Well, That Was Disappointing, Temporarily

Never forget:

As we all know, offseason ends when Winter Mtgs do, so Cueto / Davis / Heyward / Upton / Cespedes / Gordon etc ineligible to play in 2016.

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) December 9, 2015

That’s hyperbole, but it’s important to remember. We expected the Winter Meetings to be a fury of moves, and for the Dodgers, they super weren’t. I mean, sort of, anyway — they did show plans to make the biggest move of the week, trading for Aroldis Chapman, before that fizzled for very obvious and understandable reasons.

You probably already know how this post is going to go. It’s basically “Mad Libs” of a dozen other things I’ve written over the years. Fans get irrationally angry and yell about the team “sitting on their hands” as others improve, or yell about “being cheap,” and I reply with “the season doesn’t start for four months” and “this team, right now, is arguably the most talented in baseball,” and “how in the world can you say a team with baseball’s highest payroll ever is cheap,” and so on.

To a certain extent, I get the frustration. Chase Utley and Hisashi Iwakuma, while losing Zack Greinke, is not an ideal outcome to this point. You’d have felt a lot differently if Chapman had been added (probably, anyway, since we don’t know and likely will never know who was going to Cincinnati), but that seems like a non-issue now.

But, you know, like I joked in the tweet, there’s a lot of talent still out there. If by the end of the year they’ve traded Carl Crawford, and signed Jason Heyward, Kenta Maeda, and Johnny Cueto, or acquired Carlos Carrasco (or whatever the specifics would be), you’ll look back and laugh at how panicked you were on Dec. 10. By April, you won’t remember or care if those players have been Dodgers for 90 days or 105 days.

If you’ve seen me say this before, well, I have. Offseason hasn’t gotten off to a great start so far, and there’s no arguing that. To say that the team isn’t trying or doesn’t care or no longer has the ability to make moves, well, that’s just lunacy.