Dodgers Diaries

Two of my favorite interests collided Wednesday as the Dodgers Community Caravan came to Lynwood to help refurbish a home with Habitat for Humanity. As a regular volunteer with Habitat, I was on hand to lend instruction to the players.

Jerry Hairston Jr. was eager to use power tools, so I handed him the circular saw and let him cut through the stucco so we could install a new window. He's planning to build his own home in Arizona, and just might do some of the work himself now that he knows how to install windows.

James Loney, Javy Guerra and Josh Lindblom got into the swing of things, by taking a few whacks at some stubborn concrete with a sledgehammer. I wouldn't say they were in mid-season form, but it's only February.

Former Dodger Ken Landreaux diligently attacked a stubborn 800-pound tree stump, refusing to leave until we got it out of the ground. Maury Wills, Fernando Valenzuela, Derrel Thomas, Bobby Castillo and Sweet Lou Johnson helped paint the eaves under the roof.

Needless to say, the kids from St. Paul High School, not to mention the family that's receiving the house, were thrilled. In baseball, as in life, there's no place like home.

Jerry Hairston Jr. photo by Jon Soohoo

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

Perhaps it’s only appropriate that the Dodgers commemorate Andre Ethier bobblehad night by featuring the team’s leading hitter in those horrible throwback pajama uniforms. The Dodgers' offensive ineptitude is enough to put all of their fans to sleep, and having your pajamas already on saves valuable time during the postgame show you don’t want to watch.

Ned Colletti would like to blame the team’s offensive woes on injuries. "I don't ever like to use injuries as an excuse, but if you have Furcal and Casey Blake back in, left field becomes less obvious," Colletti said Monday night.

Seriously? Injuries? Jamey Carroll has been more productive than Rafael Furcal ever was at shortstop except maybe for that short stint in 2008 when he was on fire. Aaron Miles hasn’t hit a home run since 2008 (I blame Barack Obama for this), but his .291 average is hardly the reason the Dodgers can’t score runs. OK, maybe his .308 OBP is. But he’s been an adequate replacement for Casey Blake.

No, Ned, the problem with the Dodgers’ offense is the players who AREN’T injured. James Loney, who’s slugging .270. Juan Uribe, who has grounded into double plays more often than hitting a home run. And Gwybbomesands, the revolving door of left fielders, none of whom is hitting above .224.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

How does the Dodger offense stink? Let me count the ways

The Dodgers are 5th in the NL in hits, but they have more singles than a Canoga Park strip joint.

Lionel Richie has more hits.

The only offensive category in which they lead the league is getting hit by pitches.

TV censors have never flagged them for doing anything offensive.

Chad Billingsley has the fifth-highest OPS on the team.

Catholic schools send people home more often.

Casey Blake hasn’t played since April 24, yet he’s still fourth on the team in runs scored.

James Loney has gone 18 for his last 56 (.320) to RAISE his batting average to .230.

-- 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

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

Monday night’s game wasn’t lost in the first inning; no game that ends with 15 runs scored and 28 hits is decided that early on. But the Dodgers set the tone for losing by running themselves out of an opportunity to score first.

Matt Kemp and James Loney had singled successively with two outs, and Kemp apparently scored on a third straight hit by Casey Blake. But Loney was thrown out at third before Kemp crossed home plate, negating the run.

Given that Reed Johnson didn't score the tying run against the Angels in the June 23 game where Russell Martin got tagged out at second, you'd think Larry Bowa would have smithed a branding iron that reads "Run Hard All the Way Home" and used it to stamp the backside of every runner rounding third base.

Or maybe he did make such a branding iron, but it rusted from lack of use.

Or maybe Dodger runners keep failing to score on third-out plays because they have to stop and ask directions to home plate.

It looks to me like the players have given up on this season. I know I won’t be spending any money to visit the Stadium unless I see a dramatic turnaround in the next few weeks.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

Sunday was Blogger Night at Dodger Stadium, a now annual occasion on which the Dodgers thank their loyal followers (myself included) for writing so diligently about the team’s exploits. I and about a dozen other bloggers had the opportunity to see the game from the corporate level, and also to interview GM Ned Colletti.

Colletti said he doesn’t read any of the blogs or any of the newspaper coverage of the team. “If I have to learn about my team from media accounts, I’m not doing my job,” he said. But he spent close to an hour taking our questions on subjects ranging from future Dodgers to Matt Kemp’s recent woes to the pleasant surprise that has been John Ely. There were no earth-shaking revelations in his comments; perhaps the most revealing part of the evening was when he refused to answer a question about whether beleaguered George Sherrill might accept a minor league assignment to work on his mechanics.

Colletti said a starting pitcher is still the team’s top priority going into the trading deadline, though a reliever is probably more likely. He’s disappointed in the team’s play so far, especially the slow start. But he’s optimistic that the Dodgers can catch the Padres. He’s still concerned that Russell Martin has stagnated in his development: “He plays the toughest position, and if one part of his game is off, it affects the others,” Colletti said.

The GM is still high on Blake DeWitt. “He’s never going to win a gold glove or a silver slugger award,” said Colletti, but he likes DeWitt’s character and his approach to the game.

Colletti also said he was wary about Vicente Padilla, but was willing to give him a chance. One slip-up and he would cut the Nicaraguan without giving him a second look. Padilla promised not to be a bad egg, and so far has not been one. “He’s one of the hardest workers on the team,” said Colletti. After the 2009 campaign, he decided to re-sign Padilla. “After hunting season,” he said, to laughs.

The game itself was less memorable. John Ely got hit. Not hard, but often. The Marlins scored two runs on four successive singles in the third, and chased Ely when opposing pitcher Nate Robertson drove in another run with a hard single up the middle. The Dodgers rallied back, narrowing the gap to 6-4 on a Rafael Furcal homer, and then closing within a run when James Loney drove in Andre Ethier with a double. But they just couldn’t dig out of the hole Ely had created.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

I’ve been to two Dodger games this year, and the team has lost both of them. But Sunday’s was so much more satisfying than the April 17 9-0 loss to Lincecum and the dreaded Giants. In that game, Charlie Haeger pitched in and out of trouble all afternoon, surrendering 7 runs in 3 innings, and was emblematic of all that plagued the Dodgers’ pitching staff. The defense was lousy, and the Furcal-less, Manny-less, Blake-less offense was inept, mustering just seven singles and a double, and not getting a runner to third base until the ninth inning.

Sunday’s game, but contrast, was more of a near miss. The Tigers jumped out to a 3-0 lead, courtesy of a Miguel Cabrera rocket off starter Hiroki Kuroda. But the Tigers scored in the first inning of the two previous games, only to go silent for the next five or six innings thereafter. And Sunday was no exception. Kuroda shut down the potent Detroit offense through the sixth, and would have pitched into the seventh had his spot not come up with the bases loaded and two outs in the bottom of the sixth.

Manny Ramirez, hitting for Kuroda, grounded out weakly, though in his defense, his meager grounder was in the direction of Mannywood, even if it didn’t get out of the infield. In the tall tale of Manny being Manny, they’ll probably omit this deflating moment. That episode too was symbolic of this game. The Dodgers had many chances to win it, but kept coming up short. Mostly, they lost because they kept hitting the ball right at Tigers’ starter Rick Porcello, who will take his black and blue marks as long as they gave him the victory.

Porcello snared a Matt Kemp line drive in the first and turned it into a double play. An inch to the left or right and the ball goes through the middle for a run-scoring single. In the 4th, James Loney hit Porcello with another grounder, but the pitcher fielded it in time to get Kemp at second, and almost turned another double play. If that ball gets by Porcello, a run scores and there’s one out with men on firs and second instead of two gone and runners on the corners.

In the 8th, Ronnie Belliard hit into a double play subbing for Blake DeWitt, who made a nifty play in short right field, and Russell Martin hit into a tough ground out double play to end he game in the ninth. If the team had been scuffling all week, we’d point to this as another example of its ineptitude. But because they’ve been playing so well, I’m happy to chalk it up to the way the ball bounces over a long season.

The other constant in both games has been Garret Anderson starts in left field. Correlation with losing? You be the judge.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

With their second straight victory over the Tigers, and their 16th in the past 20 games, the Dodgers are finally playing the way we all thought they could. Maybe even better than they could. During their nine-game win streak May 9-18), starting pitchers took the victory eight times, the lone exception being Jeff Weaver’s opportune entrance into the May 14 game against San Diego right before Matt Kemp hit a two-run homer.

