At few weeks ago I said that the Dodgers were either going to win their division or end up in third place.
I had no idea at the time that they could end up in FOURTH place....so now I'm going to predict that the Dodgers will finish higher than the Giants....which in many years is all a Dodger fan hopes for...so I'm looking to the bright side....
The Dodgers will finish above the Giants....pop the champagne...pour beer over David Wells head and celebrate a season where the Giants made the Dodgers look like the 27 Yankees....except of course in that one three game series on September 7, 8 and 9....when the Giants beat the Dodgers two out of three and basically finished them off.
They did come back and win two series in a row against The Padres and The Diamondbacks but had they swept the last place Giants then those series wins might have really made a difference...
When you lose a series to the last place team in your division in September it's a bad thing...when that series is against the Giants then it becomes more than a bad thing...it starts to resemble a bad haircut....or maybe even a small nail in the coffin.
It's not just losing a weekend series....it's losing to the Giants....and it has to eat at the very core of all fans and the players had to ask questions of themselves at that point....questions like..."hmmm...are we the team we thought we might have been"....questions like each of us has on the golf course when we start falling apart....questions like John McCain must be having....questions, questions, questions....hmmm.
I will say one thing regarding their pride. After losing two out of three to the Giants, they lost the next game to the Padres on the 9/11 and at that point it looked like they might not win another game in the season....they were down....and they hit a false bottom (false bottom's are all bottom's that aren't officially eliminating you from the race) ( The real bottom looks like it will happen in the next few days)....anyway they hit the false bottom after the lost to the Padres
and it stirred something inside and they showed flashes of either current abilities or flashes of future abilities and won four games in a row, and by the evening of September the 15th it looked like they might not lose another game....and the scared words...World Series...started creeping into the smaller regions of my mind....but I kept thinking about that three game series in San Francisco and asked questions like..."How could a team this good lose two out of three to the Giants...in September?" Well then on Sunday they lost to the Dback's and traveled to Denver for a four game series with the Rockies.
Yesterday in Denver....I got the answer to most of my questions....and now it looks like the Dodgers could finish behind Colorado and end up in fourth place....but well ahead of the Giants.
Somehow that doesn't make me feel great.....but imagine how the Giant fans feel....ha ha ha ha...
and they've got Barry.....ha ha ha ha.....
An entire baseball season has so many levels, especially if a team is in the race. One of the important levels of this season for the Dodgers has to be that time period when they were in first place and then decided not to score any runs over a two week period.
In 50 years of listening and watching Dodger baseball I never remember any Dodger team being shut out so many times in such a short sequence of games. I remember watching the games and started wondering if they were all having vision problems at the same time.
That dry spell, which took place toward the end of July, started the downward spiral that cuminated in yesterday's disaster in Colorado....and as I was feeling sorry for myself and my team I clicked on Major League Baseball's web site...and saw the story that explained the pictures shown above and felt very little.
It's embarrassing to think I care this much about baseball when there are so many things that I should be concerned with......and so many things I should be thankful for...and so many things I should be happy about...
If you want to read about the pictures shown above...cut and past the following address.
Michael Timothy McAlevey
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