Captain's Quarters -

Wait 'Til Next Year!

Hey, New York! Guess who the Dodgers found looking for a job?

Joe Torre was hired Thursday to manage the Los Angeles Dodgers, taking the job two weeks after walking away from the New York Yankees.

Torre moved from one storied franchise to another, getting a three-year contract. He takes over a team that finished fourth in the NL West this season and hasn't won the World Series since 1988.

The 67-year-old Torre becomes the Dodgers' eighth manager since they moved west from Brooklyn for the 1958 season. Torre grew up in Brooklyn, rooting for the rival New York Giants and detesting the Dodgers.

"As a kid growing up, you didn't like them," Torre said on WFAN radio in New York less than an hour before the hiring was announced. "As a player, to me the Dodgers were the Yankees of the National League because ... you either loved them or you hated them."

The Dodgers have to put the talent on the table, of course, in order to build a champion team. How much will it help to have Torre on the bench in attracting that talent to Los Angeles? I'd say players will want to play for a man who has one of the best managing records in the game, especially those desperate for a ring in 2008.

Twenty years is a long drought for Angeleno baseball fans. The long wait may soon be over.

My Blue Heaven

I moved out of California almost ten years ago, and besides my family, I rarely miss it. It's not that I dislike the Los Angeles area, but I prefer the pace of Minnesota living. The weather has its ups and downs -- waaaaaay ups and waaaaaay downs -- but it's cleaner, less crowded, and more personable.

Certain things just don't transfer, though, and one of them is Dodger Stadium and Dodger baseball. It's been ten years since I've last been to Chavez Ravine, but I'll be going tonight to watch the Dodgers battle the San Diego Padres for the wild-card spot. We have baseball in Minnesota, but as fun as a Twins game can be, there is no better spot to watch a major-league game than Dodger Stadium.

The stadium sits in Chavez Ravine like a crown in the hills. It has a spectacular view even without the baseball game. Its unique setting contributes to the sense of something special about any event one sees at the stadium. Legendary announcer Vin Scully's voice will echo through the park, as people bring radios to hear him call games even while attending live. The Dodger dogs will appear in abundance. We'll lose our voices cheering the team. It's all Dodger tradition, and it makes Dodger Stadium a treasure.

I'll be in the left-field stands tonight, hoping that one of the boys in blue goes deep and drops a ball in my lap. I'll take a few pictures, and hopefully I'll get one that captures why I've missed the Dodger experience over the last ten years.

Same Old Song From Shef

Gary Sheffield has a book to promote, and the obnoxious superstar has fallen back on one of his tried-and-true attention-grabbing schemes -- accuse a former manager of racism. Sheffield accused Yankees skipper Joe Torre of treating blacks different than whites and claims that Jeter wasn't "black enough" to notice the difference:

New York Yankees manager Joe Torre treats black players on his team worse than white players, controversial baseball player Gary Sheffield has charged.

"I know when I was [with the Yankees], the couple of blacks that were there, every one of them had an issue with the organization," Sheffield, who played outfield for the Yankees between 2004 and 2006, told Andrea Kremer in an interview that airs Tuesday on HBO's "Real Sports."

When pressed on who specifically within the organization black players were upset with, Sheffield said, "They had an issue with Joe Torre."

"They weren't treated liked everybody else," said Sheffield, who currently plays for the Detroit Tigers "I got called out in a couple of meetings that I thought were unfair. ... [Torre] had a message to get across to the whole team, so he used me to get the message across."

Sheffield has been down this road before. Dodger fans will remember that he accused the O'Malley organization of being racist, and specifically leveling the charge against Tommy Lasorda. Of course, this was after the Dodgers made it clear that they didn't want the locker-room cancer to return at the end of his contract, even though the Dodgers clearly missed his power at the plate afterwards.

Last week, he accused Major League Baseball of racism, too. He said, in essence, that Latin American ballplayers suck up to management more than black ballplayers do, and that's why the percentage of black ballplayers has dropped by half in the last generation. I'd guess that the Latin American stars in MLB might take issue with his disparagement of them, but also point to a draft system in the US that devalues the development of domestic talent in favor of athletes not subject to the draft at all.

Let's all agree not to buy Sheffield's book. Then he can proclaim book readers racists -- and disappear quietly with the tens of millions of dollars he made in this racist system.

