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Entries from July 2008

Andruw Jones: It Was Like He Never Left

July 5th, 2008 · No Comments · Baseball, Dodgers

Outfielder Andruw Jones returned to the Dodgers lineup Friday following minor knee surgery … and he picked right up where he had left off: As the biggest free-agent bust in Dodgers history. Aside, perhaps, from Jason Schmidt. Andruw went 0-for-5 with four strikeouts in the Dodgers’ 10-7 victory. Which is hard to do. Making five […]

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Hot Dog! Competitive Eating Is Young Man’s Game

July 4th, 2008 · 1 Comment · Uncategorized

You always hear it, around sports. The legs go first. Uh, no. The belly goes first. And I’m not talking about abs here. I’m talking about the stomach. The ability to eat massive amounts of food and … not die. There was a time when the idea of “competitive eating” might have intrigued me. This […]

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Sonics Angst: Why No Pity for L.A.?

July 3rd, 2008 · 4 Comments · Baseball, Basketball, Sports Journalism

This is starting to annoy me. The NBA franchise leaving Seattle for Oklahoma City is being treated by various and sundry observers as an injustice that borders on the criminal. OK, it’s not a nice thing. Leaving a city after 41 seasons. But do any of you recall any sort of nationwide condemnation and gnashing […]

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L.A. Times Staff Cuts, and Making Do with 700

July 3rd, 2008 · 10 Comments · LANG, Sports Journalism

I take no pleasure in the cuts at the Los Angeles Times. Even though the Times was the main competition for most of my journalism career, and it’s a test to avoid the instinctive “what’s bad for them is good for me!” mind-set of days gone by. This was the newspaper derisively known as “The […]

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Seasons in The Sun: 1996, Joel Boyd

July 2nd, 2008 · 6 Comments · Seasons in The Sun, Sports Journalism, The Sun

Who can predict who will be memorable? You work a few feet from a person for five years, believe you know a fair amount about them, they leave … and five years after that … it’s hard to remember their faces. Or three salient non-work facts about them. But sometimes people can be so unremarkable […]

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Baron Davis? Clippers (!) on a Winning Streak

July 1st, 2008 · No Comments · Basketball, Clippers

And I thought the Clippers were going to return to anonymity for another decade or three. The Lakers keep Kobe Bryant, get Pau Gasol, go to the NBA Finals … and the Clippers (23-59) fall apart. We’ve seen this before, and it’s always been a lengthy process. Lakers get cranked up, Clippers fade, see you […]

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Landon Donovan and the Olympics: Don’t Count On It

July 1st, 2008 · 8 Comments · Olympics, soccer

Landon Donovan played for the U.S. Olympic team that finished fourth at Sydney in 2000, and loved the experience. He told me, while in Australia, that the Olympics were a huge thing for him. He has told me twice in the past six months that he would like to get back to the Olympics, in […]

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