As Jay Jaffe over at Sports Illustrated, well… illustrated, the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ box scores as of late have been like dried up water wells from John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. Fittingly enough, the state of California right now faces extreme water shortages and drought and are scarcely equipped with many real resources or solutions in place to rectify the problem.
The macro picture obviously outweighs the micro one in scope and weight of things, but the Dodgers and Don Mattingly are probably more focused on scoring runs right now. A team with a Major League leading $278.8 million payroll should not be scraping by in terms of run production.
As Jaffe went on to mention, the Dodgers’ 2015 scoring drought was the longest MLB scoreless streak on offense since the Marlins played through 37 innings of plagued base running efforts in 2013. However, the Marlins played with only a $30.3 million payroll that season.
Who knows what the LA Dodgers baseball team had for a payroll in 1962, the year when this scoreless record was initially set in, but you can bet (inflation included) it probably wasn’t the equivalent of Joc Pederson and Yasmani Grandal‘s combined 2015 salaries of $1.2 million. Sandy Koufax made $27,500 in 1962 ($219,651 USD in 2015).
Sure, there is no salary cap in MLB, but $278.8 million? That’s a obscene amount of money. That much of an investment in players should guarantee management that their club scores at least once in each of the 162 games played. 35 straight innings is unsightly and an extremely repressing figure. With the Dodgers’ payroll, it works out to an average of $11.52 million per player for a 25-man roster. With that kind of money and no salary cap in place, an NBA team would be able to buy themselves an entire roster of Stephen Curry’s, who made $10.6 million in base salary this year.
Dodgers fans will point to excuses like Yasiel Puig and Carl Crawford being on the disabled list, but so what? Name one team that doesn’t deal with an impact position player who lands on the DL for a given stretch every season. The ironic part to all of this is the Dodgers’ young rookie center fielder is the cheapest everyday player they have on the roster AND the second most productive after Adrian Gonzalez. Pederson currently has an oWAR of 1.2.
Therein lies two problems with both pro sports and the Dodgers: 1) Players are paid for production, but also years of service/seniority, which means they are usually paid more money based on past production. 2) This baseball team has quite a few under-performing, overpaid players on it’s roster.
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Jimmy Rollins is making $11 million but hitting .197. Juan Uribe is making $7.5 million and is hitting .238 with only one home run this season. Until Matt Kemp (who is still a major contributing factor to LA’s current bloated payroll) was traded to San Diego and Puig landed on the DL with Crawford, outfielders Andre Ethier and Alex Guerrero were making $18 million and $6.5 million respectively, mainly in reserve roles.
Don’t be misled, though. The Los Angeles Dodgers are still winning a good chunk of ball games. They should be thankful Zack Greinke is having a stellar season leading the way with five victories for the pitching staff, otherwise things might not be as peachy as they are right now in La La Land. They’re feeling the heat, literally from nature, but also from the Giants who are 1.5 games back of the Dodgers in the NL West.
So while the drought rages on and California’s peach crops struggle to ripen, this will likely be noted as a minor blip on the Dodgers’ radar. They won 2-1 last night, with the go ahead run coming — surprise, surprise — via a solo shot off the bat of Pederson in the bottom of the eighth inning versus the Padres.