I sent Landon Donovan an e-mail a few days back with seven questions about the match with Mexico, coming up later today. Even though he has been busy training for (and traveling to) Mexico City, and I’m on the other side of the Atlantic, he wrote back last night, presumably from his hotel room in […]

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Yes, a ridiculous concept. Unless you were born and raised in Mexico City or have a strong preference for smog, altitude, overcrowding and poverty. Then, most any city pales in comparison to Paris. But this is the rare occasion when I wish I were in the distrito federale with Los Tricolores waving above me. Rather […]

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Talking a collective concept here, not an individual one. And it isn’t really that much of a contest. Not in the modern game. “Rodriguez” is the greatest name in baseball. More good players … more players overall … have that surname than any in baseball. Right now. Let’s look at our all-Rodriguez lineup.

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Let’s see … Wednesday night, we were invited to a former colleague’s home for dinner, and six of us consumed … a bottle of Chardonnay, a bottle of rose, a bottle of Cote du Rhone and another bottle of red we didn’t get the name of. Thursday night, we met a friend at a place […]

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OK, yes, we concede it: The rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees is the keenest in baseball, and has been for at least a decade. Nothing comes close. Whatever pretensions the Dodgers and Giants or Cardinals and Cubs or anyone else might have had to being Beisbol Rivalry Numero Uno […]

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I like Russell Martin, Los Angeles Dodgers catcher. So do most Dodgers fans, who applaud him warmly and rarely criticize him and never (to my memory) have booed him. He’s an intelligent young man, even something of a team spokesman, at age 26. He is durable, and he wants to play every day. Admirable qualities, […]

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I have been on every continent, aside from Africa and Antarctica, and have been paying attention to sports and sports reporting my entire adult life, and I can say without hesitation that the matchless city of Paris and the great country of France hold these distinctions: No city and no country are less interested in […]

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We’re taking the “funemployment” thing to the next level. A couple of months ago we were sitting in the Long Beach apartment, and I had a sudden inspiration. “Hey! Why can’t we sit around and do nothing … somewhere else … as well as we can here? Like, say, in Paris?” And I picked Paris, […]

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This is what we in journalism call a “sidebar,” and it goes with the main story that is the blog item just below this one. On Walter O’Malley and the Dodgers. This sidebar is about one Vincent X. Flaherty, sports writer, sports columnist and, it turns out, mover and shaker in the Dodgers getting from […]

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Walter O’Malley always has been a divisive figure, and the two main camps were these: Those who didn’t like him very much. Those who loathed him. Now we have a 324-page apology, largely, for the man who moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and built Dodger Stadium. Entitled “Forever Blue” and subtitled, “The […]

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