Dodgers trade for a second baseman, and it's not Brian Dozier

The Los Angeles Dodgers traded prospect pitcher Jose DeLeon to the Tampa Bay Rays on Monday for infielder Logan Forsythe.

This puts complete fini to the speculation that the Dodgers would deal for the Twins' Brian Dozier. Not only do the Dodgers now have Forsythe to plug into second base, but DeLeon -- who was supposedly to be the key (or, perhaps, only) return for the Twins -- is gone.

Nobody on the outside can be completely sure what the asks in the Dodgers-Twins talks were, but supposedly the Dodgers were insistent that it be one-for-one. That's what they wound up with for Forsythe. And Forsythe, while a decent infielder with some pop in his bat, isn't nearly the player Dozier is.

The Twins correctly wanted more than DeLeon, who has never thrown as many as 115 innings in a season, for Dozier. If that's all the Dodgers would offer, the Twins were right to walk away. The Dodgers wound up with a lesser player, but gave up less than they would have to get the better one. They may have been right to stand their ground too.

Bottom line: Unless something is going on below the surface, Dozier is going to be a Twin in 2017. That is not, repeat not, a disaster.

Notes, quotes and comment

Slow times in baseball news, so I'll just toss a few recent links your direction and get on with other things in my life:

* Jim Bouton's book Ball Four played a significant role in my becoming a baseball fan almost a half-century ago. The material Bouton and Leonard Shecter used to create that marvelous book -- notes, tape recordings, manuscripts, correspondence -- is being auctioned. Bidding closes Jan. 21.

* The chatter about a Brian Dozier trade to the Dodgers has largely quieted, but I wouldn't call it dead yet. Baseball America's organizations prospect rankings has reached the NL West teams (last division this year), and here's Los Angeles's Top 10 list. I expect that if the Twins do trade Dozier to the Dodgers, three of those names will be involved. The Dodgers are, supposedly, unwilling to include more than one.

* The St. Louis Post-Dispatch tells the story of Seth Maness, relief pitcher and surgical pioneer -- first major leaguer to undergo a surgical alternative to Tommy John surgery. Not every pitcher whose elbow goes south can have this procedure, but the recovery time for those who can figures to be sharply better.

Waste as a business model

The Los Angeles Dodgers are under new management, and the new management is unloading a lot of the previous management's commitments.

This involves writing off some pretty substantial contracts:

• Reliever Brian Wilson, designated for assignment Tuesday, is owed $9.5 million for 2015.
• The Dodgers will pay the Miami Marlins $12.5 million to take starter Dan Haren off their hands.
• They will pay the San Diego Padres $32 million over the next five years to take the contract of outfielder Matt Kemp.

Add it up, and those three moves mean the Dodgers are paying $54 million so Kemp. Haren and Wilson will play for somebody else.

$54 million is roughly the equivalent of the largest free-agent signing in Twins history (Ervin Santana).

And that, I think, is the real advantage of the "unlimited budget" teams. Not merely that they can dole out giant contracts, but that they can blithely trash the money if they decide the deal isn't working for them.

In the book Moneyball, Billy Beane is described as treating the Yankees and Mets and other large-market teams as piggy banks when working trades: Shake them until the money falls out. The Dodgers seem to be a pretty generous piggy bank right now.

The Yasiel Puig Rorschach test

Yasiel Puig misplays a base hit in the fifth inning
Friday night for his second error of the game.

The Los Angeles Dodgers played a really bad, no-good, horsebleep, rotten game on Friday night. Yasiel Puig was part of the problem.

So was just about everybody who took the field for L.A. — the Dodgers got just two hits, and likely Cy Young Award winner Clayton Kershaw was ineffective — but Puig made some early and obvious mistakes in the field as the Cardinals jumped to a fat lead and carried away the NL pennant.

Had Puig played a perfectly clean game in the field, the Dodgers would still have lost Game 6, and with it the National League Championship Series. He didn't play a clean game. And because he is who he is, it was noticed.

Puig spent the season in the spotlight — his controversial contract as a Cuban defector from the free-spending Dodgers; his dominating spring training; his call-up in early June; his .391 batting average at the All-Star break; his .273 batting average after the break. He came to the Dodgers when the team was in the basement; the team's emergence as the power in the NL West largely coincided with his arrival.

