The Dodgers were the first sports team I paid attention to, and I can’t help but follow them … even though that World Series drought is up to 20 years now and the club is owned by Bostonians more interested in the club as a real estate venture than as a successful sports team.

I can’t really say I’m a fan — though I’m allowed to be, again, while I’m out of journalism and don’t have to bother with the pretense of impartiality.

But I digress.

My favorite Dodgers, from the past 50 years.

10. Eric Gagne. I might have ranked him higher, a few years ago, before it became fairly clear he was ‘roided up throughout his three-year run as the best closer in the game. The funky facial hair, the clunky glasses, the high heat, wicked breaking stuff and flail-inducing changeup. “Game over!” indeed.

9. Willie Davis. “Three Dog” was his nickname. Because he wore No. 3 but also because any ball hit between outfielders very likely could be a triple. I remember a sense that he was an underachiever because he didn’t take full advantage of his speed. Never really bunted, etc., which was heresy in the Dodgers organization. But he put up some solid numbers in an era dominated by pitching and was an integral part of the team for a decade. And probably the fastest man in baseball for most of his career.

8. Wes Parker. I loved this guy. So elegant. So classy. Perhaps the greatest fielding first baseman of all time. Not much of a hitter until the final couple years of his career (he drove in 111 runs with only 10 homers, in 1970). But a very effective player. Switch-hitter. I remember being very agitated when he retired — too soon, I thought — after the 1972 season, at age 33.

7. Don Drysdale. The big right-hander always represented to me the essence of the club’s will to win, in the late 1950s and into the middle 1960s. Just a fearsome competitor who feared no one. A guy who would dust off Willie Mays or even plunk him in the ribs. He believed the outer half of the plate belonged to him. Just a horse, as a pitcher, a guy who pitched enormous amounts of innings and always threw hard. I can see his all-knees-and-elbows delivery in my mind’s eye right this minute. Koufax was the finesse guy, slicing you up; Drysdale was the blunt object, beating you down.

6. Mike Piazza. Only the best-hitting catcher in the history of the game. The Dodgers idiotically traded him in mid-career, an enormous error because he sold tickets — and hit scads of home runs. He had a long swing, but when he hit the ball squarely he could drive it out of a stadium at any point. Often over the (opposite field) fence in right. A nice back-story, too — the 62nd-round draft pick, taken as a favor to Tommy Lasorda, a family friend. The centerpiece of the teams that won the division in 1994 and 1995. You never went to get a hotdog when Piazza was due to hit.

5. Maury Wills. The sparkplug of the 1960s Dodgers offense. This was before statistical analysis indicated he didn’t get on base often enough or get enough extra-base hits to be a genuinely great player … and before we found out he had some substance-abuse issues. This was the middle 1960s, when Little Maury was a threat to beat out a bunt and steal a base at any time. When he was the embodiment of the Dodger Way to Play Baseball, the small-ball, hit-and-run, steal-a-base, go-from-first-to-third-on-a-single philosophy that served them so well for so long.

4. Fernando Valenzuela. Anyone who lived in Los Angeles in 1981 will never forget Fernandomania — which may have been the first of all the sports-related “manias.” (Just like Watergate was the first “gate”, all of which refer to scandal.) The guy was beyond big, his rookie season. But especially the first month, when he threw five shutouts in seven games, all seven of them complete games. In 63 innings, he gave up 40 hits, no homers and 16 walks against 61 strikeouts. He also was batting .318. You cannot overestimate how huge he was, in this market. And he had a great story, too. The chunky phenom from the Mexican desert town of Navajoa, somehow discovered by the Dodgers to return them to prominence. With a quirky delivery in which he rolled his eyes toward the sky before coming home with that unhittable screwball. He won the Cy Young Award that season and was also Rookie of the Year — and won three games in the 1981 World Series victory over the Yankees. And shouldn’t he be in the Hall of Fame? Forget the 173-153 record; think of what he meant to the Dodgers and to all the Latin players who flooded baseball after him.

3. Orel Hershiser. I’m still not sure where he came from — as a star. There he was, just a sort of mediocrity, and Tommy Lasorda called him in one day and told him he needed to be tougher and awarded him the nickname “Bulldog” … which never really stuck and seemed more mockery than anything else. A guy named “Orel” who looked more like a civics teacher than jock … and then, bang, he was unhittable for a couple of seasons there. I remember him from 1988, in particular, when he broke Drysdale’s scoreless-innings record and seemed to carry the team on his back and right into the playoffs — and to the World Series championship, winning twice in the Dodgers’ 4-1 rout of the Athletics. Orel made nerdiness cool and unhittable.

2. Ron Cey. The Penguin. Loved that guy. It seemed as if he excelled despite being handed one of the weirdest bodies in baseball history. Short legs. Stubby arms. The man could barely run. It was more an awkward waddle; hence, the nickname “Penguin.” But, man, could he hit. He was a little ball of muscle, and the guy who really mattered in the mid-70s Dodgers lineup. Anyway, he looked as if he was a guy off the street — who could hit 30 homers every year back when hitting 30 meant something.

1. Sandy Koufax. Sandy was The Ultimate Dodger. The Man on those two World Series champions, in 1963 and 1965, when the Dodgers seized hold of the imagination of SoCal sports fans. A guy who could throw a two-hitter and strike out 15 at any given moment. The velocity! And that 12-to-6 curveball. “The BIG RAINBOW CURVE!” as Vin Scully called it. I spent hours of my youth trying to throw it … and either bounced it or threw it to the backstop. How DID Sandy do that? Koufax was the perfect hero in that he was a gamer, he was SO good and he had almost zero public presence. It’s the guys we don’t know whom we can be most fond of, and that was Koufax.