For Los Angeles Dodgers fans, the realization that their club hasn’t played a meaningful game in the last month of the season remains tough to swallow.
Los Angeles is headed for a sub-.500 record and an offseason of turnover, a 500-foot home run from the last two seasons that saw the Dodgers advance to the National League Championship Series.
For a club as tradition-rich as the Dodgers operating in the second-largest market in the country—a market that provides a wealth of knowledgeable and passionate baseball people—such unnecessary turmoil that has savaged the organization in the last year has left the team with a county of exasperated fans.
But what the mangled ownership fails to realize is that this is a fan base that lives for the Dodgers, dies for the Dodgers and, above all else, supports the Dodgers.
In 2009, Dodger Stadium packed in more fans than any other ballpark in America. The team thrived, Manny Ramirez drew, and the people cheered.
What about this year, a year that has seen the corpse of Ramirez come and go along with one of the most successful managers in baseball history in Joe Torre because the losing became too much and the absence of a front-office leader became too crippling?
Without much reason to, the fans still showed up.
Los Angeles trails only the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Yankees in attendance this year.
Yeah, I know, population of a city has a ton to do with it, but it doesn’t have everything to do with it. Hell, Milwaukee currently ranks in the top 10 in attendance this year right behind the Boston Red Sox.
So, no, this isn’t St. Petersburg, where great baseball is going unwatched.
This is the feeble state of the Dodgers, where putrid baseball is undeservingly consumed.
Which is exactly why things need to change in Chavez Ravine this winter so that an organization worthy of October returns there, so that fans deserving of a World Series get there.
Here we present five potential changes that could help the Los Angeles Dodgers return to prominence in 2011.