Dodgers Find Their Footing At The Best Possible Time

The Los Angeles Dodgers had started off the season with two straight losses, and fans -- even out here in Minnesota -- wondered how they could climb off the canvas against their most hated rivals, the San Francisco Giants. The team rebounded in the road series, taking Barry Bonds and the Bay Area for a sweep this weekend:

Luis Gonzalez hit his first two home runs in Dodger Blue and Randy Wolf gave the Dodgers a third straight standout pitching performance to pull off a three-game sweep of the San Francisco Giants during a 10-4 victory this afternoon.

Gonzalez connected for a solo shot and three-run homer in his 26th career multihomer game, and Wolf (1-1) outpitched $126-million fellow left-hander Barry Zito in the Dodgers' eighth consecutive victory in San Francisco.

Matt Kemp had three hits, two RBIs and scored twice for the well-rounded Dodgers, who have dominated in the Giants' waterfront ballpark since their last loss there on Aug. 18 of last year. Jeff Kent scored three runs. ...

San Francisco has only started 1-5 twice before since the club moved west from New York in 1958, in 1967 and 1980 -- not the kind of start the franchise wanted for its All-Star season.

It's a long season, and the two teams will play plenty of baseball between now and October. However, for long-time Dodger fans like myself, we will take a sweep against the Giants any time of the year. Taking the set from them in San Francisco is especially sweet.

The Dodgers now move to 4-2 and face off against the Colorado Rockies in another divisional series. The Rocks are a game behind the Dodgers, while LA is just half a game back of the Arizona Diamondbacks, who have had a good start this season. With this sweep behind them, the Dodgers have to be feeling pretty charged up coming back to LA. Let's hope they can keep the momentum -- and the four-game winning streak -- alive.

My Teams Make The Playoffs

It came down to the end of the baseball season, but the two teams I follow both made the playoffs, which means I will have to watch some playoff games this year. For my favorite baseball team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the wild card spot tasted even sweeter as they clinched it at the end of a San Francisco sweep. The Dodgers finished off their traditional rivals and got to celebrate on their turf:

Los Angeles beat San Francisco 4-3 in what might've been Barry Bonds' last game for the Giants, and ended up even in the standings with San Diego. The Padres held the tiebreaker based on head-to-head record and earned the West crown.

"We're looking forward to getting this thing started," Los Angeles manager Grady Little said. "What's taken place here started last year. Everything has been positive."

The Dodgers could have won the divisional championship had San Diego lost their final game. However, Trevor Hoffman held off the Arizona Diamondbacks 7-6 in Phoenix to clinch their second straight divisional title. That sends LA to New York to play the Mets in the first round, a selection that the Dodgers say they wanted. LA wouldn't mind avoiding the Padres, as they went 5-13 this year against their southern rivals.

The Minnesota Twins, meanwhile, came out of nowhere to steal their divisional title from the Detroit Tigers. They only led on the final day of the season as the lowly Kansas City Royals swept the Tigers in Detroit this weekend:

On the season's final day, Joe Mauer won a historic batting title, the Twins defeated the Chicago White Sox 5-1, and then the players settled in with about 35,000 of their fans for a little TV.

Together, they watched on the stadium's two JumboTrons as Kansas City finished a 10-8, 12-inning victory over Detroit that knocked the Tigers behind the Twins for the first time all season.

After coming from 12 games back, the Twins won their fourth American League Central title in five years, setting up a first-round playoff matchup with Oakland that starts Tuesday at the Metrodome.

Twelve games back? Twelve games back? We've seen an amazing comeback by the Twins this year. They managed to play themselves back into the wild-card slot, but no one expected the Tigers to collapse the way they did in September. Detroit will have a difficult task ahead of them, recovering from this blow in time to go on the road for their playoff series as the wild card.

Both teams improved themselves significantly from their 2005 seasons. Dare I hope for a Twin Cities-LA Series?

An American Anniversary

The Washington Post reminds its readers of one of the finest moments in baseball history, an event that celebrates its thirtieth anniversary today. It wasn't a record-breaking home run or a perfect game, but a singular moment in an era of cynicism and doubt that for one moment united us and reminded us of the best of America ... and it happened in Dodger Stadium:

Rick Monday never tires of answering questions about that memorable day 30 years ago, when he performed his own Patriot Act and unwittingly became an icon to millions of American war heroes and their loved ones.

