I still believe Paul DePodesta was the best hire the Dodgers have made since the McCourts took over the team. As general manager, before the 2005 season. But they gave him only two years and ran him out of town when the 2005 Dodgers imploded. Several prominent local sports columnists helped grease the skids for […]

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This was the Russo-Japanese War of newspaper collisions. Little-noted beyond the immediate participants, but messy and decisive, all the same, concluding with one side crippled and the other enormously stronger and recognized as a major regional player for the first time. The Russo-Japanese War began in 1904 and ended with Russia humiliated and on its […]

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It was a spasm of good fortune. For the newspaper, the section and for Mike Terry. It was the spring/summer of 1987. Bob Ritter was editor of The Sun. He called me into his office one afternoon and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Would I like to add Mike Terry to the sports […]

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Good thing newspapers are dying. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to get all these folks into the “press” room. I’m in the Chick Hearn press room, as it’s officially named, at Staples Center, and we basically are out of space here in the working area of the place. Every single work space has someone sitting […]

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David Bristow wasn’t meant to be a sports journalist. He is too smart. Too interested in real-world topics. He was meant to make news, not report on it. But for 3-4 years there, he did more than dabble in sports journalism, and we all had a splendid time. David may be as fondly remembered by […]

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I freelanced a story for the Deseret News (of Salt Lake City) out of Game 2 of the Lakers-Jazz series on Wednesday night. I’ve written for other newspapers hundreds of times. No exaggeration. But this might have been the first time that I wrote about a team that was playing against a hometown team. It […]

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Dan Hawkins was as bright as anyone I ever worked with. As witty and amusing, too. A guy ready to laugh, someone who was conversant in a myriad of subjects and expert in more than a few. He was the resident NASA expert, even when he was working in sports, and when the space shuttle […]

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Anyone who has run a sports department knows the importance of clerks. Better to lose a beat writer than your ace agate clerk. Who may be all of 19 years old. You can put out a section with a wire baseball story. You can find a dozen competent people eager to cover baseball. But you […]

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Looking into the crystal ball, here, and I see a lot of clouds around horse racing’s future. I can see this sport being marginalized, like greyhound racing. Perhaps even criminalized, like cock-fighting. Any sport that involves animals that haven’t signed a legal waiver or given verbal consent before an attorney … is in big trouble. […]

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Apparently, the L.A. News Group newspapers still are struggling to publish. This is Day 2 and it may be next week — Day 6 or 7, that is — before LANG’s overworked and underpowered (and shared) Unisys computer system comes up. (See techie updates over at the Reporter-G blog.) A former LANG layout editor told […]

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