Posted by
Ed Lilly on Tuesday, July 22, 2008 11:00:35 PM
The Yankees and Red Sox are the teams you usually hear about when it comes to trying to just buy a pennant or World Series. Their payrolls are staggering, but there are certainly other teams that have the resources available to compete if that's the approach they want to take. The Mets spend a lot of money, and I seem to recall the current Angels owner as being reputedly willing to spend big to try to win.
One team that manages to usually spend a fair amount of money but still not make its way to a World Series title is of course the Cubs.
So the latest news that the Cubs have been fined half a million dollars tells us what?
Here's the quick and dirty:
The Cubs' fine for violations related to the June draft of first-year players was a whopping $500,000, SI.com has learned.
Major League Baseball ruled that the Cubs violated a couple of baseball
rules, including failing to report a signing to MLB's New York offices
and putting the player on the field before receiving approval for the
signing from MLB offices.
The Cubs were said by people
familiar with the case to have exacerbated the situation by how they
responded to MLB's concerns. MLB higherups apparently didn't believe
Cubs people were completely forthcoming regarding their actions in the
case when questioned about them.
I would certainly like to think that the Cubs front office is made up of sharp-eyed baseball minds who somehow made brilliant acquisitions that will help turn the team into a juggernaut over the course of the next decade.
A century of futility and a little bit of common sense makes me think it's far more likely that the front office is badly run and that if this year's team manages to win a title the most appropriate analogy for the role of the front office in all this would be to think of them as the thousand monkeys that finally produced a Shakespearean play.