Embracing the Pressure

Now that we've left 2020 behind, I hope that some of the players and teams resolve to not let January be as boring as December was, and that the hot stove season can finally live up to its name. The only sparks of excitement so far have been courtesy of the San Diego Padres, who have made themselves into one of the best teams in baseball by building a very deep farm system and being aggressive using it. For all of the deserved credit that the Rays get for making their voodoo work, it's good to see a team in a relatively small market like San Diego making a bold and aggressive push in a much different way to challenge the Dodgers in the NL West. 

Beware the Dreaded Dombrowski

As if things aren't tough enough for Mets fans who are still left longing for a real impact free agent signing, now Ken Davidoff of the Post is describing the Phillies' hiring of Dave Dombrowski to run things in the City of Brotherly Love as a "haymaker" delivered right in the schnoz of Steve Cohen's stated mission of winning a title with the Mets. Apparently, fans of the team like myself should now quake in fear of what this hiring means for all of our hopes. So, thanks to Ken Davidoff, Dave Dombrowski joins the long line of boogeymen that the New York media utilizes to beat Mets fans over the head. In his honor, I have included the picture of my favorite fictional Dombrowski, Louis, who I'm pretty sure anyone much short of retirement age will need to Google. You're welcome.

Tanking Is Ugly, and Doesn't Always Work

Interesting piece by Sam Miller on ESPN.com about the Phillies' failure to reap the full benefits of tanking. It's a really good piece, and not behind a paywall, so I recommend you take a look at it. What interested me in particular about it was that it runs contrary to the belief of many around baseball that tanking is some sort of automatic route back into contention. I remember there was an article by Daniel Kaplan in The Athletic back a month ago that I responded to rather vigorously in a post of my own. Basically, Kaplan was taking a contrarian view to the idea that the Mets under Cohen were primed to succeed. Citing the success of the Yankees and a somewhat bizarre idea that the location of Citi Field in Queens doomed the Mets' chances of having good attendance, Kaplan went on to cite an unnamed source to suggest that tanking and rebuilding was the way to go: