Jimmy Bramlett

Steve Nash told reporters after the Lakers opening night loss to the Dallas Mavericks on Tuesday that things would get uglier before they got better for the Laekrs. He was right. The Lakers were charitable to the Portland Trail Blazers coughing up the ball 25 times en route to their 116-106 loss.

Much has been made of the Lakers hiring Eddie Jordan as an assistant coach and installing the Princeton offense. The results throughout the 0-8 preseason looked rather lackluster and continued into the regular season opener as the Lakers fell to the Dallas Mavericks 99-91.

It was a rough evening for Tigers starter Doug Fister in the second game of the World Series in San Francisco. The Giants won 2-0 in the pitchers' duel to take a 2-0 lead in the series as it heads to Detroit for three games.

The clicking you heard throughout the evening were narratives that had to be rewritten as the first game of the 108th World Series got underway in San Francisco. We were supposed to marvel and salivate over Justin Verlander, or Mr. Kate Upton as he may be known in some corners, and his wafer-thin 0.74 ERA in three games this postseason.

So we're not in Dallas, Texas, home to the Allen High School $60 million football stadium and have a network prime time television show dedicated to the drama of high school football, but among us lives one of the best high school programs in the nation.

It wasn't the 95-degree day that I've been accustomed to dealing with in my last several trips to Santa Anita Park. But that made it a perfect setting for showcasing the best of the California-bred horses on the 23rd annual California Cup Day.

You should be reading about the Kings raising a Stanley Cup Championship banner at STAPLES Center, a sold-out crowd of 18,118 on their feet while the Kings have their final public celebration of the franchise's first championship. Finally above the retired numbers and the cringing embarrassment of their 1990-91 Smythe Division and 1992-93 Campbell Conference banners, they have a real banner up there in the rafters.

No Dwight Howard, no Kobe Bryant, no interest. It didn't really matter that the Lakers lost to the Portland Trail Blazers 93-75 especially since from the sound of the outrage on the interweb the only people who witnessed the game were the people at Citizen's Bank Arena in Ontario.

Dodger reliver Kenley Jansen's 94 mph fastball low and outside to the Giants Xavier Nady got him swinging and missing for strike three. That's how the Dodgers season ended, a 5-1 victory over the Giants.

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. It was quite the warm night the Dodgers were going into as they tried to heed the advice of Dylan Thomas as told by Vin Scully. Refusing to succumb to their deficiencies the Dodgers flailed and kicked and refused to go quietly "into that good night", but finally came up short in Game 161, a 4-3 loss to the San Francisco Giants.