Huge day for sports in greater Los Angeles. The Angels signed Albert Pujols to the second-biggest contract in baseball history and the Lakers traded for Chris Paul — only to see the NBA commissioner kill the deal.
But being “big news” doesn’t mean also mean it is “good news.”
One of these stories is bad news. The […]

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*-Update:  Arte Moreno apparently noticed the season Mike Napoli had. On September 30, the Angels dismissed general manager Tony Reagins.
While in Baltimore and Tampa and Atlanta and Houston some astonishingly riveting last-day-of-the-season stuff was going down, involving the Red Sox and Rays, Braves and Cardinals … the 2011 Angels went quietly, meekly into history. They […]

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I can’t remember the last time I saw a televised baseball game from start to finish. Sometime in 2009, I guess it would be. I’ve seen stretches of playoff games, while in Abu Dhabi, but the time differences are so weird that I inevitably miss the start of a game or its finish.
So I felt […]

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I wish I could be an Angels fan.
It’s not like the club won’t allow it. But you can’t really have an emotional connection with a team three decades into a lifetime of following baseball.
I remember when the idea that the Angels might be the best team in the Los Angeles market, or all of Southern […]

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The other day, while shouting insults at my burly friend, we decided to settle this like any red-blooded males would:
In the squared circle. With a hapless referee and a handy supply of folding chairs.
It would be a Mexican Death Match.
But I was missing one key piece of equipment …
The problem can be solved, however, by […]

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This was an issue before I fled the country. Actually, it has been an issue for about 10 years now.
Going to a game at Dodger Stadium can be just … plain … dangerous.
It appears that two men dressed in Dodgers apparel attacked a Giants fan after the game on Opening Day and beat him so […]

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Former colleague Michelle Gardner sent me a link to the latest from our favorite ballplayer, David Eckstein.
Eck, you may recall, was the little guy who made the most from a baseball career with the fewest natural gifts. Undersized, not very fast, almost no power as a hitter, a guy with a strange throwing motion and […]

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It’s liberating, really. After four-plus decades of fandom only partially damaged by journalistic interaction with snotty and dopey players (and Tommy Lasorda), I swore off the Dodgers a year ago. To me, they’re just another team.
It’s Frank McCourt. As long as he or his ex-wife are running the franchise, I want no part of it. […]

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I am excited about the idea of the San Francisco Giants winning the World Series. And they are one game away now, with three shots at securing their first championship since 1954 — or four years before they moved to San Francisco.
Growing up in Los Angeles, as a Dodgers fan … I spent decades loathing […]

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The best part of having two baseball teams in the Los Angeles market?
Usually one of them will be pretty good.
Didn’t work out that way for greater L.A. this year. And that doesn’t happen very often.

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