Monday was playing center field for the Chicago Cubs on April 25, 1976, at Dodger Stadium when he noticed two protesters kneeling on the grass in left-center, intending to burn the American flag. He immediately bolted toward them and snatched it away.

Rick Monday never tires of answering questions about that memorable day 30 years ago, when he performed his own Patriot Act and unwittingly became an icon to millions of American war heroes and their loved ones.

Monday was playing center field for the Chicago Cubs on April 25, 1976, at Dodger Stadium when he noticed two protesters kneeling on the grass in left-center, intending to burn the American flag. He immediately bolted toward them and snatched it away.

As it happens, I wrote about this incident last year when in came up as part of the run-up to Flag Day. The description of the event given by Larry Henry covered the heroic actions of Monday well, but missed an important part of the context. Being from Los Angeles and a life-long Dodger fan, the event has remained with me for all of these years:

Dodger coach Tommy Lasorda had also started running out to the outfield from the other direction, and fortunately for the two nuts involved, security got there before he did. Monday, in other interviews, has said that Lasorda had murder in his eyes as Monday passed him in full stride. He had no doubt that the two individuals, who appeared stoned and somewhat amused at Monday's deft steal of the flag, would have presented no challenge whatsoever to the middle-aged but well-known battler.

Lasorda himself, in his memoirs from years ago, acknowledged that he meant to stop the pair any way he could. But that was not the prevailing attitude in 1976. For those too young to recall, the nation had reached what we thought was the depth of our national crisis of confidence. A year earlier, we had watched on television as the last Americans in Saigon had to be airlifted out by helicopter from our doomed embassy as the North Vietnamese overran the allies we abandoned in 1973. Two years earlier, our President resigned from the office he disgraced, taking the credibility of the national law-enforcement and intelligence agencies with him.

With the bicententennial of the Declaration of Independence coming up, the country had started a celebration of the event that overloaded on red, white, and blue. The nation tried to put on a coat of faux patriotism it didn't really feel, and the entire effort felt commercialized and hypocritical. With Independence Day two months away, many already had had enough of the celebration.

However, when Monday took off with the flag, all of the cynicism and defeatism of the past two years melted away. Watching Monday rescue the flag from two lunatics who tried to hijack a baseball game for their protest, which would have provided the perfect nadir of American morale at that time, the crowd did something no one expected. Lasorda recalled in his book that starting softly, the crowd started singing "God Bless America", completely unprompted, until all of the tens of thousands of Dodger fans had joined together to sing it. It was one of the few unscripted and spontaneous patriotic displays in our Bicentennial, and one of the most moving at any time.

Monday became a favorite of Dodger fans from that moment on, and the next year the team traded for Monday. He played on three pennant-winning Dodger teams and played a key role in their World Series win in 1981. Today he still works for the Dodgers as a broadcaster, continuing an almost 30-year association with the team that began with that daring rescue of Old Glory. Monday not only saved the flag from burning that day, but at least for a brief moment in time, united us in genuine love of country and showed us what real patriotism looked like. For that, Monday has always been and always will be one of my favorite Dodgers -- and favorite sports figures -- of all time.

Just another slice of Dodger history that I hope everyone will enjoy.

I am happy to re-run this post in honor of a fine ballplayer and an even better man. Thank you, Rick Monday, for a heroic gesture and a wonderful memory.

UPDATE: MLB.com has much more, including the play-by-play by the great announcer Vin Scully that will take you back to that day as if it were yesterday.

A True World Series And Its Best Possible Ambassador

Baseball has decided to embrace a world vision this year by creating an international tournament of national teams, based loosely on the format used by the Olympics in past years. Instead of those Olympic competitions, which occurred in the middle of the major-league season and wound up as amateur and minor-league tournaments, the World Baseball Classic will feature the best players in the world competing for their native countries -- the US, Japan, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Mexico, and others. The venues will be in Japan, Puerto Rico, and the US, with the final games in San Diego's Petco Park.

MLB has selected one of my favorite baseball legends for its ambassador to the first WBC: Tommy Lasorda. As I wrote in a comment on his site, who better to represent the love and passion we Americans have for our national pastime than the Hall of Fame manager who has devoted his entire life to baseball -- especially Dodger baseball? The only regret I have is that the WBC missed an opportunity to hold at least some of its games at Dodger Stadium, still the most beautiful of all MLB ballparks -- and privately financed, I might add. If they had played a couple at Chavez Ravine, I could have at least seen the stadium while I watched the games on television.

