Moments before the first full-squad workout of spring training and the launch of another disappointing season for the hapless Los Angeles Dodgers, manager Don Mattingly created some poster board material today by comparing his team to the New York Yankees and the Angels to the New York Mets.
In other words, the Dogs own Southern California baseball, and your Halos are second-class citizens, according to “Donnie Baseball,” who is often the dullest tool in the field-house shed.
]
“It's kind of like Mets-Yankees,” Mattingly said from Glendale, Arizona (via ESPN). “The Yankees are
the team. (The Mets) are going to have their years when they play well,
but the Yankees are still the team. I don't want to badmouth the Angels
at all. Mr. (Arte) Moreno has done a great job down there
in Anaheim, and Mike (Scioscia) does a great job. But
we're the Dodgers, and that isn't going to change.”
Go on.
“We're still going to need to play good baseball. But at the end of the day, if we do things right, worry
about ourselves and take care of business, we don't need to worry about
what another team is doing. I don't mean this as a negative, because
(the Angels) have done a tremendous job down there. But at the end of the day, the Dodgers are still the Dodgers.”
Okay, we'll give Mattingly this: the Dodgers are still the Dodgers of unfulfilled expectations. They are the Dodgers who play to thugs who nearly kill Giants fans just trying to leave Chavez Ravine. They are the Dodgers who will likely allow the best play-by-play man in history to expire before they make it to another World Series.
It doesn't take a former solid hitting hayseed in pinstripes to see that the Angels will likely make it to the Fall Classic before the Doyers do.
Yes, the Angels were once owned by Disney, but the Dodgers were owned by Rupert Murdoch, fer chrissakes. And don't get me started on that parking attendant douche, or whatever T.J. Simers calls him.
As for the Dodgers being the Yankees, would that be the Bronx Bomb-outs of 1912, 1966 or the disappointing 1982-95 teams that composed the so-called “Mattingly Era”? Maybe the Dodger skipper recognizes more looming mediocrity in the “Kemp Era.” Or “The Hit Man” could be referring to the 2002 Yanks that led the American League with a 103-58 record–only to lose in four games to the eventual World Series winner, your Anaheim Angels of Anaheim.
There is one thing Mattingly appreciates about the Halos: the Rally Monkey, which he finds “funny.”
“I try to tell guys they should like the rally monkey
because when the rally monkey comes out, it means you have the lead.
You're not behind. So I like when he comes out.”
Not too much chance of that these days, Donnie Baseball.
Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.