An obscenity of riches

 Saw the other day that the Los Angeles Dodgers signed a career .273 hitter for $240 million over four years, and my unkempt mind immediately began imagining a world in which the Dodgers owned everything. Headlines began to blossom in my frontal lobe:

Dodgers Buy Judge, Raleigh, Skenes, Ohtani, Skubal; Ohtani Reminds Dodgers They Already Own Him.

Dodgers Respond By Buying The Re-Animated Corpses Of Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio And Ted Williams; "With Or Without His Head?", Fans Inquire Of Williams.

Dodgers Buy Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, France; Tell President Trump, "I Got Your NATO Right Here, Pal."

Dodgers Buy Norway; Tell Trump, "And Your Nobel Peace Prize, Too."

Dodgers Buy MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred For Two Packs Of Bazooka Bubble Gum And A Game-Worn Chico Salmon Jersey; "Paid Too Much," Fans Complain.

And last but hardly least:

Dodgers Buy Entire National League. With the subhead, "Finally, Some Competitive Balance": Dodger Execs.

All of this is in jest, of course, but not by much. If the Dodgers can afford to shovel $240 mill at Kyle Tucker, the aforementioned career .273 hitter, how big a pile must they be sitting on? 

Because it's completely ridiculous -- no longer an embarrassment but an obscenity of riches -- and it launches the entire market into orbit. The Dodgers scooped the 29-year-old Tucker from the Cubs. Know what he did for the northsiders last season?

Batted .266. Hit 22 homers. Drove in 73 runs.

Now, those are OK numbers, but they're hardly $240 mill numbers. And they're especially not $240 mill numbers when you consider the Dodgers are back-to-back World Series champs who scarcely needed a .266 hitter to bolster an already gilded lineup. 

So Tucker's a spare part, essentially. And if you can afford to spend that many dineros on a spare part, how is anyone else expected to keep up?

No wonder the other owners have their Jockeys in a twist, yowling for a salary cap even though none of them are exactly destitute. Steve Cohen's Mets, for instance, just dropped $126 million across three years on the Blue Jays' Bo Bichette. That ain't chump change.

Besides, considering Bo's numbers dwarf Tucker's -- Bichette is a .294 career hitter who batted .311 with 18 homers and 94 RBI last season -- the Mets might have gotten him cheap. Bizarre as that sounds.

Then again, it's all bizarre these days. Which is why the Blob's unkempt mind might not be as unkempt this time as it usually is.

I mean, the Dodgers probably could buy NATO. Or at least a piece of it. And if Fearless Leader and the rest of his cabal objected?

Why, the Trolley Dodgers will just call Yoshinobu Yamamoto out of the pen. That'll shut 'em up.