Congratulations, Tommy. I know you've wanted to see a true World Series for many years, and this will get us as close as we can get. I think the US will have a tough time making it into the finals against the global competition that we have encouraged for years, but you will remain to remind everyone that the sport has been an American gift to the world.

Bicentennial Rick, Old Glory, And Dodger Stadium

My friends and colleagues at Power Line and Shot In The Dark post today about one of the many memorable moments from Dodger Stadium. Rather than a baseball play or a championship season, though, they recall the heroic actions of then-Chicago Cubs outfielder Rick Monday on April 25, 1976, when he rescued the flag from protestors who had run onto the field to burn it. Make sure you read both posts, but being the lifelong Dodger fan that I am, I'd like to add another perspective to this story.

First, here's the story from Larry Henry, a sportswriter from the Everett Herald in Washington, written in 1998 to celebrate Flag Day:

On this spring day in '76, he was on a Cubs team that was headed for a fourth-place finish in the National League East. It was the fourth inning with the Dodgers batting. The Vietnam War had ended a year before, but people didn't need a war in order to protest. What these two ding-a-lings who had just dashed onto the field of Dodger Stadium were all about nobody knew, but here they were, and where was security? They had come from the left-field corner and had run past Cubs left fielder Jose Cardenal. One carried something under his arm but Monday couldn't distinguish what it was.

Once they reached shallow left-center, they stopped and brought out the object. Monday could see now what it was: the U.S. flag. He recalled that they laid it on the ground almost as if they were about to have a picnic. Then one of them dug into his pocket and brought out something shiny and metallic. "I figured having gone to college two and two is sometimes four," Monday said. "They were dousing it with lighter fluid."

Then they lit a match. Which flared momentarily and died.

By now, Monday was in full stride, running towards them. "To this day, I don't know what I was thinking," he said. "Except bowl them over." He was also thinking they were trying to commit a terrible act. "What they were doing was extremely wrong as far as I was concerned," said Monday, who served six years in the Marine Reserves.

He reached them about the time they got the second match lit and were about to torch the flag. "There's a picture that I think won a Pulitzer Prize and it showed me reaching down and grabbing the flag," he said. ... Monday got the flag and handed it to Doug Rau, a Dodgers pitcher. That was the last Monday saw of it until a month later. The Dodgers came to Wrigley Field and Al Campanis, a Dodgers executive, presented the flag to Monday. "It's displayed very proudly in my home," he said.

Dodger coach Tommy Lasorda had also started running out to the outfield from the other direction, and fortunately for the two nuts involved, security got there before he did. Monday, in other interviews, has said that Lasorda had murder in his eyes as Monday passed him in full stride. He had no doubt that the two individuals, who appeared stoned and somewhat amused at Monday's deft steal of the flag, would have presented no challenge whatsoever to the middle-aged but well-known battler.

Lasorda himself, in his memoirs from years ago, acknowledged that he meant to stop the pair any way he could. But that was not the prevailing attitude in 1976. For those too young to recall, the nation had reached what we thought was the depth of our national crisis of confidence. A year earlier, we had watched on television as the last Americans in Saigon had to be airlifted out by helicopter from our doomed embassy as the North Vietnamese overran the allies we abandoned in 1973. Two years earlier, our President resigned from the office he disgraced, taking the credibility of the national law-enforcement and intelligence agencies with him.

With the bicententennial of the Declaration of Independence coming up, the country had started a celebration of the event that overloaded on red, white, and blue. The nation tried to put on a coat of faux patriotism it didn't really feel, and the entire effort felt commercialized and hypocritical. With Independence Day two months away, many already had had enough of the celebration.

However, when Monday took off with the flag, all of the cynicism and defeatism of the past two years melted away. Watching Monday rescue the flag from two lunatics who tried to hijack a baseball game for their protest, which would have provided the perfect nadir of American morale at that time, the crowd did something no one expected. Lasorda recalled in his book that starting softly, the crowd started singing "God Bless America", completely unprompted, until all of the tens of thousands of Dodger fans had joined together to sing it. It was one of the few unscripted and spontaneous patriotic displays in our Bicentennial, and one of the most moving at any time.

