Angels vs. Dodgers
7 tonight
KCAL 9 or Fox Sports West
Back in the good old days when I was a longtime Dodgers fan—long before the parking lot attendant and Rupert Murdoch and whoever the manager was who succeeded Tommy Lasorda (was it Bill Russell? How soon we forget?)—I could forgive a failure to reach the playoffs, even forgive a last-place finish in the West, so long as the Blue Crew at least won more games than the then-California Angels. At least LA would have SoCal bragging rights—and SoCal bragging rights they had every season that I can remember. The double blow of letting Mike Piazza go and the prolonged players strike put me off the nation's pastime for several seasons—and put me off the Dodgers forever. I didn't return to watching games on television until the Terry Collins-managed Halos somehow got under my skin. There was something infectious about the way the ragtag team of underachievers left everything on the field—probably a result of the fire the fiery Collins was lighting under them (until he burned all his front-office bridges). I was already going back to the games in person when Mike Scioscia moved into the dugout, so I've been able to throw that back into the face of people who knew I'd been a Dodger fan since the Garvey-Lopes-Russell-Cey days and accused me of conveniently jumping onto the Angels' World Series bandwagon. Indeed, thanks to interleague play, these days I can forgive Los Angeles of Anaheim a bad year (like this one . . . so far) as long as they beat the Dodgers in their season series and go on to at least finish higher in the standings than the Dogs. But I must confess, the designated hitter rule sucks. And I do still miss Vin Scully on the radio.
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.