Bill Plaschke is a hypocrite, again

A couple of months ago, I ripped LA Times columnist Bill Plaschke for saying the Dodgers should give up on their season and go into a youth movement. Apparently, he’s already forgotten about that.

From Bill Plaschke’s Oct. 29 column:

Seventeen of the 23 players who played for the Red Sox in this series came from somewhere else.

This was a team not grown and nurtured, but bought and bartered.

And (parentheses mine):

(Dodgers’ owner Frank) McCourt and (Angels’ owner Arte) Moreno should be ready to talk about it now. They should call Rodriguez’s agent, Scott Boras, immediately.

They need to prove that all this talk about grooming young players aren’t just code words for keeping the payroll low.

Let’s compare all of that to what he wrote back in August:

If you want to cheer, you must first groan.

If you want to enjoy, you must first endure.

If you want to eventually celebrate the successes of the best collection of young Dodgers talent in the last decade, you must first watch them go splat.

There’s a reason they don’t call it growing joys.

Do you play your young guys and endure growing pains or go out and sign proven players? I’m confused.

It still amazes me that Plaschke seems to like the Dodgers’ management more than the Angels’ in recent years, even though it’s the Angels that are run more like the Red Sox, not the Dodgers.

The current Angels’ management has brought in free agents to help and contribute alongside the prospects, raising the payroll while having very few bad contracts (sounds kind of like the Red Sox, except they do it better).

The current Dodgers’ management has brought in very few free agents who have actually helped the team, has made horrible free agent signings (like Juan Pierre) and played the bad ones for most of the year before deciding to play the younger guys.

I really need to stop reading Plaschke, but I can’t stop. It’s a bad habit I formed back before I discovered sports writing on the Internet — I grew up reading the LA Times sports section. Plaschke has been annoying me since he was a little kid.