PORT ST. LUCIE — Of all our team sports, baseball is probably the one in which cohesion is least important.
In football, for example, watching the synchronized Super Bowl blitzes of the Seahawks — and the lack of adequate group adjustment from the Patriots — accentuated the every-down necessity of 11 working as one.
However, so much of baseball — 75 percent? — is centered on the one-on-one, pitcher-hitter battle. Thus, changing over significant portions of a roster should be less fraught in baseball than other sports. Yet there is a near-annual tradition of anointing the team that spends the most/brings in many famous names as the offseason winner despite not much historical correlation to translating that into success.
The Dodgers repeated as champions last year and their offseason free agent haul from outside that annoyed so many in the industry as overkill — Michael Conforto, Hyeseong Kim, Roki Sasaki, Tanner Scott, Blake Snell, Kirby Yates — did more to undermine than help; at least until Snell got healthy and excelled in the postseason.