Oct. 17--Dear Dodgers,
On behalf of all your fans, thank you for a thrilling season. Thank you for all the time you spent away from your families, flying in the middle of the night to new cities and hotel pillows.
Don't think we don't appreciate the hard work. Seriously. Most of us have never done anything as humanly unnatural as 81 games on the road. Dizzy with travel, you must wake up some nights and wonder where in God's name you are, or where you hid the groupies. I just can't imagine 81 road games. What hurts more, the fastballs you foul off your ankle or four nights in Milwaukee?
Baseball is the longest slog. Hockey comes close. Invading Russia in the winter is a distant third. If it wasn't for the easy access to chess sets and good literature, being a ballplayer on the road would have to be the harshest of all punishments.
No, if you wanted days off, or a normal life, you never should've taken up baseball. You should've taken up law, or carpentry, or the trombone; we'll always need those skills. You could've been an astronaut -- are there still astronauts? Or a bank robber; these days, it's good to be self-employed.
Of all the careers, baseball must take the most out of your hide by age 30. All envy and silliness aside, we do appreciate your tireless work. Now it's time to kick back, snuggle the kids, thank the wife for helping with the homework and keeping the bank off your back.
In baseball, mere survival is half of it, right? Far as we fans can tell, there wasn't a single clubhouse brawl. Can't we all get along? Well, we did.
Sure, for a minute in that final game, we thought the right fielder might take a swing at the boss, right there in the dugout in front of 7 million viewers. But the way things were going that night, he probably would've missed anyway. Strike four! Sit down, son.
So goodbye, guys. Enjoy the off-season. Like most departing co-workers, promise to keep in touch, then let the promises slide. We understand. You're a baseball team, not a garden club. See you guys in Arizona.
Well, most of you, and that's OK. Speaking for the fans, we like this ballclub. Sass and class. Puig and Kershaw. You can go a long way on those kinds of ingredients.
Yep, we mostly like this roster, especially if Zack Greinke, Hyun-Jin Ryu and Brandon McCarthy all make it back. You could replace the skipper, but you could also do way worse. For the record, Terry Collins didn't suddenly develop into an elite manager. This season, he finally had the right racehorses.
Far as some purists are concerned, your greatest off-season loss may be the stadium organist, whom you'll probably just replace with more snarling rock music anyway. If it were up to me, they'd have a guy playing acoustic guitar between innings. If it were up to me, they'd use Dodger Stadium for morning mass and Debbie Gibson concerts.
This year, nearly 4 million fans showed up, so you must be doing something right. Honestly, not in years has the stadium been this comfortable, this clean, this functionally egalitarian.
Now, Dear Dodgers, if your bosses can just get that little technical glitch with my TV worked out.
Just let me be sure I've got it straight: The franchise is being paid $8.3 billion for TV rights, yet after two years much of the market doesn't get the local telecasts? That's the essence of it, right? Fake the money and run?
Look, I'm not the brightest big screen in the store. I rely on Siri to figure out my restaurant tips, and long as I live I'll never be able to tell the difference between Boomer Esiason and Phil Simms.
But I do know that a team would have substantial trouble in a seven-game series when it didn't have enough pitching for five. And that with the biggest payroll in sports, you should get beyond your first round.
But most of all, Dear Dodgers franchise, you have to fix this TV fiasco. You can obsess about Greinke all you want, spend the holidays counting your bullion and figuring out how to lure even more hard-hitting outfielders to L.A.
But if you don't settle this intransigent TV standoff by next season -- probably the last for Vin Scully, your biggest star -- there may be a pox on this franchise that may take decades to overcome.
Dear Dodgers, don't become your own curse.
