Dodgers Diaries

The Dodgers today announced the Andre Ethier was named a finalist for the 2012 Hank Aaron Award, given to the outstanding hitter in each league. Matt Kemp won the award in 2011.

At first glance, the news is a shocker. Ethier, with his .284 average (and even more pitiful .222 vs. lefties) paltry 20 homers is a finalist for this coveted award? It's not until you read down a few paragraphs that you learn every team gets to submit a finalist. Even the Astros. So Jose Altuve, come on down. You are the least worst player on the Astros!

Ethier was no Jose Altuve, although the 22-year-old second baseman did compile a slightly higher average (.290). But to realize Ethier was the best hitter on the 2012 Dodgers is to understand why the team failed to make the playoffs. When Matt Kemp got hurt, the Dodgers fielded a middle-of-the-lineup that often featured hitters nomore imposing than Ethier, Jerry Hairston and Bobby Abreu. In that regard, Ethier was the least worst Dodger of the first half of 2012.

I suspect the competition for best Dodger hitter of 2013 will be a little more interesting with full seasons from Hanley Ramirez and Adrian Gonzalez. It’s too bad the 2012 team didn’t get them in time for them to make more of a difference.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

... and walls and windows and doors, as they came out to volunteer with my local chapter of Habitat for Humanity. And not ex-Dodgers like Ken Landreaux and Lou Johnson, or part-time players like Justin Sellers or Tony Gwynn Jr. I'm talking All-Star Dodgers, recognizable by people who don’t even follow baseball. I'm talking 2011 Cy Young Award Winner Clayton Kershaw and his wife, and 2011 shoulda-been MVP Matt Kemp. Kemp and I spent some time taking sledgehammers to walls (the walls lost) as we tore down a garage to make room for another house for a poor hard-working family.

The all-stars were there for more than a photo op, hanging around and helping us get work done long after a cynic would have said they could have gotten back on the bus. Kershaw in particular, lingered for a while (he isn't scheduled to pitch tonight). Kemp wielded the sledgehammer with ease, but didn’t labor so long that anyone needs to worry about him wrecking his swing. Somebody asked him that question, in fact. His answer: “Don’t worry, I work out."

Josh Lindblom, who also came out the last time the Dodgers helped out at Habitat, was there today as well, and brought his wife Aurielle with him. Jill Painter, the LA Daily News columnist, told me the two of them volunteer all the time, even when the cameras aren't there. That makes him my new favorite Dodger. Sorry, Jerry Hairston. :-)

Maury Wills helped me remove a window, and my outstanding crew of Bank of America volunteers helped us tear the roof off the garage.

Photos by Jon Soohoo

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

Before Gilligan's Island became popular, the opening theme song neglected to mention "the Professor and Mary Ann," relegating them to the catchall "and the rest," following "the movie star."

The theme song for the Dodgers 2012 offense might have to be written the same way. The headliners are impressive: Matt Kemp (the league’s most valuable player in 2011, even if the Baseball Writers didn’t see fit to give him the award because of the team he played for), and Andre Ethier, an All-Star and gold glover whose 2011 season was curtailed by injury.

After that, however, the Professor and Mary Ann might be better options, even at their advanced ages of 87 and 74 respectively. Kemp and Ethier have combined to hit 11 homers, drive in 18 runs apiece, and OPS a ridiculous 1.432 and 1.044 respectively. Those gaudy numbers have earned Kemp Player of the Week honors for the first two weeks of the season.

The offense tails off after the middle of the order, however. More like swan dives. "The Rest" collectively have just one home run (AJ Ellis) and 23 RBIS. Not counting pitchers, the other Dodger position players are bating .223, slugging .355, and OPSing .668.

Or, pretty much what I expected when this season started: Kemp would carry the offense, just like he did last year, and the Dodgers would be better than .500 if Ethier returned to form, and worse if he didn’t. The fact that they are 10-3 can be attributed to some lousy April opponents, and to Ethier and Kemp hitting the cover off the ball.

Projected over a full season, each man would have 224 RBIs. Kemp would have 87 homers, Ethier 50. Kemp's batting average of .451 would shatter this single season record of .439 set by Hugh Duffy of the Boston Beaneaters in 1894. Ethier would hit 62 doubles, more than any man since Paul Waner in 1932.

In other words, it can't go on like this forever. The heart of the Dodger order isn't going to stop beating, but it can’t keep hyperventilating like this for a full season. When Kemp and Ethier come back to earth, so will the Dodgers. Unless one of The Rest work their way into the credits.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

If Ryan Braun's use of performance enhancing drugs is confirmed, I don't have a problem taking the award away from him. If this news had been revealed before the end of the regular season when ballots are due, Braun wouldn't have placed in the top five, and Matt Kemp would have won the award in a landslide. So what's the difference?