Monday became a favorite of Dodger fans from that moment on, and the next year the team traded for Monday. He played on three pennant-winning Dodger teams and played a key role in their World Series win in 1981. Today he still works for the Dodgers as a broadcaster, continuing an almost 30-year association with the team that began with that daring rescue of Old Glory. Monday not only saved the flag from burning that day, but at least for a brief moment in time, united us in genuine love of country and showed us what real patriotism looked like. For that, Monday has always been and always will be one of my favorite Dodgers -- and favorite sports figures -- of all time.

Just another slice of Dodger history that I hope everyone will enjoy.

UPDATE: CQ reader E.O. reminds me that the scoreboard operator at Dodger Stadium recognized the import of Monday's actions immediately. After the incident, he or she put up the message: RICK MONDAY - YOU MADE A GREAT SAVE! Quite an acknowledgement for a visiting player.

My Blue Heaven

Tommy Lasorda has a blog. Yesterday he offered some "Fatherly Advice":

My father had five sons, and one day he called a family meeting, sat us down, and told us he wanted to bring his brother’s son, Mario, to America. He told us to treat him as an equal because he was family. When Mario arrived, my father told Mario he could live with him so while he worked hard, he could save his money and eventually bring his own family to America too.

Mario was lazy; he did not work hard, he did not save any money and his trip to America was a failure. When he returned to Italy, he blamed his failure on my father instead of taking responsibility for his own actions.

I was so mad at Mario, I wanted to go to Italy, find him, and throw him into the Adriatic Sea for ruining my father’s name.

Later, my father sat us brothers down again and told us he wanted to bring his sister’s son to America. I immediately jumped up and shouted in protest that I did not want to bring any more relatives to America. I said I didn’t want to support any more lazy Greenhorns. My father, in broken English, told me to sit down and shut up. He said because Mario was bad should not deprive his sister’s son from coming to this country.

Well, he came to America and lived in my father’s house. He worked hard and raised a beautiful family with two sons of his own, who eventually became professors in Rome.

The same principle is at work at Dodger Stadium. I do not want Frank McCourt to deprive families of the $2 True Blue Tuesday promotion because of two bad guys who ran across the outfield, and one bad sports columnist who unfairly criticizes the McCourt’s.

If you've read Tommy's memoirs or talked to him in person, you know that this is classic Tommy Lasorda. I'm delighted to welcome Tommy to the wonderful world of blogging, and I look forward to many posts with his insight into Dodger baseball and life in general. Check it out when you can, and a big thanks to Brant at SWLiP for the heads-up.

Dodgers Roar To Life

After an off-season marked by odd moves, stranger negotiations, and the dismantling of what appeared to be a pretty good 2004 team, Dodger fans could be forgiven for anticipating a meltdown in the first few games as the new squad found its way around the clubhouse and the field together. After having won its first playoff game since 1988, we figured we might well have to wait another couple of years for the next one after that.

However, Paul DiPodesta has delivered a real team to Dodger Stadium -- one that has gone on a historic rip for the first two weeks of the season, much to the delight of Dodger Blue fans:

And so they have rolled, through nutty deficits and nerve-rattling errors, with five different first basemen and a couple of different Jose Valentins and only one solid, steady, smiling Milton Bradley.

And so they have rolled, nameless shirts and faceless players, through the increasingly outstretched arms of stunned fans along the prettiest first mile in Los Angeles Dodger history.

"I know, people are saying, it's early, it doesn't matter," said Phillips. "But you get this kind of start, this kind of lead on people, you bet it matters."

Especially in this town, under this ownership, in this season, the Dodger players providing the stability that the front office could not, overcoming a winter of communication problems, filling the headlines with the only baseball language that matters.

Wins, 12 in their first 15 games.

Drama, with five wins in their final at-bat in only the first two weeks.

Hope, with their best starting pitcher scheduled to show up for the first time on Sunday.

I love living in Minnesota, but I can't pretend I don't miss the excitement of the baseball season in Los Angeles, and this year will prove most difficult if the Dodgers keep winning like this. So far, they've managed all this without their starting ace and their celebrated closer (Eric Gagne). Imagine what they will be like when both return to full health, and if the team can maintain this chemistry. They already lead the West by three games after two weeks and at 12-3 have an opportunity to build up a lot of momentum before summer.

I know it's early ... but Dodger fans are used to consoling themselves with that thought, not attempt to stop hyperventilating.

