Michael Ventre

Back in the middle of August, Dodgers starter Derek Lowe offered this opinion about the team’s love affair with its youngsters:

“To go with a total youth movement is not fair to the veterans, and not fair to the city. I am a firm believer that you use the minor league system to help the major league team now. You try to win today, and four years from now, you will probably have a kid just as good as the one you got rid of.”

After Thursday night’s 9-4 loss suffered by the Dodgers at the hands of the Colorado Rockies, second baseman Jeff Kent went off, serving notice that he, too, feels the kids are not all right: “I don’t know what it is, especially when you have a lot (of young players). It’s hard to influence a big group. We’ve got some good kids on the team. Don’t get me wrong … It’s hard to translate experience. I don’t know why they don’t get it. … I think experience can help more than inexperience. And it’s hard to give a young kid experience.”

Clearly, there is a rift between the old and young among the Dodgers that rivals anything you might see in movies such as “Rebel Without a Cause” or “The Blackboard Jungle.” In fact, the only chasm that might be larger is the one between the Dodgers and their playoff hopes.

The Dodgers have been out of the NL wild card race for some time now, even though they have yet to make it official. It’s like knowing that somebody is quitting a job soon, because they’ve been packing up their belongings, taking three-hour lunches and generally slacking off. All that’s missing is the memo.

This “geezer-punk” assemblage has lost five in a row at a time when the San Diego Padres, making a run at the division title, have won seven straight. The Dodgers just suffered their first-ever four-game sweep by the Rockets at Coors Field. So naturally, the already cranky tricenarians and quadragenarians who creak around the clubhouse in search of their lost youth are becoming more cantankerous by the minute.

Special feature Reuters Stretch run: Breaking down MLB playoff races

You might think that this is a diatribe directed against jocks in their sunset years who can’t accept that at some point the amusement park will close and they’ll have to go and find real jobs. But it isn’t.

Actually, these geezers have the sharpest minds of anybody in the Dodgers organization.

What they detect, but can’t come right out and say – so I’ll say it for them -- is that the owners of the club, Frank and Jamie McCourt, have decided they would rather populate the roster with low-priced youngsters and make gobs of profit in the process rather than put the absolute best team possible on the field given their revenue stream.

Heck, they raised the parking fees at Dodger Stadium this year to $15 a pop, but it’s still a nightmare to park there, and the team is worse than when it cost $10 to park.

The Dodgers don’t make the kind of money the Yankees make, but they rake it in nonetheless. Yet they like to garnish the roster with token veterans like Juan Pierre and Luis Gonzalez to cover up the fact that the main course consists of minor league hopefuls like James Loney, Andre Ethier and Andy LaRoche.