That masked a mediocre performance by Ramon Ortiz, the fifth starter and lone weak spot in the rotation now that John Ely has solidified his hold on the No. 4 spot. Ely was his usual self again Saturday, mixing pitches and speeds to baffle the Detroit lineup for six-plus innings. His streak of 89 batters without a walk ended in the first inning, when he gave up two runs. He scattered hits over the next five innings without giving up another walk or a run to keep the Dodgers in the game, and the offense was up to the task, scoring their usual six runs.

In Andre Ethier’s absence, the load has been shouldered by a variety of players. Saturday, it was Casey Blake with three hits and a standout defensive play to help Jonathan Broxton preserve the lead, James Loney with two hits, Matt Kemp with his first homer in over a week, and Blake Dewitt with a two-RBI triple. We don’t hear much about Ronnie Belliard taking over at 2B these days, as Dewitt has quietly done a good job. Still no homers, but a .359 OBP is impressive enough from a guy who still hasn’t celebrated his 25th birthday.

With an off day Monday, the Dodgers don’t have to worry about a fifth starter until Saturday, May 29 at Colorado. I’d love to see Carlos Monasterios get another shot. He might not give you six innings, the way the rest of the rotation has been doing of late. But if he can go four or even five, the bullpen has been getting plenty of rest, and should be able to carry things the rest of the way.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

Included on the list of players who will accompany the Dodgers on their March 10 trip to Taiwan is Ronnie Belliard. Yes, the same Ronnie Belliard who showed up to camp a couple of pounds over the 209 his contract requires. It’s a pretty lenient contract, however. All he has to do is be 209 or under at any point during spring training. A long flight across the Pacific might be enough to dehydrate the last two pounds out of him.

Others on the Taiwan excursion include James Loney, Manny Ramirez (the optimist says it’s so the Dodgers can keep an eye on him; the pessimist says it’s so he can restock his supply of performance-enhancing herbs), Eric Stults, Xavier Paul, Lucas May, and of course Taiwan natives Chin Lung Hu and Hong Chih Kuo.

On a separate note, Dodger Stadium looked a little bedraggled on Sunday for the college tournament. The signs on the outfield wall looked like they hadn’t been changed since October; there was still a “Postseason on TBS” banner in centerfield.

-- JOHN ROSENTHAL

If you made a movie about Thursday’s events, nobody would believe it. Down to their last strike in the bottom of the ninth, the comeback kid Dodgers get new life when Matt Holliday, a pretty good outfielder, can’t corral the third out. It lands for an error, James Loney runs hard all the way to second and the Dodgers are alive.

You know the rest: The walk by Casey Blake that put the winning run on base, and according to all in the Dodger clubhouse, gave the team hope that not only could they tie the game, but win it. The huge hit by the Jekyll and Hyde Ronnie Belliard. I’ve never seen a guy look so bad in some at-bats and so solid in others. Like Thursday’s game-tying single.

Holliday will get all the blame for this game, because his error would have been the final out. But Yadier Molina’s passed ball put the winning run 90 feet away. I have no doubt that Mark Loretta’s bloop would not have scored Blake from second base. But from third, it was a piece of cake. Then again, Loretta might not have batted, since Russell Martin was semi-intentionally walked.

Also deserving of goatee horns is Ryan Franklin, the closer who should've been out of the inning, but never got another out. Two walks and two singles later, he was the recipient of a blown save and a loss.

Only the diehards will remember the stellar pitching performances in this game, by both Adam Wainwright, who was robbed of a win, and Clayton Kershaw, who pitched well enough to merit one. Both youngsters kept piling up zeroes on the scoreboard. Andre Ethier is quietly putting up Manny-esque numbers. It’s only two games, to be sure, but he’s got a single, a double and a homer in seven at-bats, with a sick 1.556 OPS. He’s also making people forget that Manny has done quite little so far. Everybody goes into slumps, but when you hit like Ramirez did last year, fans come to expect it every year.

Put another way, when you’re as antic a player as Manny is, you had better put up Manny-esque numbers. Fans will only let Manny be Manny as long as he delivers. If he continues to hit .125, he might even become Juan Pierre’s backup. Naah; it’ll never happen.

--- JOHN ROSENTHAL