How To Treat A Legend

For decades, no one has embodied the spirit of the Los Angeles Dodgers more than Tommy Lasorda. As a player, his heart far outstripped his talent, despite his oft-repeated (and hilarious) claims that the Dodgers would have been better off optioning off Sandy Koufax and keeping him on their major-league roster. As a talent scout and a minor-league coach, he developed some of the Hall of Fame talent that he later coached to two World Series with Walter Alston, and himself led the team to four World Series appearances in twenty years, winning two of them.

But more than his impressive record, Lasorda has imprinted his personality on his beloved Dodgers and the Los Angeles region. He still lives with his family in the middle-class neighborhood of Fullerton instead of tony digs in Bel Air or Beverly Hills, and rather than shut himself off from baseball's fans, he seems to light up in their presence. I met him briefly twenty-three years ago after his first World Series win, late at night at a Los Angeles hotel with his family waiting for him. Instead of just graciously shaking my hand and moving on -- which I would have understood entirely -- he spent at least 20 minutes talking to me and my friends about the Dodgers and the Fernando Valenzuela phenomenon. He clearly loves the Dodgers, the fans, and Los Angeles itself.

Unfortunately, during the brief ownership of Fox, the organization appeared almost ashamed of Lasorda. They gave him a title but obviously never felt comfortable with him, giving him almost nothing to do. Lasorda never said a word about it but his enthusiasm noticeably dimmed for the team and organization that he spent a lifetime building and promoting. Now that Frank McCourt has taken over the ownership of the Dodgers, the Los Angeles Times reports that Lasorda almost seems reborn:

In one week alone, he led the pitchers through bunting practice, coached first base in an extra-inning game, tossed high-decibel motivational gems at minor leaguers as he walked around the clubhouse, hit ground balls to infielders during batting practice and chased foul balls during a simulated game.

He mingled with fans, signing autographs and posing for pictures. He entertained the 14-month-old son of General Manager Paul DePodesta, granted numerous interviews and appeared via satellite on Fox News and CNN to discuss steroids in baseball.

The Dodgers appointed their Hall of Fame manager senior vice president in 1998, after he served as interim general manager. The ill-defined position sometimes left Lasorda wondering what to do, and vulnerable to charges of forcing himself on a baseball operations department that did not seek his advice.

But new owner Frank McCourt has embraced him, and Lasorda has returned the embrace. McCourt last month asked Lasorda to serve as a senior advisor, reporting directly to the owner, and to represent the Dodgers whenever needed.

"There are so many things he can do for us," McCourt said. "Nobody loves the Dodgers more. There is so much knowledge Tommy has. He knows everybody. I can learn a lot from him."

I know that some baseball fans have never felt much affection for Lasorda, considering him something of a clown or a fool with his many motivational stories of his years in baseball which often transform themselves into rather tall tales. No one can question his lifetime commitment to the game, however, or his heart. He continues to demonstrate why so many more people continue to hold so much affection and respect for the man who swears he bleeds Dodger Blue. Three cheers for Frank McCourt for understanding how to honor Lasorda -- by allowing him to keep contributing meaningfully to the game and the team he loves so much.

Dodgers In Playoffs: Triple Play Of Good News

The sports wires carry a three-bagger of good news for the Los Angeles Dodgers on the eve of their first playoff game in years. The first comes from the Dodgers' front office itself, announcing that outfielder Milton Bradley will be allowed to play after serving a team-enforced suspension after Bradley threw a bottle into the stands:

Bradley will return from his five-game suspension Tuesday against the Cardinals in Game 1 of the NLDS, the Dodgers' official site reports. ...

"We as an organization and he as an individual recognize the fact that he made a mistake. He paid for it," manager Jim Tracy said. "He served his sentence, and we're going to move forward."

This comes as no surprise; the Dodgers got into the playoffs on Bradley's bat and his fire. Hopefully they can get him to channel that in more productive ways during the playoffs.

The other two items relate to two other superstars. Eric Gagne, baseball's best closer over the past two seasons, received a cortisone shot for his throwing shoulder and should be ready to play. He's had five days rest and Tracy reports that he's throwing at 97-98 MPH. Gagne has provided the Dodgers with the consistency at the closer position that allowed them to win a league-leading 53 come-from-behind games this season.

Shawn Green also will play against the Cardinals. He's been nursing a sore ankle, which may affect his power and especially his running. However, since he's now a first baseman instead of the right fielder, he should be able to play through it. Like the Rotowire says, at this time of the year, either you go home or you play. Green's playing.

