I can’t adequately explain how this happened. A couple of months ago, we finalized a commitment to an 18-day trip to and through Spain and Portugal. Not a crazy idea, considering we are already close to the former, which is attached to the latter. Also, not crazy considering that 1) we have spent little time […]

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I woke at 5 a.m., in Portugal, and instead of the Dodgers and Astros being done for the evening, back there in Central Daylight Time USA, the teams were tied at 12-12 going into the top of the 10th. Perfect timing for my mental energy — explained and celebrated in yesterday’s post — to push […]

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“Juju” is a noun with two definitions, according to Merriam-Webster. 1: a fetish, charm, or amulet of West African peoples 2: the magic attributed to or associated with juju I do not have a fetish, charm or amulet, but like many sports fans, I have a sneaking feeling that I can influence, by my attentions […]

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The Dodgers can’t have expected Yu Darvish to throttle the Houston Astros in Game 3 of the World Series. Well, maybe they did, given his solid performances in his first two outings of the postseason. But Yu has been fairly consistently inconsistent for the past two seasons — or since returning from more than a […]

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In 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were “saving” baseball by pursuing the 37-year-old record for home runs in a season, set by Roger Maris, the sports apparel company Nike came up with an ad campaign based on one sentence: “Chicks dig the long ball.” (Video of that spot, which actually features pitchers Mike […]

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Baseball and beards have become inseparable. Or so it seems. Somebody on just about every Major League Baseball team sports a Civil War-style beard. Six inches or more of facial hair flapping in the breeze. Perhaps the greatest postseason collision of mega-beards occurred in Game 1 of the 2017 World Series tonight, when Los Angeles […]

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The Dodgers will play in a World Series. That was harder than we thought it would be. From 1941 through 1988, the Dodgers were National League champions 16 times in 48 seasons. On average, they were in the World Series every third year, during that era, when they also won the World Series six times. […]

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The New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers. One of the great rivalries in baseball. To me, it remains the greatest, and only in part because these teams have met in a World Series 11 times, by far the most championship matchups in baseball history. With a 12th Fall Classic pitting them now suddenly […]

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As recently as the winter of 2013-14, Justin Turner was out of baseball. For the second time. A seventh-round draft pick by the Cincinnati Reds in 2006, out of Lakewood Mayfair High School, Turner had not demonstrated he could hit successfully at the major-league level. At best it looked as if he might be a […]

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This is where the general Southern California-oriented blogger writes about the Los Angeles Dodgers, what with the club opening the National League Championship Series at home tomorrow versus the Chicago Cubs. I’ve been thinking about this for a few days, and I’ve got only one contribution to make to the discussion:

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