Dodgers need to trade for Machado
Fixation on luxurytax threshold may hurt L.A.’s season.
Sometimes the too-obvious move is the right move.
When you’re the Los Angeles Dodgers and you haven’t won a championship in 30 years, your all-world ace is on the clock, and you just lost one of baseball’s best shortstops, at some point in the coming weeks you bite the bullet and pay the price to go get Manny Machado. Simple, right? The Dodgers have one of the top farm systems in baseball, so they can absorb the cost in prospects, though it will pain Andrew Friedman, their president of baseball operations, and a front office that takes great pride in being a buildfrom-within organization.
Indeed, there’s the rub, and the reason that baseball people I spoke to believe it’s only 50-50 that they actually do trade for Machado.
Simply put, Friedman’s group has transformed the Dodgers from the wild-spending operation under the new Magic Johnson-led ownership of several years ago, one so desperate to win a championship that it instead paved the way for a Red Sox title in 2013 by making that absurd, high-salary trade for the likes of Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford and Josh Beckett.
These days, in fact, the Dodgers are operating more like the current Yankees, making it a priority to get under the luxury-tax threshold this year. Otherwise Giancarlo Stanton probably would be in his hometown of L.A. rather then the Bronx this season.
The difference is that for the Yankees it’s part of their rebuild, brief as it was, which is built around a nucleus of young, affordable talent, and offers the promise of years of championship contention.
The Dodgers, on the other hand, are surely terribly frustrated at being unable to get to the mountaintop. They’ve won five straight division titles but have fallen short every October, sometimes because Clayton Kershaw hasn’t pitched like the best pitcher in baseball.
And while Friedman has done a great job of replenishing the farm system on the fly, Kershaw is 30 years old and has an opt-out in his contract that allows him to become a free agent this winter.
It’s one of the reasons the Dodgers want to reset their luxury tax rate, knowing how much it will cost to re-sign their ace. And although Kershaw’s age and recent history of back problems might tell their analytics-heavy front office it wouldn’t be smart to re-sign him at a huge cost, it’s also hard to imagine they’d let him walk.
Much more so than the Yankees, then, the Dodgers are in win-now mode, with Kershaw backed up in the rotation by 38-year-old Rich Hill, and their closer, Kenley Jansen, making $18 million a year. However, they’re also off to a bad start, falling to 12-16 on Monday, slipping eight games out of first place. This on the same day they learned Corey Seager needs Tommy John surgery on his throwing elbow and will be out for the season.
It already has the feel of a lost year for the Dodgers, but their front office can’t look at it that way. They should get Justin Turner back from his wrist injury in a couple of weeks, they still have plenty of talent, and, well, it’s a long, long season. But to plug the hole at shortstop they have to move Chris Taylor in from left field, compromising their depth by making Kike Hernandez more of an everyday player.
One solution was to avoid comparisons along the way, which was never going to be easy.
Quail Hollow presents one of those challenges.
Thomas played nine holes Tuesday with Tiger Woods, Bryson DeChambeau and Dru Love. It was the first time he set foot on Quail Hollow since the PGA Championship, when he holed a 15-foot putt on the first hole of the final round to escape with bogey, watched a birdie putt hang on the edge of the cup at No. 10 for the longest time before dropping, chipped in for birdie on the 13th hole and hit the best shot of his life — a 7-iron on the par-3 17th — for a birdie that clinched his first major.
These are memories, and how he plays this week at the Wells Fargo Championship has no bearing on what he accomplished last summer. Neither will anything else he does this year.
“The course is going to be playing different,” he said. “That was a major, a different time of the year.”
On the table as he spoke was his phone, the only place he keeps his goals. Thomas doesn’t share them until the season is over, and if they’re anything like a year ago, they can be as specific as being among the top 30 in scrambling and as general as making the Ryder Cup team. One objective drives him. “Make my bad golf better,” he said.
The encore to last year cannot be measured because Thomas still has the more important half of the season ahead of him, which includes three majors and the FedEx Cup playoffs. But there already is proof that he is backing it up just fine.
For starters, Thomas is second in the Vardon Trophy to Dustin Johnson, the world’s No. 1 player, but maybe not for long. Thomas gets his third chance to move to No. 1 in the world this week, most likely needing around 12th place to overtake Johnson, who is not playing at Quail Hollow.
What gets Thomas even more excited are his finishes — not just the victories at the CJ Cup in South Korea last fall or the playoff he won at the Honda Classic, but the tie for 22nd at Kapalua at the start of the year. It’s his worst finish in his 10 individual events he has played. The bad golf isn’t bad at all. “I’m so much more consistent this year, which I really like,” Thomas said. “That’s what I’ve wanted to do this year. Get my bad golf better. No missed cuts. Have a chance to win more tournaments. Living around the top 10 is something Tiger did for a long time. He always had chances to win tournaments, and if he didn’t, he was always around, always on that first page of the leaderboard.”
That’s what led Thomas to believe he is playing better this year. “I don’t have all the crazy things to go along with it,” he said.
Thomas had said he would seek advice from Woods and Jack Nicklaus, along with Jordan Spieth, on how to deal with living up to expectations after a big year. But it was a conversation he had with Nicklaus last summer before winning at Quail Hollow that had a more lasting effect.
“When I talked to Mr. Nicklaus last year, he said he adjusted his game plan according to how he was playing,” Thomas said. “I don’t know why I never thought about that, but it stuck with me. Because at the time, I wasn’t playing well. He said: ‘When you’re not playing well and you have a 6-iron, are you trying to make birdie? You probably won’t because you’re not playing well. Why wouldn’t you just hit the middle of the green?’
“I was like, ‘Why am I playing courses the same when I’m playing my best versus when I’m not playing well?’” Thomas said. “That is a big part of why I’m having success this year.”
The conversation carried into the offseason with his father, Mike Thomas. The idea was to make ordinary weeks better instead of worse. To turn 40th place into 20th place. Make the bad golf better. “If he doesn’t have a chance to win ... things irritate him more. He fires at flags he shouldn’t fire at,” Mike Thomas said. “He’s good up front. He’s not in the middle. We all sat and talked about that. It’s not that you need 5 more (FedEx Cup) points or an extra $5,000. It’s just a frame of mind. Try to always improve.” It appears to be working. Better than last year? Along with five victories, Thomas shot a 59 at the Sony Open and a 63 at the U.S. Open. Seasons like that are hard to top.
“I feel I’m capable of doing it again,” he said. “But it’s not like I’m going to have those on my refrigerator and checking them off. There are many things I want to do and can do. And like many things, I’m hoping it can happen.”