I was 180 degrees from this opinion, two months ago. I insisted the Dodgers shouldn’t trade for Manny Ramirez. Then, when it happened, I suggested the Manny trade would be the last desperate and foolish act on Ned Colletti’s resume. A day later, I rounded up the commentary from Boston, where angry/enraged columnists accused Manny […]

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I’m by no means the only one who has noticed that a five-game series is too short to decide something as important (at least in the baseball world) as who gets to the league championship series. Dodgers manager Joe Torre, whose team was on the lucky side of a short series against a superior team, […]

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Maybe an American expat can buy some sort of cable package, here in Hong Kong, that gets you all the sports TV you might be able to see back at home. I haven’t found it yet. But I’m not totally disconnected from the goings on, via television. I saw two L.A. teams in action today, […]

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So, here we are, a few days into the baseball playoffs, and the best team in the regular season is nine innings from elimination, and the worst team in the regular season is nine innings from advancing. Those would be the Angels and Dodgers, respectively, and their experiences so far — and likely short-term futures […]

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And it just ended. Already I’m feeling it. Even with four rounds of playoffs going on. I like baseball’s long season. As a fan. Not as a reporter or sports editor. Several upsides to it.

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The Associated Press has found a school in Maine that offers three units for a history class about baseball. About Boston Red Sox baseball, in particular, but I could stand that. Name of the Bates College class: Red Sox Nation: Baseball and American Culture.” Where was this class when I was going to school?

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We know what we would like, here in Southern California. A Freeway Series. Finally. We won’t get it. But it could be fun, anyway. Here’s how I see things unfolding, the next four weeks: (And this is the updated/corrected version; you’d think I was hurrying to get to an airport, or something.)

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Manny Ramirez prompted me to think of this anew. Ballplayers, even many of the greatest  ballplayers on the planet … look like regular people. Sure, “why should they not?”, you’re saying. Well, because if you spend much time hanging around football or basketball teams, it can be jarring to realize that an elite athlete, someone […]

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This would seem to qualify as a “Well, duh,” moment. The Associated Press did its annual “roundup for league leaders story,” with the baseball regular-season ending … and Torii Hunter of the Angels was frank enough to suggest that the lowest homer pace since 1993 was about steroids being (mostly, it would seem) driven out […]

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This is sort of the Holy Grail of Southland big-league baseball. The Dodgers vs. the Angels in the World Series. SoCal print journalists have been writing about this concept almost from the minute the Angels were created, in 1961. And it’s never come close to happening. I can remember a dozen times when we did […]

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