When the Los Angeles Dodgers stunned the baseball world last August by acquiring Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett and Nick Punto at a commitment of about $263 million, they thought their brazen expenditure would buy a spot in the playoffs. It did not. The other day they made a far less expensive move that could produce playoff spots less expensively in the future.

Demonstrating versatility of positive pursuit, the Dodgers’ general manager, Ned Colletti, and president, Stan Kasten, acquired Gerry Hunsicker to be a senior adviser for baseball operations. The Dodgers are unlikely to make a more significant off-season move.

“We went through this year and were able to rebuild the club and farm system and front office to some extent,” Colletti said. “I was looking for someone to help the front office. It’s like when I hired Bill Lajoie. He had walked the walk.”

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Several years after Mike Ilitch hired Dave Dombrowski to run Detroit’s baseball operations, the new man convinced the Tigers’ owner that if he wanted to win, it would cost more money than he had been willing to spend. Ilitch had spent to build his National Hockey League team, the Detroit Red Wings, into a champion, but he hadn’t made money available to the Tigers.

When Dombrowski became president of the Tigers in 2001, the team was coming off a season in which its payroll was $49 million, ranking 19th in the major leagues, and its record was 66-96, which was 25th in the majors. This season the Tigers won the American League Central title with an 88-74 record, seventh in the majors, and a $139 million payroll, fifth highest.

Going into Thursday’s fourth game of the American League Championship Series, the Tigers were one win from playing in the World Series for the second time in seven years. Given the ammunition to do the job, Dombrowski and manager Jim Leyland have done it.

They have also done a job on the Yankees.

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So much for the rise of low-payroll teams.

The ability of teams with low payrolls to advance to post-season play despite their collections of “poorly” paid players has been noted here, but the playoffs have produced a different development worth noting. In the four match-ups in the division series every one was won by the team with the higher payroll. The results by payroll rank:

* No. 1 Yankees over No. 19 Orioles
* No. 5 Tigers over No. 30 Athletics
* No. 6 Giants over No. 20 Reds
* No. 9 Cardinals over No. 16 Nationals

Each winner needed the full five games to prevail and some needed last-inning rallies or extra-inning victories to get there, but in the end the richer teams won.

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