His admirers love his gusto, his enthusiasm, his exposed emotions on the field. His detractors deride his frequent mental errors and, yes, his exposed emotions on the field.

Puig is a rare talent, somewhat reminiscent of Bo Jackson. Jackson did things we'd never seen — and could also look like he'd never seen a baseball game. For all his magnificent talent, Jackson was never a truly great baseball player. A great player doesn't just do one spectacular thing a week. He grinds out good play six or seven days a week and mixes in the did-you-see-that stuff.

Puig might get to that point someday. He's not there now.

The reaction to this man and his emergence was been interesting. There are the old-schoolers — self-righteous "protectors of the game"— who want him reined in and forced into a cookie-cutter mold. On the opposite side are his defenders, who often come from a sabermetric camp that routinely scoffs at talk of "doing the little things right." They frequently come off as having decided that chronically missing the cutoff man is no problem — and that any mention of Puig's blunders borders on ethnic insensitivity.

People look at Puig, and see what they want to see. An out-of-control "wild horse" on one hand, a refutation of stodgy baseball tradition on the other. It all says more about the viewer than about Puig.

Puig isn't a problem. He's a challenge. For the Dodgers, the challenge is to get him to refine his play, to strip out the miscues while keeping the passion and aggressiveness. For the rest of the league, the challenge is to cope with the talent he brings to bear.

Everything else is just nonsense.

Ex-Twins watch: Matt Guerrier

Matt Guerrier goes into a handstand during
batting practice, to the amusement of teammate
Brandon League.

The news Sunday that Matt Guerrier had been designated for assignment by the Los Angeles Dodgers prompted me to visit his Baseball Reference page to review his career.

He had a nice run with the Twins, starting out as the long man/mop up guy and working his way into a key set-up role. He had five straight seasons (one with the Dodgers) in which he made at least 70 appearances, and he twice led the league while with the Twins in games pitched.

All that work — plus the fact that he's in his mid-30s now — probably took a toll on his arm. Guerrier spent most of 2012 on the Dodgers' disabled list, and while he was back on a 70-games-pitched pace this year, he wasn't effective (a 4.80 ERA doesn't cut it anywhere, but particularly in pitcher-friendly Chavez Ravine).

And so the Dodgers — in last place in the NL West but only four games out of first — decided to eat the remaining $2 million or so of his contract and move on.

It's possible that Guerrier will land somewhere once he's cleared waivers and been given his release; he has a track record, and the Dodgers will be on the hook for the $2 million. But it won't be in Minnesota. The Twins don't have a bullpen problem (even if the relief crew got torched Sunday by the Royals), and even if they had an opening, they have younger and presumably more talented options in their minor league system to go to first.

The joy of deferred contracts

Two winters ago, during the run-up to the Joe Mauer contract extension, Jim Pohlad said there would be no deferred money in any contract. You have to pay the money at some point, he said, and it might as well be during the time that the player is providing the services contracted for.

That attitude is not universal around baseball, and this week has given us two examples of teams that have significant deferred money pending -- and are in financial trouble.

$21 million for this? Really?

First, we have the Los Angeles Dodgers, who filed Monday for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The list of unsecured creditors is dominated by current and former players, led by Manny Ramirez. The King of Female Fertility Drugs has $21 million coming. Andruw Jones, now two teams removed from his tenure in L.A., is owed $11 million. Marquis Grissom, who last played for the Dodgers almost a decade ago, is owed $2.7 million.

Then there's the marvelous saga of Bobby Bonilla and the New York Mets. Back in 2000, the Mets brought out the $5.9 million owed for the final season of his contract.

The buyout put off the pay off for 11 years -- but charged the Mets 8 percent interest. As a result, the Mets, beginning on Friday, are to pay Bonilla slightly less than $1.2 million. Every year for the next 25 years. Over the next quarter-century that deferred money will total more than $29 million.

What the linked-to Wall Street Journal story doesn't get into is how the Mets figured they were going to pay for that. They invested the money ... with Bernie Madoff. Yes, the Bonilla deferred money is part of why the trustee in the giant Ponzi scheme is after $1 billion from the Mets owners.

High finance and low lifes

Bud Selig and Frank McCourt, 2006:
Don't look at him with the naked eye!

