By Merv Moore
Sports Director & Head Baseball Coach
Well, color me shocked. The Los Angeles Dodgers, that plucky little mom-and-pop shop from Southern California, have done it again. They’ve won another World Series, this time in a heartwarming Game 7 thriller that I’m sure was funded entirely by bake sales and good vibes.
Just kidding. They bought it. They absolutely, positively, wrote a gargantuan check for it.
Watching the Dodgers clinch another title got me thinking about the two types of teams in Major League Baseball: the Haves and the Have Nots.
Sponsored Links
The Dodgers are the ultimate “Have.” They have a budget bigger than the GDP of some small nations. They have a front office that looks at the luxury tax threshold not as a barrier, but as a minor suggestion, like “wet floor” sign. Their idea of developing a player is often to develop a relationship with his agent.
Then you have the “Have Nots,” or as I like to call them, the “MacGyver Teams.” These are your Kansas City Royals, your Tampa Bay Rays, your Milwaukee Brewers. They can’t buy championships; they have to engineer them out of duct tape, grit, and a sixth-round draft pick who suddenly learns to hit a slider.
When they win, it’s a beautiful miracle of scouting, player development, and luck. It’s the baseball equivalent of building a satellite out of a toaster. You admire it, you cheer for it, and you know it’s incredibly rare.
The Dodgers’ model is different. It’s less “MacGyver” and more “We Have a Guy for That.” Need a shutdown pitcher for Game 7 on zero days’ rest? They have a guy—Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the $325 million man, who promptly delivered a performance for the ages.
Need a veteran leader? They have a guy (Freddie Freeman). Need a generational two-way talent? They had that guy, and now they probably have the next one, too.
Let’s be clear: I’m not mad. I’m a coach. I appreciate excellence. And I’m also a realist. What the Dodgers have built isn’t just a roster; it’s an entire baseball ecosystem. And that’s where it gets interesting for us over here in Bohol.
While everyone’s focused on the Dodgers’ spending in free agency, the real secret sauce is their global talent pipeline. They are the undisputed kings of the international market, especially in Asia.
They don’t just sign the biggest Japanese star; they have a sprawling scouting and development apparatus that finds and cultivates talent from the ground up. They have built the most reliable bridge between Asian baseball and the Major Leagues.
And that, my friends, is where the Bohol Coconuts come in. We’re trying to build our own ecosystem. We have our “Class of 2026” and our 17 affiliate clubs—our own version of a grassroots talent pipeline. We believe the Philippines is a sleeping giant of baseball talent.
So, while the rest of baseball groans about the Dodgers’ wallet, I’m looking at their map. They have the perfect infrastructure that a program like ours needs.
Imagine a future where a top Bohol Coconuts prospect, refined in our system, gets spotted by the most connected Asian scouting network in the world. The Dodgers didn’t just buy a championship; they built a highway from this part of the world to the World Series.
They’ve shown that to win in modern baseball, you need two things: a bottomless well of resources and a global net to catch every possible star. They have both. We’re working on the net. Maybe one day, our paths will cross on that highway.
So, congrats to the Dodgers. You bought a classic. You built a dynasty. And you’ve given every kid in our system a very clear, very expensive blueprint to dream towards.
Photo: All-Pro Reels | CC BY-SA 2.0
Marvin “Merv” Moore is the head coach of the Bohol Coconuts Baseball and Softball Club. He has coached in both Europe and Asia, and helped start the Mister-Baseball and BaseballdeWorld international baseball websites.
