The Area That Most Concerned Me

Everybody pays a lot of attention to what the major league payroll is, but the Dodgers have also silently reduced the importance of what brought forth this rise in prominence in the first place: the minor league system.

Genovese, perhaps baseball's most notable living amateur scout, was sitting in the aging easy chair in his tiny North Hollywood home recently when he received a solemn phone call from one of his Dodgers bosses.

He was thereby informed that his annual part-time salary was being slashed.

From $18,000 to $8,000 -- a 56% pay cut.

Now i'm not going to act like firing a single scout or failing to sign a single player embodies all the changes/failures that are going on, but it does make you wonder whether or not the Dodgers will be able to continue to produce quality players.

No matter how good you think Logan White and Kim Ng are, giving them a competitive disadvantage to almost every other team in the league, while still expecting top tier prospects, is unreasonable, but that's exactly the challenge they have already been facing.

The Dodgers have paid $8.5 million in signing bonuses for draft picks over the last two years -- the lowest figure among all major league teams, according to Baseball America.

The Dodgers, so proud of their heritage in Asia and Latin America, today are a non-factor in bidding for top amateur players abroad. In 2008, according to Baseball America, major league clubs combined to sign 115 such players for bonuses of more than $100,000. The Dodgers did not sign one.

"They're definitely not the pioneering team they were," Baseball America editor John Manuel said. "They've squandered that advantage."

That draft spending trend isn't just for 2008 and 2009 either. The Dodgers were in the bottom five among all franchises in draft spending in 2007 as well. Pair the lack of domestic spending with almost no presence in amateur signings internationally, and the Dodgers really haven't had much to work with recently. It makes the job done by the scouting departments even more impressive.

Now obviously this is old news, but I choose to dig this up now because i'm completing some minor league reviews and I began to wonder how much talent there will be to write about in a few years. Let's just say that at this rate, all it would take is a couple bad drafts, or a few injuries, and there might be very little talent left, if anything at all.