This was my favorite sports team, as a kid. I have a vivid memory of lying on the floor in front of a speaker in my parents living room, elbows down, my face in my hands, listening to Vin Scully do a Dodgers game. Was it an important Dodgers game? Maybe. Maybe not. Thing is, I couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8, and I was already a serious fan.

A lot of that innocent veneration was scrubbed off, once I got into journalism and found out how the “sausage” that is a baseball team is made. Hence, this list will skew toward the early days of the Dodgers’ half-century in Los Angeles.

(Yeah. Sorry. None of the Boys of Summer are going to make this list. I’ll leave them for the even older, far more bitter guys back in Brooklyn still cursing the name of Walter O’Malley.)

This is, of course, completely personal. These aren’t the best 10 players. Or the 10 most valuable players. They’re just guys who caught my attention, and it might have been for something silly.

Let’s go No. 10 to No. 1 here. Starting with …

10. Billy Grabarkewitz. Loved his name. And his one really good season, 1970. He was going to be the Dodgers’ answer at 3B … and then he played his second season. Go look at his career stats, and tell me he doesn’t warrant discussion among the “all-time, one-season heroes” in baseball history. He looked like a guy who would have a nice career, and then, bang, he was gone. Injuries, incompetence, etc. But for one year there, he was a serious player, and I was a big fan.

9. Tommy John. Not quite a Dodger, really; only six of his 26 seasons were spent in L.A. But he made such an impression here that they named a career-saving elbow surgery after him. He was a kind of goofy presence out there, a guy who looked more like a golfer than a ballplayer. That is, only marginally like an athlete. A lefty who just spun junk up to the plate. I admired his tenacity, and his longevity (288 career victories) and the way he came back from, yes, Tommy John surgery.

8. Davey Lopes. An underrated leadoff man. A guy with a solid on-base percentage who stole bases with high efficiency — but also gave you pop from second base, which was a rarity back in the 1970s, when 2B was still viewed as a place for guys who could turn the double play and maybe not hit five homers a year. Just a solid, all-around player who, in my mind, rates as the second-most-valuable of the 1970s Dodgers. For some reason, just now, too, I remember him trying to mediate that Two Maniacs Screaming shouting match on the mound between Tommy Lasorda and Doug Rau from the, what, 1977 World Series? A good guy, is what I’m saying.

7. Mike Piazza. I know, he spent less than half his career as a Dodger, but what a half-career. He averaged 33 homers and 105 RBI for the five seasons through 1997, and he hit .336 or better with an OBP of .400 or better the last three. He was the single best reason to go see the Dodgers play that entire time. Great power to the opposite field. A stiff, somewhat mechanical hitter, and a barely adequate catcher, but man, could he put a charge in a baseball. He also was a stand-up guy in the lockerroom, someone who would talk to reporters in good times or bad, and I give him brownie points for that. As well as his up-from-nowhere story, the whole “62nd-round draft pick, a favor to Tommy Lasorda” thing.

6. Maury Wills. Little Maury. The man who caught Ty Cobb. Yeah, I know, turns out he wasn’t exactly Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy (the drugs, and all), and the stolen base, his calling card, is the most overrated stat in baseball … but the Dodgers don’t win so often in the 1960s without him at the top of the order, beating out singles and stealing second, sometimes third, and scoring on a sac fly. He embodied the franchise’s dedication to footspeed and athleticism, and it engendered results. Heck, the Giants turned the area around first base into a swamp, at Candlestick, so Little Maury couldn’t get a good jump. He got into people’s heads like that. He had no power at all, not even gap power, and he didn’t get around the bases as often as our memory would tell us (60 runs in 594 at-bats in 1966?). But another iconic figure, going into second with a standup slide, ahead of the catcher’s throw. A guy who commanded a crowd’s attention.

5. Don Drysdale. He was the blunt instrument of the 1960s Dodgers pitching staff. He would dust off guys just for the sake of dusting them off. Well, actually, to remind them who owned the inner half of the plate. No one with a brain in his head dug in too deep against Big D. Really, seriously Old School just when school was about to be let out — forever. I’m not sure Willie Mays ever got through an at-bat against Drysdale without going to the dirt at least once. (He drilled 154 guys in his career; he’d be ejected all the time, these days.)

