Did you ever see the movie Major League? Great movie. Charlie Sheen. Tom Berenger. Wesley Snipes. It's about the new owner of a major league team with hopes of attendance falling off so much, that the team can be sold. Baseball is often used as a metaphor for life, but when life imitates metaphor, we have a problem, or at least a sequel — Major League III: The Dodgers.
OPEN ON:
New owner, let's call him McCourt. He buys the team amid rumor of his selling off property, piece by piece, the old "parts more valuable than the whole" theory. But in fear of being lynched by blue and white faced fans and displaced Chavez Ravine relatives, he decides to become Mr. Baseball — photo ops with the players, sitting behind home plate — all the time wanting to wave that big foam finger at the fans.
ENTER:
A young , first time manager, let's call him Patsy — no, DePodesta, that's it. He takes the manger job because the gig at FEMA was taken. Slowly, with the "skill" of a seven year old boy with a handful of Baseball cards, he begins to dismantle the winning combination of a World Series bound team just before play-offs. And just to show that he really knows what he's doing, he trades for players no one has really ever heard of. But the play-off momentum is so great that they almost take the play-offs, despite his best managerial efforts.
NEXT SEASON:
Sell ad space — everywhere. Make the stadium look like a public access PC with no spam guard. Cheapen the food, then raise the prices. Now, dismantle the rest of the team and bring in players off of other teams DL rooster. Hurt players and those two years passed their prime make for a great program, but will never be able to pull it together enough to play as a team. Start off big and then finish the season one away from the bottom.
By next season, Los Angeles — never known for it's long attention span — will swear that the only Major League team in town is the Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim). The Dodgers can be moved to a AAA park in Bakersfield; the Vero Beach Training facility turned into retirement condos; and Dodger Stadium can be sold back to the City of Los Angeles to make way for the newly proposed, Chavez Heights. GO BLUE! No, GO DEPODESTA! Hey it's only a movie, right?