Right now, the Dodgers are down 1-0 in the top of the 3rd.

Dodgers Slam Giants To Win The West

As any Dodger fan will tell you, the final weekend of a pennant race in Los Angeles evokes thrills and chills -- thrills for the possibility of the Boys in Blue getting a playoff slot, and chills because inevitably we have to go through the hated San Francisco Giants to get there. When only one of the two rivals have a shot at the playoffs, the other always relishes the opportunity to send them home for an early vacation. But when they're fighting each other for that spot, the tension can be unbearable.

This weekend, the Dodgers needed only to win one game against the Giants to clinch the division, and they lost the first one on Friday. I was prepared to write a celebratory post on Friday night -- stayed up late to do it -- but unfortunately, the Giants hung tough. Yesterday's game looked like it would bring the same news, but the Dodgers showed their mettle unlike anything we've seen since Game 1 of the 1988 World Series:

Down by three runs entering the ninth inning, the Dodgers had already scored three times and there was still only one out. With the Giant defense playing in, all that was needed was a fly ball or a deep grounder to get the winning run home.

"I wanted to enjoy the atmosphere," said the 39-year-old Finley, a 16-year veteran. "I knew I would get it done."

Did he ever. Finley got his fly ball on the second pitch from Franklin, a fastball that cleared the wall in right field at the 375-foot sign, a grand slam to give the Dodgers a 7-3 victory, a franchise-record 53 comeback victories and, most important, the championship of the National League West Division for the first time in nine years.

Unfortunately, being so far away from LA, I don't get the TV coverage of the team that I used to get when I lived there. I haven't been to Dodger Stadium, which is truly one of the most beautiful ballparks in the country, since 1997. But I think I'm correct when I tell you that the 2004 Dodgers have more heart and more desire than any team since that last championship. Coming back from three runs down in the bottom of the ninth to win the division is legendary, and Steve Finley may wind up being this season's Kirk Gibson.

Congratulations to the Dodgers. Now I'll get to watch a few games on TV. Let's go all the way!

Addendum: Not to sell the Angels short, either, because they won their division yesterday, too -- the first time both teams have qualified for the playoffs in the same year, and they did it on the same day. I like the Minnesota Twins, but I've spent my share of time at the Big A/Edison Field, too. A Freeway Series between the Dodgers and Angels would be a blast.

The Season's Still Young, But ...

We're just two weeks into the 2004 season, but the Los Angeles Dodgers seem to be firing on all cylinders -- an unusual occurrence for a team known for starting slow. Pitching, defense, and even timely hitting have come together, the latter of which has always been an issue despite having one of the league's highest payrolls:

The Dodgers have won four in a row after an 8-3 loss at San Diego on Tuesday, good for a 4-1 start on a nine-game, 10-day trip against the National League West. They're feeling good at 8-3, and even Bonds' towering solo homer on a 95-mph fastball from reliever Darren Dreifort in the eighth couldn't dampen their mood.

"It's just momentum," Bradley said. "Momentum can switch at any time, but we've got it right now."

Most fascinating is the performance over the past two seasons of closer Eric Gagne, a failed starter at the major-league level for the two seasons prior to that. Gagne now has a record string of 66 consecutive saves going back to 2002. Last night he notched his third save in as many days, although he had to struggle to get it:

Gagne struggled with his command in his third appearance in as many days, a day after Bonds smashed a two-run homer against him — on a 100-mph fastball — in the Dodgers' 3-2 series-opening victory.

Pedro Feliz led off the ninth and connected for an opposite-field homer, a rarity for a right-handed batter at SBC Park, and the crowd stood and cheered as the Giants had runners on first and second on a walk, a sacrifice bunt and another walk.

But Gagne showed the mettle that helped him win last season's National League Cy Young Award, recording his fourth save when shortstop Cesar Izturis fielded Grissom's slow bouncer up the middle, stepped on second and threw to first to end the game and give the Dodgers victories in the first two games of a three-game series.

The Dodgers have won each series they've played so far this year, including two against the San Diego Padres, whose general manager (Kevin Tower) claimed that the Blue's struggles with mediocrity revealed a character flaw in the team. By the time the season is over, Tower will probably regret that remark more than any other he's made so far this year. It's early yet, but the Dodgers are winning on the road and at home and with complete efforts from all phases of their game. Hope springs eternal in the Dodger fan's breast -- perhaps this may be the year that we win a playoff game ...