All elbows and knees in that oddly angular delivery of his. He looked like a beach chair being unfolded, and then would come that high, hard one. And he could hit, too. He had 29 career homers, and twice had seven homers in a season, which would have made him a far better hitter than Andruw Jones was this season. One of the last great intimidating, hand-me-the-damn-ball pitchers, a guy who logged 239 innings or more for 10 consecutive seasons and topped 300 for four consecutive seasons in the middle of that. And, somehow, him dropping dead in his Montreal hotel room during a road trip, at age 56 in 1993, while a Dodgers broadcaster, seemed a fitting way for the guy to go out, a baseball man to the end. A Dodger through and through, back when that still meant something.

4. Ron Cey. I loved this guy, even if he were a crabby little (5-foot-9, maybe) man, as I later found out. The Penguin. His knees were about 10 inches off the ground, and it made him walk and run with this stiff, bizarre gait. Seeing him trying to leg out a triple was like watching a three-legged race at the county fair. Lots of flailing but not much motion forward. He also had enormous teeth. Tommy Lasorda used to say there was some horse out there with human-size teeth, because Penguin had wound up with some horse’s teeth. Anyway, the man could hit. The real MVP of the 1970s Dodgers. Steve Garvey got more attention, but it was Ron Cey who was the run-producing machine in the middle. He was a gamer, too. And clutch. As well as the only third baseman worth a damn in L.A. Dodgers history.

3. Fernando Valenzuela. What a story. Only in America. Homely kid with a bad body (he made Babe Ruth look like Charles Atlas) comes out of some godforsaken Mexican village and dominates the National League for nearly all of 1981, winning both the Cy Young and the MVP as he perplexes everyone with that nasty screwball. One of the last of the 250-inning, 10-complete-game guys. Tommy Lasorda flogged him like a mule, actually. And he never complained. He also brought with him that sense of a baseball world suddenly bigger than just American players, one that really hadn’t quite taken hold by 1980. He needed a translator, and he turned on the large (and about to become huge) SoCal Mexican-American market and pretty much forever wedded them to the Dodgers, as opposed to the Angels — or any other big-league team.

2. Sandy Koufax. Anyone who was a Dodgers fan in their early years here knew what an event it was when Sandy Koufax pitched. The odds that something amazing would happen were always strong. A one-hitter, a two-hitter. A no-hitter. A perfect game. Maybe 18 strikeouts. Two other compelling qualities about this guy: His mound presence, and that includes his delivery, with the high leg kick, and the exquisite, unhittable, overhand, 12-to-6 curveball that I tried to emulate but couldn’t get to a catcher on the fly … and the air of mystery around him. The guy was publicity shy, very inward, awkward as a speaker, and even now nobody quite knows what the man is about. Other than he’s awfully damned dignified, and I don’t mean that in a sarcastic way. The iconic figure of the L.A. Dodgers glory days. I might have been in something approaching shock when he retired, quite suddenly, after the 1966 season.

1. Wes Parker. I think I may have revealed this on some other post. Or maybe in the newspaper, when I was still writing for one. But I venerated this guy. When I was a kid, I picked up on what I (now) would describe as the guy’s class, grace and elegance. He was a ballet dancer around first base. Everything looked so easy for him. There’s a reason he is the first baseman on the all-time Gold Glove team.

And then as I got older, I decided he was something of a perfect player for the 1960s Dodgers, who made runs out of thin air. Well, of course, if he were perfect he would have hit .342 like Tommy Davis did in 1962. But Parker wasn’t that good. Plus, he played in the middle-to-late 60s, when baseball offense hits its lowest point since the Dead Ball Era. He was a switch-hitter who could run, bunt and play defense. He was a great Little Ball weapon.

I also liked that he seemed to play the game on his own terms, walking away from it just a few years after that marvelous 1970 season, when he drove in 111 runs with only 10 homers. Turns out he was independently wealthy, quite intelligent, and just got tired of the travel and realized he was on the back side of his career, so he just hung it up. At age 32. I also like him because not everyone else did. He wasn’t an obvious fan favorite, so he seemed to me almost like my own star. One of the last Gentleman Ballplayers, and the one I would have wanted to emulate.