I never mind seeing the San Francisco Giants suffer. This is a deep-seated frame of mind, going back to my childhood and the annual Wars of Religion between the Giants and my team, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Back to when Juan Marichal took a bat to John Roseboro’s head. Back to when the San Francisco […]

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The LA Galaxy has been around for 21 seasons now, but it struck me today that never in that time had the soccer club had to fight for attention in its hometown with a local National Football League team. The NFL abandoned the Los Angeles market after the 1994 season, when the Rams and Raiders […]

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Rio 2016 is the first Summer Olympics I will not attend since Moscow 1980. Yes, it was a good run. I made it to eight consecutive Summer Games. Beginning with Los Angeles 1984 and continuing with Seoul 1988, Barcelona 1992, Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000, Athens 2004, Beijing 2008 and London 2012. The first four with […]

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The two players voted into the Hall of Fame by the Baseball Writers Association of America were formally inducted today in Cooperstown, New York. Ken Griffey Jr. and Mike Piazza had long and productive careers and their numbers indicate they deserve a place in baseball’s ranks of immortals. But my personal recollections of the two […]

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In one category, anyway, the Los Angeles Dodgers are No. 1 in Major League baseball. That would be in spending money on players. Not that it has led to any noteworthy successes on the field. Their last championship, as well as their most recent National League pennant, was in 1988. That was so long ago […]

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It took him three tries, but Julio Urias finally looked like he belongs in the major leagues. The 19-year-old left-hander, ranked one of baseball’s top prospects, gave up one run in four innings and racked up seven strikeouts in a game the Dodgers won over the Colorado Rockies 4-3, on Trayce Thompson’s ninth-inning home run. […]

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In sports, a lot of bad trades become bad trades after the fact. The Dodgers’ nine-player trade with the Boston Red Sox in August of 2012 was a bad trade from Day 1. The Dodgers did the Red Sox a huge favor (and themselves a huge disservice) in the heart of the infamous deal — […]

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Only a few weeks after forward-thinking baseball pundits pooh-poohed the likelihood — as well as the wisdom — of calling up “best pitching prospect in ball” Jose Urias … the Dodgers have done just that. The left-hander from Mexico, still only 19, was working on a 27-inning scoreless streak in Triple-A when he got the […]

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First thought: This is no kind of team to give 88-year-old Vin Scully in his last season as the voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers. These are not The Boys of Summer. They are not The Big Blue Wrecking Crew. The Dodgers not quite awful but they certainly are not good — which you might […]

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The website FiveThirtyEight.com is best known for political predictions and analysis. But it has a sports component, and today it produced an interesting piece on the best and worst teams in Major League Baseball history, at least according to the Elo statistical tool. It goes back to 1903, the year when the first World Series […]

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