No matter what happened Wednesday on the playing fields of Major League Baseball, the biggest drama happened behind closed doors when Commissioner Bud Selig essentially seized control of the Los Angeles  Dodgers.

Any MLB franchise is valuable, financially and otherwise, but some are more so than others. I am, of course, devoted to the Twins; I honor and respect the histories and traditions of the teams in Pittsburgh and St. Louis, Detroit and elsewhere; but there is no doubt that (despite the best efforts of the Bostons, Chicagos and Philadelphias) that the cornerstone teams of baseball are the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers -- the dominant teams in the nation's largest metro areas, one on the East Coast, the other on the West Coast, one in the American League, the other in the National.

And now the Dodgers are effectively in receivership. It's a complex and tawdry tale, which can perhaps be summed up thusly: Frank and Jamie McCourt, the married/divorced couple who took the Dodgers off News Corp's hands, looted the operation.

In recent days it was reported that Frank McCourt borrowed $30 million from Fox -- News Corp again -- to meet payroll. This on top of some $430 million in long-term debt with which the McCourts saddled the operation.

Selig has repeatedly this spring blocked Frank McCourt -- who has continued to operate the Dodgers single-handedly despite a court ruling that the team is community property -- from tying up the lucrative television rights with News Corp. McCourt, without question, needs capital; Selig pretty clearly regrets ever letting these clowns in to the ownership club and wants to force both Frank and Jamie out; and News Corp is eying a potential killling.

I don't think Selig is afraid that Fox wants to own the Dodgers again; News Corp has been there and done that. I think he fears that McCourt's immediate financial desperation will lead to a too-cheap long term TV contract that will make the Dodgers a less attractive property. Fox doesn't need to buy the cow if it can get the milk for free.

This fiasco isn't over yet. McCourt apparently intends to fight this out, although he is surrounded by problems, each of which might be enough to topple him -- not the least which is a reported IRS investigation into the financial manipulations by which he and his (ex-)wife pulled some $100 million out of the operation for personal use without paying a dime in taxes.

Meanwhile, we'll see how long it take Selig to do unto the Wilpons and the Mets as he has to the McCourts. One key difference, I fear: He likes the Wilpons and doesn't much care for the McCourts.

I offer this link if you're interested in the sordid details: Dodger Divorce is a first-rate blog run by a University of Minnesota law student that has been on top of the McCourt divorce saga from the get-go.

From the business side

The future of the Los Angeles Dodgers of Los Angeles got a bit uglier Thursday as the pending divorce of Frank and Jamie McCourt (above, in happier times) got a bit nastier.

Frank McCourt is the official owner of the Dodgers; Jamie is the CEO, or had been. They announced their separation last week; on Thursday, the Dodgers announced that Jamie had been fired as CEO.

The experience of the San Diego Padres the past year or so is not an encouraging template for Dodgers fans. The divorce proceedings of John and Becky Moores first stripped the club of operating capital, resulting in the departures of, among other veterans, franchise icon Trevor Hoffman. Then it resulted in the sale of the franchise to a group headed by former superagent (and former Boras rival) Jeffery Moorad, who has since fired long-time GM Kevin Towers.

And that's a situation in which one of the divorcing spouses (Becky Moores) had no official role in the operation.

*I don't know that the Fox boys ever mentioned him — they probably didn't notice him, observant as they are — but baseball's Lucifer, Scott Boras, was in the field-level seats right behind home plate Thursday, a constant presence over plate umpire Fieldin Culbreth's right shoulder in the basic TV shot from left-center field.

He was dressed in black, and I kept thinking it should be red, and he should have a pitchfork. (The angle on AP's photos from the outfield is different, and Boras isn't in them.)

Boras is well represented in the ALCS — his clients include Alex Rodriguez, Mark Teixiera and Johnny Damon of the the Yankees and Jered Weaver of the "Los Angeles" Angels of Anaheim.

And while the free agent season hasn't started yet, he (or his minons) have already started the public jockeying, feeding favored journalistic bobo Jon Heyman the line that free agent outfielder Matt Holliday prefers the Yankees to all others.

Damon, of course, is the current Yankees left fielder. Ah, the plight of Boras. Which client does he burn? Probable answer: Which one will bring him the smaller commission?