The fact that so many books still name the Los Angeles Dodgers as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" baseball team ever only tells you how far baseball still is from becoming a serious sport. Football critics have long recognized that the greatest football teams of all times are the Liverpool and Manchester United, who were not the most famous or richest or highest revenue-earners of their times, let alone of all times. NFL journalists rank the highly controversial New England Patriots over American football teams who were highly popular in discussions around the United States. Baseball journalists are still blinded by commercial success. The Dodgers won more than anyone else (not true, by the way), therefore they must have been the greatest. Football journalists grow up watching a lot of football matches of the past, American football journalists grow up listening to a lot of gridiron football of the past. Baseball journalists are often totally ignorant of the baseball of the past, they barely know the most frequent world champions. No wonder they will think that the Dodgers did anything worthy of being saved. In a sense, the Dodgers are emblematic of the status of baseball journalism as a whole: too much attention paid to commercial phenomena (be it the Mariner’s sluggers or the Padres’ “super bullpen”) and too little to the merits of real baseball players. If somebody becomes the most complete 5-tool ballplayer but no major league team signs him and markets him around the world, a lot of baseball journalists will ignore him. If a major league team picks up a players who is as stereotyped as can be but launches him worldwide, your average journalist will waste rivers of ink on her or him. This is the sad status of baseball journalism: baseball journalists are basically GMs working for major league ball clubs. They simply highlight what product the baseball business wants to make money from.