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“Dodgers Forfeit Right to Celebrate”
“Dodgers Wrestle with Inability to Clinch the West”
“Skid Potentially Historic for Dodgers”
“Dodgers Sleepwalking to Postseason”
Etc. Etc. You get the idea.
For as ominous and bleak as these headlines sound, you could imagine these were written by the dirty vicious bloggers.
But no, these were written by the mainstream media: Tim Brown of Yahoo! Sports; Bill Plaschke of the LA Times; Doug Miller of MLB.com; Gary Miller of CBS2/KCAL9 respectively.
I’m not complete naïve to see the Dodgers performed very poorly in this last road trip. We all would have loved to see them celebrate the NL West title in Pittsburgh so that these next three games against the Rockies would be a mere formality.
But it didn’t.
I understand the frustration, but I don’t think it’s any time to sound the alarms.
Back in 2006 the Detroit Tigers had a stronghold of the AL Central but let it slip in the final month of the season to the Minnesota Twins. But they got the wild card, and despite their awful play losing the last five games of the regular season they made it to the World Series.
In the same season the St. Louis Cardinals lost nine of their last 12 games en route to clinching the NL Central with 83 wins. In the playoffs, they beat the San Diego Padres in four games and New York Mets in seven to reach the World Series - both teams they had losing records with in the regular season. In the end the Cardinals took the hardware from the Tigers in five games, and that was that.
It would be a little more reassuring if the Dodgers were playing better. It would be great if Manny Ramirez, Casey Blake, Jim Thome, Ronnie Belliard and Hiroki Kuroda weren’t dealing with injury issues right now.
But back in late August when the Dodgers’ backs were against the walls with a dwindling lead in the NL West, they faced the Colorado Rockies and took control in Denver.
They will do the same again in this series. It’s not time to sound the alarms and run to higher ground. With the prince of Los Angeles Pete Carroll giving Manny Ramirez shit on Twitter, the Dodgers can’t fuck up too bad. Right?
