This team has “ugly” covered, coming and going.

Not only are the 2008 Dodgers lousy, they’re dull. The worst of both worlds.

The lousy is fairly easy to document. They’re five games under .500 despite playing in the worst division in baseball. They rank among the bottom in baseball in runs, home runs, doubles, saves, shutouts. They don’t do anything well aside, maybe, from hit singles.

They don’t hit for power and they don’t hit in the clutch. Their starting pitching is in tatters. Their bullpen is spotty. Their defense is subpar and will be as long as Jeff Kent is at second, Matt Kemp is in center field and Juan Pierre is anywhere.

Bad, however, can be good. Or at least fun. Or at least interesting. But this Dodgers team doesn’t have even that.

This is a team you just can’t get your arms around. Not that you would want to. A batch of mediocrities, faceless and almost nameless.

If this team were old, we could find some ghoulish pleasure in watching the decline of this or that star. Well, if that star were an interesting person, as opposed to Jeff Kent.

If any of the Dodgers seemed actually to enjoy what they do, or said provocative things or interesting or intelligent things, that could help.

But they have almost none of that.  This is a team of seemingly random, mismatched parts that excites no … excitement. You can’t hate them. You certainly don’t love them. You don’t much have an opinion of any of them. And that is a bad place for any sports team to be.

Some of this is about the back-story of this team. It doesn’t have one.

Many of its players are young, and fans just don’t know them yet. Several of the veterans are hurt, and out of sight (and out of mind), meaning that even more faceless players are signed or brought up from Triple A. (Hello, Angel Berroa.)

Here is a measure of the Dodgers’ plight:

I can’t imagine even Dodgers fans would like to see any Dodger in the All-Star Game.

Here are the eight Dodgers on the ballot: Russell Martin, James Loney, Jeff Kent, Rafael Furcal, Nomar Garciaparra, Andre Ethier, and (gulp) Andruw Jones and Juan Pierre.

None of them are anywhere close to leading the fan voting, and that’s with the Dodgers leading the National League in attendance, again. Nor should any of those players be among top vote-getters. Some are hurt. Some are performing at mediocre levels. None of them are “stars” at this point in time.

It also says something about this team’s fans that “no-shows” seem to be up. Way up. The Dodgers sell scads of season tickets, but thousands of them aren’t used, night after night. Just look around the ballpark. Whoever owned those tracts of empty seats couldn’t manage (or wouldn’t bother) to find someone to take the tickets.

That indicates a team that’s just not engaging the public’s imagination.

What do the Dodgers do about this?

Stick with the kids. We don’t really know them yet, but we could, if the club actually can manage a break from the constant upheaval of the past decade. Leave Martin, Loney, Kemp and Ethier out there. And Billingsley, Broxton and Kershaw, too. Do not trade them. Do not bench them.

I’m not sure any of them, Martin aside, ever will be loved (or even talked about) by fans … but let’s give them a chance.

Stop bringing in surly, jaded mercenaries off the free-agent pile. No more Nomars, or Kents or Andruw Joneses. They cost far too much and deliver far too little — both as players and as concepts.

The Dodgers seem at least vaguely aware they have no star-power — in a market that worships it. That is the only explanation for bringing in Joe Torre as manager. An attempt both sad and ridiculous to imbue some name-recognition on a team starved for it.

So these Dodgers not only aren’t very good, they’re not any fun. Not good enough to cheer, not bad enough to jeer, they sit in that netherworld of limp disinterest.

Barring some miraculous run of over-their-heads achievement, it’s hard to imagine those conditions changing before 2009, at the earliest.