A nine-player deal, the Dodgers taking on hundreds of millions in salary commitments, including those of Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford and Josh Beckett. And the takeaway? Los Angeles has just rediscovered it is a major sports market.

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As a displaced fan of most Los Angeles sports teams, I will take some time out from the latest travelogue to give credit where it is due: To the veteran management team of the Lakers. And to the new management team of the Dodgers. Both franchises have been proactive, and imaginative, and as fans of […]

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You hear this, now and then. And I did the other day on BBC. Or maybe it was Al Jazeera, here in the Gulf. That Usain Bolt, sprinter from Jamaica, “saved” track and field. Perhaps kept it from going extinct? Is that what “saved” means? Which is silly, of course. Track and field now is […]

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Let’s review the State of the Los Angeles Lakers at the end of the 2011-12 season: An old, slow team, with no No. 1 draft pick, a shallow bench and all sorts of money tied up in a handful of guys. Their star, Kobe Bryant, would turn 34 before the coming season, their power forward, […]

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Huge sports day, on both sides of the Atlantic. Maria Sharapova winning the French Open women’s championship, giving her a career grand slam. Her tennis future was bleak a few years ago, after shoulder surgery, but now she is back to No. 1 in the world. Two more games in Euro 2012, including Germany 1-0 […]

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I watch/cover a lot of sports, but I don’t often have a strong opinion on how an event will turn out, before the fact. This is an exception. The Los Angeles Lakers and Denver Nuggets meet in Game 7 of their first-round NBA playoffs series tomorrow night, and I want to get on record with […]

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The Rams moved to St. Louis and became dead to me. Never appreciated the Raiders gangsta thing, and then they went back to Oakland. The Dodgers fell under the spell of the necromancer Frank McCourt. Never was an Angels guy. (I still consider them the Johnny-come-latelies who play 10-man ball.) Don’t care about hockey. Major […]

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An advantage to working at a morning newspaper on the west coast of the United States: Pretty much the whole sports day was over by the time we reached our deadline. We had complete news packages. Not much terra firma is behind California in the time-zone map, aside from Alaska and Hawaii. So the total […]

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I am astonished, from the other side of the globe, at the determination of Kobe Bryant. The man suffered a broken nose and an apparent concussion in the All-Star Game on Sunday … and three days later he scored 31 and played 33 minutes. While wearing a mask to protect his nose and while admitting […]

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I was reading a piece about quarterbacks and the NFL draft, and the name Art Schlichter came up. In, of course, a negative light. Schlichter was a quarterback who came out of Ohio State 30 years ago, and now is remembered pretty much only as a train wreck of a football player and person. And […]

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