Probably not. But at least they are in there with a chance.

Dodgers fans have been waiting for a World Series championship since 1988, when Orel Hershiser and Kirk Gibson led them to glory.

The notion that winning the National League West would translate to World Series victory … well, that has not quite worked out: The Dodgers won the division in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, and only one of those teams got to what Tommy Lasorda always insisted was “the Fall Classic”.

So the fact that the Dodgers have run that NL West mastery to six straight seasons, well, it doesn’t have Dodgers fans planning victory parades. The club may be the best in the NL West, but their inability to seal the deal has led to a sense that they lack that something special to carry them to the top.

Can they overcome that?

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The last time someone other than Mike Scioscia was manager of the Angels … it was another decade. Another century.

Heck, it was another millennium.

Lots of Angels fans have no memory of the club without Scioscia. And may not even know Scioscia was a key player for two Dodgers World Series championships, in 1981 and 1988.

Scioscia led the Angels from the 2000 season through 2018, which is 19 seasons. Which also made him a pretty special character for a franchise mostly known, before his long tenure, for short-termism and mediocrity.

Under Scioscia, the Angels reached the playoffs seven times and won the World Series in 2002. Before him, the club gained the playoffs three times in 41 seasons and never got past the first round.

He was pushed out as Angels manager two days ago, after the club finished 80-82 this season, its third successive losing campaign — despite having mega-star Mike Trout, in his prime, on the roster.

The trouble with the club, in recent years, was not Mike Scioscia. It was the fact that management surrounded Trout with not much of anything beyond has-beens and never-weres, and was not in the habit of producing its own stars. Something has to change when a team is losing and, usually, in baseball, it is the manager.

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Too soon. It was way too soon.

After completing a three-game sweep of the Colorado Rockies eight days ago, outfielder Yasiel Puig predicted the Dodgers would win the National League West for a sixth consecutive season and a prominent Los Angeles columnist wrote: “It’s over” — that the Dodgers had their mojo back and would win the division.

Doesn’t everyone remember what Yogi Berra said? “It ain’t over till it’s over.” And it certainly was not over on September 20.

Call me superstitious, but I was struck by the bravado/foolishness of th Puig/journalist predictions, and seven games later the Dodgers’ “enormous” NL West lead of 2.5 games had dissolved under a seven-game Rockies win streak.

And now the Dodgers now may be scratching to get into the playoffs as a wild card.

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France is the biggest country in western Europe, in terms of area, which is nothing to sneeze at, considering it is nearly as big as Texas.

A person can visit here many times, or live here for a year or two, without getting around to setting foot in even half the country’s wide array of climates, accents, regional cuisines, housing styles …

So it is interesting to be in the Loire, because it bears little resemblance to our home in the Herault/Languedoc … and even less of a resemblance to the megalopolis that is greater Paris.

Some key factors:

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And another mascot bites the dust.

The Forty-Niner mascot sometimes known as Prospector Pete was 86’d yesterday by the president of the California university most commonly known as Long Beach State.

Activists from the school’s faculty and student body had agitated for the ousting of the Forty-Niner mascot on the grounds of genocide perpetrated on Native Americans living in California during and after the 1848-54 California gold rush — which brought something like 300,000 Americans to the state in a half-dozen years.

(Long Beach State was founded in 1949, so as a mascot … of course, the Forty-Niner! Or so went the thinking, 70 years ago.)

One might think earlier interlopers into California from Spain and Mexico contributed more to the high mortality rates experienced by American Indians. By 1846, Spain or its successor state, Mexico, had been having their way in California for most of a century.

But more than a few historians believe that California’s Indians didn’t really reach a crisis until the arrival of the Forty-Niners, whose herd animals unsettled the natives’ ecosystem, and whose Old World diseases spread quickly and often proved fatal to the indigenous population.

What happens next?

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The inspiration for this comes from a dictionary.com gallery of “the saddest phrases in the English language”.

It ranges from single words (heartbroken, lonely, melancholy) to actual phrases (time for bed, if only, back to school).

It struck me that we might be able to put together a saddest list that would resonate with journalists.

Here are 10.

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One of the sops thrown out at print journalism reporters at the dawn of the digital age was this one:

“You can write as long as you want!”

That was supposed to allay the fears of reporters and other writers who were alarmed at the shrinking newspaper. The print product. Less space all the time, fewer column inches to tell a story.

What we called “news hole” has been shrinking for decades, after peaking some time in the 1990s, at most newspapers. In the span of a decade we went from Sunday-morning newspapers the family dog could not hope to fetch … to miniaturized, thin, narrow and incomplete products.

The original response to the shift to the online was … write a terse news story and do it in 10 or 12 inches. That little thing will appear in the shriveled print product … and then the reporter can go back to writing as much as he or she wanted — and the complete/expanded version would be posted online.

That was how it was supposed to work. How it could work.

However, like so many aspects of electronic journalism, it wasn’t true. Or accurate. And as the years go by, it becomes less true all the time — as consumers increasingly prefer short-short-short stories on the tiny format of smart phones for consuming their news.

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The bells rang on the hour, as they always do, here in “our” French village.

And then a few minutes later the bells at the 300-year-old church rang out again, and this was a gusher of clanging and banging that could mean only one thing at 4 p.m. on a Saturday:

A wedding!

And the little town of 600 or so people enjoyed a bit of renewal, celebrating en masse as a daughter of the village came back from America to celebrate her new life on the other side of the ocean.

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The Rams offense this summer did something that has never happened in National Football League history:

Ten of their 11 starters on offense did not play a single minute of preseason football, according to The Orange County Register.

Players have been complaining for years about the four-game exhibition season, and so have some coaches. And fans, too — exhibition games are included in season-ticket packages, and the preseason usually is played by guys who are not going to make the team.

But the main reason for keeping starters out of harm’s way?

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We tried for six years to get a reservation at Tickets, the well-known (and Michelin-starred) Barcelona tapas restaurant based on molecular gastronomy.

We have tended to stay in the Barcelona neighborhood named Poble Sec, where Tickets is located, and when we discovered that … the building seemed to sort of taunt us whenever we walked past, on our way to or from the Placa Catalonia. Never able to get reservations — which are opened up two months ahead of each day, and filled before the day has ended.

What is Tickets?

In simplest terms, it involves small bits of food that do not look like what they taste like. (In the photo, above, that round piece of cheese? Actually cheesecake.)

It involves lots and lots of small dishes — bites, really — with exotic ingredients and perfect presentation.

It also involves the biggest staff I have seen at a not-enormous restaurant. There were at least 20 in the dining room, maybe 25, including a sommelier. For about 30 patrons.

To make a first visit to Tickets without doing some research … is to be completely bamboozled. As I was.

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