioners office deals with the umpire accordingly.

http://tinyurl.com/29eaqy

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=6747

The other side is the old PR maxim: if you don't tell your story, somebody else will tell it for you.

In this case, though, I think you're right -- not to deprive the story of oxygen, but because now that I've calmed down about this, I think the real story may be that there's no there there.

Kent can be a horse's rear sometimes. Plaschke can write ill-considered columns. Simers likes to be the match that lights the powder keg. None of this is news... and WRT Simers, there can be no explosion if there's no powder keg. It's just a lit match in search of Big Boom.

Helton heard IT ALL as well maybe they could get him to shed some light, even the MLB fantasy411 guys were on Milton Bradley side on this one & they work for MLB.

Obviously, as far as the league and most of the public are concerned, that won't matter. Milton Bradley is a hothead with a reputation, who scares white people. Mike Winters is an umpire. So right and wrong is going to be decided based on those things. Not on what actually happened.

But while not denying that Bradley has big-time emotional problems, I think the problem of umpires' aggressiveness and baiting of players is a much more serious problem. Umpires, more and more often, are the ones picking the fights in the first place -- remember what we saw happen with Brad Penny earlier this year? It used to be just Joe West doing that sort of thing. Now it's a lot of them. And I don't think baseball has the will, or even the ability, to stop it. The umpires' union is so strong again that it's almost impossible for MLB to discipline an umpire now. (And when they do, we generally don't find out about it.)

Basically, we live in a world where umpires are completely and totally unaccountable for their actions -- not only unaccountable to their supposed bosses, but also unaccountable to the public. (Winters was prohibited from speaking to the media after the game.)

Come to think of it, Furcal really is an average player at SS--given the influx of quality SS's in the national league over the last couple years.

13 mils buys you an average one nowadays I guess.

But I don't think the media really did much more than add to the sum of McCourt's pre-existing discomfort with DePo. I suspect it wasn't about baseball so much as management style, and DePo's inability to handle Jamie. Colletti is a former PR person, so he knows how to bow and scrape to big egos. DePo is both too smart and too dumb to participate in the perpetual dog and pony show the McCourts seem to want from their underlings.

http://tinyurl.com/2jkavc

Maybe. But it doesn't matter if he believes it. I think perhaps you overestimate the intelligence of the newspaper-reading public.

I agree that Plaschke was far more influential in DePo's firing. But Simers helped. And if he didn't have influence, he wouldn't have gotten access to Frank and Jamie McCourt so many times.

The fact that McCourt even considers what these two boobs have to say is black mark #1 against him in my book.

549. The worst thing about all these comments from Kent, Loney, Kemp, Lowe and so on is not exactly what is spoken, but the inability of Grady Little and the Dodger front office to manage this situation and keep this from continuing to be played out in front of the worst piranhas of the press (e.g. Simers).

For me, the fact that Derek Lowe chose to go public with his demand (that this must be settled by spring training even if it causes a fight) after Grady called a team meeting is a sign that Grady has lost this clubhouse. The "Vets" have put their "Player's Manager" in a pretty bad position.

However, I don't think he meant that Jeff Francis had a no-hitter at the time.

I am a huge Bradley fan. I wrote here that he was our 2004 MVP, not Beltre which was sorta a crazy statement but I just loved the way he played the game. Very Kirk Gibson like to me...But at some point you have to walk away..He will never get that. It's sad really.

The reason stated for firing Depo was the club did not meet expectations. I think we know it was a personality conflict but say for a second it wasn't. Did this club meet expectations?

I completely agree. What I meant in this case (or at this step) was that I'm worried that he might take this latest sound and fury as an excuse to do what he so far has managed to avoid - dump the top prospects for PVL. It would complete the transformation of the Dodgers into the Giants, only without Barry Bonds to carry the offense.

And as I said, I'm not optimistic that Colletti will do the right thing.

The goal in baseball isn't to assemble the best young team, or the best team for the cost, it's to assemble the best team period. In 2008, the Dodgers best team involves Furcal, Lowe, Kent, Penny, and even Estaban Loaiza (for a bit, at least). I for one am sick of rebuilding, and we already have the tools to be a dominant team from 2008 or 2009 until the early part of the next decade. We don't need more prospects, we need all the good players we can get.

How about Hu's hitting this year? Have you, or has anyone looked a little deeper to see if it's for real? Is his BABIP out of whack? Is it a Vegas illusion?