I'm also in favor of vacating all awards for any player who admitted use of PEDs, was convicted of taking them, or , was dumb enough to have had his name appear in the Mitchell Report. That includes Bonds, Clemens, Ken Caminiti, A-Rod, Manny and FP Santangelo. But I don't think rewriting the history books will get a lot of traction, especially since PEDs weren't against baseball's rules during that period.

The Braun situation is different. This was steroid use discovered in the midst of the season in which the player put up MVP numbers, and revealed less than a month after the vote was revealed.

Even though the MVP vote is supposedly taken before the playoffs. Which in and of itself is a stupid requirement. If, as some have said, the MVP has to come from a contender (because how valuable can a player be if his team finishes out of the race?) then why not consider the players' contributions in the playoffs as well? If the vote is supposed to take into account such intangibles as value, clutchiness, grit, and leadership, there could hardly be a better time to discern it than October.

For that matter, if we're talking about value, shouldn't we compare prices, too? To me, the most valuable player is the one who makes the most contributions toward winning a game at the lowest price. If that's the measure, Braun would have won easily because his 2011 salary was so low: just $4 million, or a little more than half of what Kemp earned.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

Matt Kemp won a 2011 Silver Slugger Award on Wednesday, to go along with the Gold Glove he captured Tuesday and the Hank Aaron Award he won last week. He's the first Dodger to win gold and silver in the same year more than once (he did it in 2009 as well).

Gold Glove, Silver Slugger, what's next for baseball's best offensive five tool player? The Platinum Arm? Bronze Winged-Feet? Diamond batting eye?

I'm sure the Baseball Writers Association of America can think of something. Hint hint.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

Is the bloom starting to come off Logan White's rose? I’ve long hoped the maestro of scouting would replace Ned Colletti as Dodgers GM, but as can't-miss prospect after prospect has regressed (see Martin, Russell, or Loney, James), you have to reconsider White’s supposed brilliance at spotting talent. Here's his hit list from the Dodgers' official bio:

Tony Abreu
Chad Billingsley
Jonathan Broxton
Blake DeWitt
Scott Elbert
A.J. Ellis
Chin-lung Hu
Eric Hull
Kenley Jansen
Matt Kemp
Clayton Kershaw
Andy LaRoche
Brent Leach
James Loney
Russell Martin
James McDonald
Russ Mitchell
Xavier Paul
Eric Stults
Ramon Troncoso
Cory Wade
Delwyn Young

There's no doubting that Kershaw and Kemp were A+ signings, Billingsley an A-, and the book is still out on Jansen, Elbert, and even Broxton (I won't blame Logan for injuries). But the others have all turned out to be mediocre players with occasional flashes of brilliance. Aside from the Carlos Santana deal for Casey Blake, Ned has gotten credit for not trading away any top-flight prospects. But that may have less to do with his own acumen and more to do with the fact that the Dodgers don’t really have any top-flight prospects.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

I had a dream last night that baseball’s regular season had already come to an end. The Giants had made the playoffs and had Tim Lincecum on the mound in Game 1 of the NLDS. I don’t recall who his opponent was, but the Dodgers, mercifully, had long since put out of their misery.

I woke up with a start, not because I was so upset about the Dodgers' failure to reach postseason -- I came to grips with that in spring training when I saw Juan Uribe’s swing. My distress was provoked by the thought of another summer flying by without delivering on its eternal promise of endless barbecues, watermelon on the back porch, sunny days at the beach and lazy afternoons at Dodger Stadium.

When I woke, of course, it was still July, with plenty of warm summer days still to look forward to on the calendar. Today promises to be one of the finest, pleasant enough to do just about anything in shorts and flipflops. Compared to last year, when May Gray and June Gloom stretched on right through September and October, summer 2011 is already an improvement.

If only the Dodgers would cooperate even just a tiny bit. I dutifully watch the games, but only until they fall behind by two runs. At that point, it’s simply too infuriating to watch this team squander runners in scoring position. Even MVP candidate Matt Kemp seems to be plagued by the Dodgers’ malaise. After outrunning a fly ball off the bat of Andres Torres, he came up with runners on first and third and one out, hit the ball hard, but still managed to ground into an inning-ending double play.

The Dodgers are slated to play an afternoon game against the Giants on Wednesday, with Lincecum taking on Clayton Kershaw. The forecast is for another ho-hum gorgeous day here in Southern California. In more promising years, I’d be tempted to play hooky and go to the game in person. But I was almost relieved to remember that the game is in San Francisco.

