This spring, I picked the Los Angeles Dodgers to be the best team in the National League, while acknowledging they might not even finish with a winning record. Basically, I thought they had the highest upside in the league.

General Manager Paul DePodesta had assembled an impressive roster, with young players like J.D. Drew, Brad Penny, Milton Bradley, Jeff Weaver, and Hee Seop Choi all moving into their primes. The Dodgers also had reliable veterans like Eric Gagne, Jeff Kent and Derek Lowe.

The downsides of the roster DePodesta built were obvious – Drew, Penny, and Bradley are notoriously injury prone. Like Choi, they have always been less impressive than their statistics, and with the exception of Gagne and Penny, every player named above has acquired a reputation as a headcase – but I thought the team had enough talent to take a weak division, and DePodesta enough cleverness to fix the team’s problems by the trading deadline.

Such, of course, has not proved to be the case.The West has been weaker than anyone could possibly have thought, and it hasn’t done the Dodgers a bit of good.They’re 11 games below .500, four games out of first place, and now a series of bizarre incidents has turned a lost season into an ugly one.

The first and main culprit, as DePodesta defenders like to point out, has been injury. Gagne has missed the entire season, it looks as if Drew and Bradley will combine to play less than 150 games, and key starter Odalis Perez has made only 17 starts, during which he’s put up a 4.73 ERA. In addition, injuries to a variety of supporting players like Jayson Werth and Jose Valentin have left the Dodgers often fielding a Triple-A team.

This is a pretty lame excuse. DePodesta put together a lineup built around three players, two of whom are exceptionally injury prone, and a rotation built around three pitchers, two of whom – Perez and Penny – were known before this season to have arm woes. It was a defensible strategy, and had it worked the Dodgers might be setting up their playoff rotation right now; but it didn’t, and the team’s braintrust has to take the blame.

Depending on who you ask, the secondary culprit may or may not be an issue at all, and that’s the team chemistry. Generally, you can count me at best a skeptic on such issues – I’m inclined to side with DePodesta when he says that “winning creates chemistry.” Still, it’s hard not to be appalled by the sheer number of embarrassing incidents that have happened in Chavez Ravine this year, which range from the ridiculous to the horrifying.

Lowe, who left Boston amid widespread rumors about his “lifestyle,” left his wife and children by telephone to be with a reporter covering the team. Penny got a Marlins’ clubhouse kid into trouble by daring him to drink a gallon of milk for money. Kent and Bradley got into an altercation when an injured Bradley didn’t score from first on a Kent double, leading to Bradley saying that Kent “doesn’t know how to deal with African-American people.”

Reports in Los Angeles newspapers now say that police have responded to several domestic violence calls at the Bradley home, including one incident in which the right fielder is alleged to have choked his pregnant wife. In addition to all this, there is the widespread perception (fair or not) that Choi is too soft to live up to his potential, and that Drew just doesn’t care enough about baseball to play through pain.

One doesn’t need to come from the school that values chemistry above all else to say there’s something seriously wrong here, and that it goes back to DePodesta. The one common string through all his moves has been to acquire players other teams didn’t want for one reason or another. Sometimes that had to do with health, sometimes with age, but in many cases it had to do with the perception that certain players were just not the sort of people you want on your team.

It’s easy to caricature DePodesta for his reliance on statistical analysis and turn him into a robot too in love with his computer to notice the game is played by people, but he’s assembled a team that’s an embarrassment to baseball, largely by ignoring the conventional wisdom regarding players like Lowe and Bradley.

Are the off-field issues why the team is underperforming so badly? Not entirely, but they certainly can’t help, and they’re now leading to the further embarrassment of team owner Frank McCourt calling DePodesta out in public.

“The biggest single lesson I learned since I’ve been here is just how important character is,” McCourt told the LA Times. “I’m not sure I fully understood how important it was. I now understand it in a practical sense.”

DePodesta is an awfully bright guy, with the potential to be as good as any general manager in the game. But McCourt is on to something here, if for no other reason than that bad character has had the practical effect of badly damaging his team’s image, and thus his wallet.

He’s learned a lesson, and it will be very interesting this offseason to see if DePodesta has learned it, too.