A Missing Link or Two

It’s a cold, gray, snowy Thursday in February, saved only by thoughts of baseball.  The game itself brings smiles, ah, but the Mookie Betts’ trade throws in a few laughs as well.

The Trib got me chuckling this morning with a column it ran from the Los Angeles Times.  Getting Betts and pitcher David Price has the Dodgers “leaping all the way from February to deep in October.”  That’s what happens when you get “arguably baseball’s second-best player in the last four years behind Mike Trout.”  Take that, Nolan Arenado, Anthony  Rendon, Matt Scherzer, Justin Verlander, Christian Yelich…

How interesting that Betts qualifies as the missing link, or that a team with 106 wins last year even has a missing link.  You could argue that having three starting outfielders is better than having a platoon of four or five, which the Dodgers went with last year, only Casey Stengel never had a problem platooning players when he won all those pennants—and World Series—with the Yankees, now did he?

Here’s what I think on a cold, gray Thursday in February—come October, the Dodgers are going to be judged by the person they kept, not the ones they added.  It all comes down to Mookie Betts making Dave Roberts a better manager than he’s shown himself to be.  We’ll see.