ESPN: Keri: History says potential Red Sox dynasty no sure thing

Dynoastic work by Keri here...or as he calls it, “9,500 words of Dynasty talk and gratuitous Expos references‏.”

“There’s too much movement now,” former Reds reliever Rob Dibble says. “Chemistry is a big deal. You need to come up with the same guys, stay with them, get to know their tendencies and their inside jokes. Otherwise, it doesn’t work.”

Dibble knows something about the challenge of building a dynasty. In 1990, he was a member of the Cincinnati Reds team that won the World Series. Joined by Randy Myers and Norm Charlton, Dibble helped form the Nasty Boys bullpen, a collection of hard-throwing young relievers who—along with Barry Larkin, Jose Rijo, Eric Davis and other young stars—figured to form the nucleus of a Reds team that could reel off multiple championships. It didn’t happen. Injuries and bad luck conspired against the team, and management soon took it apart.

“Once you break a link in the chain, it’s never as strong as it once was,” Dibble says. “Free agency has ruined the game.” Forgive Dibble if he sounds like the lords of the realm who still keep Marvin Miller out of the Hall of Fame. It’s not that he begrudges players the opportunity to choose their employer and make a healthy living. It’s that ,as a fan of the game, he misses those Mount Rushmore-level teams of the past, the ones you either respected or hated, but could never ignore. Although teams such as the Yankees, Red Sox and Mets pull in and spend more money than their lower-revenue counterparts, bigger dollars haven’t translated into the kind of juggernauts that once littered baseball’s landscape, teams such as Casey Stengel’s Yankees, Branch Rickey’s Cardinals and John McGraw’s Giants. Actually, Dibble was born in 1964, too young to remember any of those teams, barely in middle school when the Big Red Machine was winding down. He might pine for the powerhouse teams of the past, but more because of what he has read and heard than what he has seen with his own eyes.