Dodgers: It is Time for the Front Office to Stop Hoarding Prospects

The Dodgers’ minor league system is one of the league’s best. With five prospects among the Top 100 and plenty of elite depth behind them, many experts rate the Dodger farm system in the top five in all of baseball.

This high ranking is actually a rarity considering the Dodgers have made no major trades to acquire prospects nor are they a team in a rebuild fase. So, since the Dodgers are ready to fight for a World Series title, is it time to use this incredible minor league system to build a winner?

Having a top-five farm system is not to be taken for granted. Ever since Andrew Friedman and Farhan Zaidi took the reigns, the minor league depth and overall talent down on the farm has been one of their greatest accomplishments and strengths. They have brought Cody Bellinger, Walker Buehler, Julio Urias, and Corey Seager to the majors and have built what is now one of the best young baseball teams in the league. This young, homegrown, squad of 25 actually brings me to my first point: team stability.

This Dodger team is set for a long time. With the exception of Clayton Kershaw (who could be extended or use his option to stay with the team) the Dodgers elite core is locked down for the foreseeable future. This does one of two things:

First, it allows the coaching and front office to develop regularity among the players they already have on the major league roster. This will allow the team to have both every day starters and a solid bench with options for power, speed, and contact hitting. Ideally, the team will eventually be in a place where they can make changes to the roster should they chose to and save for big name players that will make that group even better.

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Second, this creates a logjam at almost every position. When a team has players under team control for a long time it causes them to pile up on the roster. Prospects who are ready to break into the league are not able to because there is just nowhere to put them. Take Alex Verdugo as an example. Verdugo is the Dodgers second best prospect and ranks 24th overall in all of baseball. But, even with his elite standing as a prospect and his overwhelming statistics in the minors, Verdugo faces an uphill battle for playing time let alone a starting job.

Now, take that issue and compound it about ten times over for every other position and consider how useless that will make some of the team’s elite minor leaguers. This could restrain players for extended periods of time and can even displace them from their regular positions.

All of that brings me to my second, and main, point of this article and that is this: the Dodgers front office needs to stop being stingy with prospects. In other words what I am suggesting is the Dodgers trade the players they truly do not, and will not, need in the future. This would allow them to trade for well established major league players who could help win a title now, not in a few years from now.

An example of what I am talking about is the Yu Darvish trade where the Dodgers sent top 100 prospect, Willie Calhoun to the Rangers as a part of a package for the elite righty. Imagine trades like this, for the games elite players, but on a bigger and more frequent scale. The Dodgers traded a player they do not see themselves needing and in return landed one of the game’s best pitchers.

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I am not saying the team should decimate the system. I am merely saying that this team is at a point where prospects may do them more good on the trade market than they will as depth. The cold hard truth is the Dodgers have yet to win a championship with this elite farm system. And, since they are not winning the big game this way, it may be time to take a more major league focused approach in which they only keep the prospects that will be key to the team’s future. With a minor league system like the Dodgers’, the trade possibilities are endless and it may be time to explore those options.