If I play hooky, it won’t be to watch the game on TV, but because the summer of 2010 taught me not to take beautiful summer days for granted. No matter what I end up doing, I’ll bring a radio along, just for the joy of listening to Vin’s ebullience at the premier pitching matchup and baseball in sunshine at the best park in the country. And I’ll hope that in retrospect, the 2011 Dodgers will one day help me appreciate something as ordinary as a .500 season.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

The Dodgers are featuring six bobblehead giveaways this season, and half of the figures (manager Don Mattingly, broadcaster Fernando Valenzuela and the late Hall of Famer Duke Snider) feature players whose careers ended more than a decade ago. A fourth, Hong-Chih Kuo, scheduled for 6/14, may never play baseball again after two Frank Jobe surgeries and a serious bout of the yips.

That leaves Clayton Kershaw (Tuesday night, above) and Andre Ethier (July 7), two of the only bright spots on the 2011 roster. Matt Kemp should be the third head on this triumvirate of Knights who say “Ni,” but he’s been featured on bobbleheads the past two years. No Dodger has been featured more than twice.

To that, I say, why not? How about an annual Matt Kemp bobblehead for as long as he’s a fixture in the Dodger lineup? Ditto for Ethier and the Claw, and Chad Billingsley too, who’s never been bobbleheaded. Joe Beimel, sure, but not Chad Billingsley!

It was less than a year ago that I thought the two bobbleheads I had so far collected might be the core of a strong Dodger lineup some day. Now, Russell Martin is a Yankee and Jonathan Broxton is a head case. Maybe I’ll see what that Beimel doll is fetching on eBay.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

Because I don’t follow basketball with any care, I usually look forward to the day the Lakers are eliminated from the NBA playoffs. It’s not just that I find this particular group of Lakers distasteful, and can’t wait until the spotlight stops shining on them. It’s also because their exploits always tend to overshadow the interesting stories taking root in the spring at Chavez Ravine.

This year, however, I'm not so sure I'd like more media scrutiny of the Dodgers. This is a team that wasn't expected to go very far, and so far, they’ve barely lived up to that expectation. Clayton Kershaw and Chad Billingsley have delivered some fine performances, but the bullpen has been one of the worst in baseball. Andre Ethier and Matt Kemp are both OPS-ing over .950, but it feels like they're the only Dodgers who can hit. Even Ethier's 30-game hitting streak came to an end before the Lakers’ ignominious exit. The team lead in home runs belongs to Rod Barajas, he of the .216 batting average.

More sportswriters focusing on the Dodgers will only expose how horrendous the past 11 months of James Loney’s career have been. More broadcasters following the team will only shine the spotlight even more brightly on Jonathan Broxton's inabilities as closer. More talk on sports radio will only amplify the swing-hard-three-times-in-case-you-hit-it tendencies of Juan Uribe and Marcus Thames. Worst of all, more media attention on this team will undoubtedly focus on the travails of their duplicitous owner, Frank McCourt, who has overstayed his welcome a lot longer than Ron Artest has.

For now, I will content myself with the fact that the Lakers’ classless exit with dominate headlines and highlight shows for at least another week. And the dismantling of this team after the 4-0 sweep by Dallas is sure to keep the purple and gold in the limelight at least until LeBron and D-Wade waltz to the championship they assigned to themselves nearly a year ago.

But then it’ll be all Dodgers all the time. And the only team that will be good for is the Angels.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

Call me a cynic, but Sunday’s comeback win over the Rockies doesn’t prove to me that the Dodgers aren’t quitters. It proves that baseball is a funny game where the better team doesn’t always win.

As for these Dodgers, it’s not so much the players who quit as the management team around them. Over the 2009-10 winter, the front office quit on the team by failing to sign players to replace the departing Orlando Hudson and Randy Wolf, both of whom left without even a draft pick in return. Hudson was the offensive sparkplug for the 2009 team, hitting for the cycle in his Dodger Stadium opener. He hit a surprising .283 and OPSed .774, better even than the $10 million man Rafael Furcal at short. Wolf led the team in starts and innings pitched, but the Dodgers thought it was a career year and let him go.

Jon Garland put up serviceable numbers in his short career with the Dodgers, but they let him go as well.

As the trading deadline loomed, management again quit on the Dodgers, failing to acquire the kind of players who would make the team better. Off went Cliff Lee. For the third time in two years, no less. Off went Roy Oswalt. Ted Lilly came west, but only at the price of weak-hitting Ryan theriot. Octavio Dotel was another drain on the farm system that didn’t seem to indicate any immediate upside.