In my opinion we just need one more peace the the puzzle & thats A TRULY BONIFIED POWER BAT, A-ROD!!

And if you don't believe that, just ask him. I hear he also has some managerial experience; I believe he mentioned it on-air once in passing.

Don't be hatin' on Jeanne. At least she probably wouldn't send Drew and Kent home at the same time.

579. 577 I wonder how much of it is simply that Simers and Kent have become favorite sparring partners, if not buddies. Weren't they giving away together signed jerseys for charity earlier in the season?

This a big problem as I see it. Simers has an agenda but tries to pass it off as objective reporting. He's going to be all over Loney and Kemp for quite a while for "disrespecting" his buddy, Mr. Chuckles. His making up something about Kemp that didn't even happen the way he reported it (Kemp refusing to congratulate Abreu) is an example of what you can expect. And unfortunately, he does matter. Anyone who writes for a newspaper that's read by hundreds of thousands of people matters.

I thought it then and I continued to think it now, the lack of moves and the plan to keep these set of youngsters together for the future gave Ned and Grady at least until 2008 to build something that can last for a few years.

How would we ever lose?

But Barry is going to be available. :-)

Oh, no ... you're joking, right?

I guess not. :-) Kevin Kennedy just isn't my idea of a good manager, or a good analyst, for that matter.

15

I hate the Padres but I'm also a big Bradley fan and I'm very upset with this umpire Winters. Obviously Bradley shouldn't be lingering in the batter's box after a strikeout or trying to attack an umpire, but it sure looks like what Winters did was worse.

I can't believe that Bradley's two baseball demons got him at the same time. His temper and his susceptability to injury, one feeding into the other.

I fear his will end up a "what might have been" career.

If he was baited by the umpire, than that guy should be disciplined accordingly. However, the fact remains that Bradley's immediate response was to charge the guy. It doesn't seem like Bradley has learned much from his past troubles, and he's still the same troubled guy with an epic persecution complex (of course this incident will just solidify in his mind that the world is out to get him). So the umpire called him a name, does that give Bradley the right to run after the guy and beat the hell out of him? What if it was the 1st baseman instead, is Bradley than justified in charging that guy? If the umpire really did instigate this whole thing, Bradley could have gone a long way in rehabilitating his image by not responding on the field and then vociferously and indignantly taking up the matter off the field.

Instead, he reacted as everyone expected him to react, and simply managed to reaffirm his status as the league's premiere unstable hot-head. In no way should the umpire's actions be excused, but Bradley sealed his own fate with this latest episode. He will spend the next two seasons kicking around with teams like the Royals and DRays before he is unceremoniously dismissed from the league due to his atttitude and injury problems. Bradley will then fade away into oblivion only to reappear occasionally as a cautionary tale on the daily police blotter. I'm really not wishing this upon Bradley, but it's nearly as predictable as the sun will rise in east.

That is his act, and he sticks to it.

"when I managed the Red Sox, Roger Clemens..."

or "back when I was in the Dodgers organization and was manager of the year in Albq."

Then someone would remind him that he is a manager.

"when I managed the Red Sox, Roger Clemens..."

or "back when I was in the Dodgers organization and was manager of the year in Albq."

Then someone would remind him that he is a manager.

In my opinion, money and talent speak louder than any Proven Vet'ran Leadership blather, even to Colletti. These young players are cheap. And even to a batting average guy like Colletti it's obvious that they're good. If he really was the sort of want to dump the youth for veterans, he would have parted with Hu or Abreu to get Dotel or something.

I agree with most of your post, but this part I think is unrealistic. Had he done that, everybody would have said "Same old Milton, there he goes popping off again." People's response to it would have been indifference at best, ridicule at worst. He would have rehabilitated nothing.

I'm not on that bandwagon, sorry.

That's kind of a dada way of looking at the manager. Marcel Duchamp for manager! A urinal for third base coach!

What are we going to do if it turns out they aren't honorable guys?

:(

The one thing I know for sure is that the outcome couldn't have been any worse than the current situation. Now, not only has he solidified his image as a ticking time bomb, but by injuring himself while being restrained from the umpire he has the added perception of being an idiotic clown. After all, who hurts themselves while arguing a call (the specifics of the situation will likely get lost in the retelling of the incident)? His career could probably survive the perception of being explosive, but I don't think he will overcome the added indigni