By the time the non-waiver deadline approached, the Dodgers were barely in contention, but kept trying to have it both ways. They wanted to unload Manny Ramirez and his hefty contract. But instead of simply dealing him, they waited until the last minute to see if the team would magically re-enter the pennant race. Still, they refused to play Manny for fear that he might get hurt and ruin the deal worked out with the White Sox.

Finally, Joe Torre quit on the team, announcing last week that he would not return in 2011. He also revealed that he had made his successor, Don Mattingly, a contractual part of his deal with the team when Torre signed in 2008. There never was, and never would be any discussion about who would follow Torre, because it was even more in writing than the name of the McCourt who owned the team.

Torre clearly had to know his mind before September 15. The timing of his announcement, however, followed the remarks by former Dodger owner Peter O’Malley, who said the McCourts had disgraced the proud Dodger franchise. You know, the one the O’Malleys sold to those fine citizens, the Fox broadcasting company. Still, the PR hit left a mark, one that could only be erased by a new news cycle in which Grandpa Torre passes on the family farm to Little Don.

Does the Jackie Robinson signing automatically exempt the Dodgers from having to do anything on behalf of minorities ever again? The team had to scramble to find an African-American player to introduce Rachel Robinson in 2006 and 2007. The 25-man roster in 2010 has had no more than four black players at a time: Matt Kemp, James Loney, and Russell Martin, with Kenley Jansen, replacing Garret Anderson when the latter proved no better a hitter than the former.

The 2010 Dodger season was over before it even began. There were flashes of above-average play, but nothing inspired other than an early season stretch where the team averaged six runs a game. Their fielding was sloppy, the pitching was uneven, and players could not stay off the disabled list. They looked like an older, duller version of the 2009 team that started out so strong and merely hung on to win the division.

The 2011 team looks to be just as awful. There will be no budget for free agent signings, and no farm system to raid for dividends that pay sooner. Mattingly may wish he had taken the opportunity to learn in the minor leagues under Tim Wallach while the team struggles through the horrible McCourt divorce. It’s going to be a long run and the temptation to quit will be just as great.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

People are talking about trading away Matt Kemp. I say that’s crazy.

After his breakout 2009, everyone in Dodgertown expected his progress to be linear, and that he would continue getting better every year. Instead, he has taken a step back this year, with numbers not quite up to his 2008 performance. His average and OBP are 30 points lower; on the flip side, he already has as many homers as he did in all of 2008.

His L/R splits are showing a guy that is significantly worse against RHP. Maybe he's a platoon player after all. He and Pods can split center field. Or maybe there's a weak-hitting weak-armed left-handed CF in the White Sox organization who can share time with him.

But even if 2009 is as good as he gets, Kemp is worth holding onto. A Gold Glove and Silver Slugger aren't too bad for your starting CF.

If you didn't like the idea of trading Kemp in 2008 because of his endless upside, I'd say you shouldn't trade him in 2010 either. He's still just 25 years old. He may not ever be Ken Griffey Jr., but he will contribute for a long time if you let him.

Kemp’s 2010 reminds me a lot of Vernon Wells’ 2005. Wells was a 26-year-old centerfielder coming off a Gold Glove season. His power numbers remained strong, but his average dropped to .269 and his OPS fell to .783.

The following year, Wells rebounded with an All-Star season: 32 HR, 106 RBIs and an OPS of .899. It was a walk year, which is what 2011 will be for Kemp. Perhaps the guaranteed two-year deal Kemp signed this year is what’s holding him back. But I wouldn’t give up on him yet. He’s still 25 and won’t be making Vernon Wells kind of money for a while.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

It’s time to add another entry to the best games of Vicente Padilla’s career .

Wednesday night’s shutout of the Padres may be the best of all. Like the others, he gave up two hits. Unlike the others, Joe Torre actually left him in the game to finish the job. When the Dodgers tallied five times in the bottom of the 8th to put the game out of reach, you could smell Torre wondering whether he should bring in Travis Schlichting or Elmer Dessens to close out the ninth. Instead, he let Nicaragua’s second-greatest pitcher finish his 105-pitch outing and saved the bullpen for Thursday’s finale.

It may all be too little too late for the Dodgers. But there are still 54 games to go. The Dodgers will have to win at least 35 of those games, and probably 40. But if the starting pitchers continue to put on performances like they’ve been doing since the All-Star Break, they have a chance.

Nice to see Andre Ethier wake up with a big game: Two doubles and a homer. With Matt Kemp taking a step back in his development, Furcal hurt, Martin possibly out for the season, Blake struggling, and Manny Ramirez returning who knows when, Ethier will have to carry the team offensively. James Loney will have to help.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL