Given the problem the Dodgers have with their pitchers staying in the rotation for the whole season, and the way Shohei Ohtani was lunging for sweepers, I would say, “Don’t allow him to hit anymore.” Bill Plaschke says Ohtani led them to two championships. In 2024, the 55/55 year, he indeed did, although I would argue that Freddie Freeman did even more. But last year, many others were responsible for their ultimate victory, not Ohtani. Use him as a pitcher and a part-time hitter.
Mike Schaller Temple City
So Bill Plaschke has momentarily stopped playing psychic and has morphed into general manager, saying the Dodgers should either force Shohei Ohtani to stop pitching or trade him. Is Plaschke part of the medical staff of the Dodgers so he knows the root causes of Ohtani’s injuries this year, or what it might take this offseason to fix them?
He has written a lot of inane columns making bold statements that he usually has to eat crow on, and trading Ohtani while he is still one of the best players on the planet would fall into that category. Ohtani will eventually get to the point where his body can’t do both, but I’m sure no one is using Bill Plaschke’s medical expertise to determine when that might be.
Danny Balber Jr. Pasadena
OK, so now Plaschke is ready to give the boot to Shohei Ohtani, the baseball GOAT, as he much as he was gleefully behind basketball GOAT LeBron James’ departure based upon his controlling of the team’s condition, from trades to draft picks. This takes more chutzpah than Ohtani’s insistence to continue as a two-way player.
When will the L.A. Times decide they’ve had enough of him?
Melanie Marx bought Angel City season tickets before the team was a team. It had no players, no coach and no uniform. It was more a concept than a reality and Marx bought in.
“I’ve always had pride for this team.” she said. “This was the first team from the NWSL that I’ve been able to say that I’m a supporter for.”
Yet supporting Angel City, she says, has been as exhausting as it has been exciting. Once the most valuable women’s professional sports team in history, Angel City has had one winning season and made just one playoff appearance in its first four seasons.
Attendance declined more than 22%, high-profile players such as Alyssa Thompson, Christen Press, Ali Riley and Madison Hammond have either been transferred away, retired or been allowed to leave and the team hasn’t re-signed popular captain Sarah Gorden for next season. At the same time, it has gone through five coaches and three general managers/sporting directors in less than five years.
Angel City defender Gisele Thompson celebrates with teammates after scoring a goal.
(Lindsey Wasson / Associated Press)
That’s not exactly what Marx signed up for.
“I’m upset as a fan, of course, and I’m upset as a season-ticket holder,” she said. “But I’m also upset as a fan of these players and someone who’s been invested in this league of almost 10 years.”
“What keeps myself and others coming back week to week is because of the players themselves,” she added. “Because the results on the pitch haven’t always matched the ambitions of the supporters.”
During the past three months, that support has finally been rewarded. Following Sunday’s draw with first-place Gotham FC, the reigning NWSL champion, Angel City (12-8-7) heads into the league’s two-week international break riding a seven-game unbeaten streak and is in sixth place in the 16-team table, in position for another playoff berth.
The team has lost just twice in 16 games under interim coach Leif Gunnar Smerud. Its 12 victories with three games to play is already a franchise record for a single season, as are its 45 goals. After posting a substantial negative goal differential in its first four seasons, Angel City’s plus-16 mark this year in best in the league.
And in the current international break, the team had a record nine players called up to various national teams. It’s one of the most dramatic turnarounds in NWSL history, one that may have saved at least a portion of the team’s most loyal fan base.
“My renewal for next year just recently came up and I was on a bit of knife’s edge deciding whether I want to go ahead,” said Michael Jaeger, an attorney who has had multiple Angel City season tickets in section 133 since the first season. “There have been consistent problems throughout.
“I really want the team to succeed. Given the recent successes, I did go ahead and re-up for next year because I’m feeling optimistic.”
Optimistic but not necessarily confident.
“I am not feeling like ‘OK, this is what I’ve been waiting for. The team’s really turned a corner,’” Jaeger said. “That to me would be success on the field, plus a decision about Sarah Gorden, plus [a] permanent head coach who we know is at least going to have one or more seasons to have things play out.
“So I don’t think we’re there yet. I like the current trend but because not a lot has necessarily changed about the front office, I’m not ready to say ‘OK, we’re fully on the right track.’”
Angel City has only itself to blame for that lack of trust. When the team launched with a massive ownership group that included Hollywood A-listers, former U.S. women’s national team stars and sports luminaries including Serena Williams and Billie Jean King, it promised to ignite a revolution in women’s sports.
Angel City FC fans chant during a match against the San Diego Wave at BMO Stadium on May 9.
(Luiza Moraes / Getty Images)
“We’re not just building a soccer club. We want to build an organization that has impact,” said Julie Uhrman, one of its team’s three founding owners.
And while Angel City has done real, meaningful work in the community, providing millions of meals to the hungry, funneling millions of dollars into community programs and taking a courageous stand against ICE raids across Southern California, as a soccer team it hasn’t delivered on its promises.
The loyal fans blame the front office, which has waived nearly six dozens players and five managers, including interim coaches, through its revolving doors since the first season. Mark Parsons, who won six trophies as manager with the Portland Thorns, was hired 20 months ago to stabilize things but his highly touted global search for a coach ended with Alexander Straus spending just a year with the club — going 7-15-5 in parts of two seasons — while Parsons unsettled the roster by making more than 40 transactions.
“There’s just a lack of trust in the front office frankly,” said Nadia Johnson, who attended games every season but didn’t buy season tickets until this year. “We’re still doing these chaotic things, which is really frustrating as a fan.”
And the chaos may not be ending anytime soon. Despite his success, Smerud has not publicly been guaranteed anything beyond this season; officially, the team is still searching for a new manager.
Gorden, the captain and anchor of the defense, is out of contract at the end of the season as is veteran Claire Emslie. Meanwhile Sydney Leroux, 36, who has played one minute the past two seasons as she deals with mental health issues, is signed through 2027.
At the same time, Parsons has built the league’s youngest roster around players whose performances are bigger than their names. Goalkeeper Angelina Anderson, 25, is third in the league with nine clean sheets and 12 wins. Brazilian Maiara Niehues, 22, already has a franchise-record nine goals while Evelyn Shores, 21, has tied the single-season record with seven assists and defender Gisele Thompson, Alyssa’s sister, leads all outfield players with 2,420 minutes.
“I am excited about how diverse our team is and really how they’ve grown,” season ticket-holder Johnson said. “It’s playoff crunch time and so it’s always exciting, especially when your team is in it. So I’m excited to see where they go.”
But after four seasons of mediocrity and worse, however, she’s learned to keep her fingers crossed.
“I’m not confident if we get a rough patch next year what decisions will be made in terms of trying to repair that,” she said. “So yeah, that’s where I’m at.”
The most forgotten hero in Dodger history stepped out of the shadows in 1987 as their instant general manager and created the miraculous monster that came to be in 1988.
The resuscitation of a Dodger brand during what was quite possibly its darkest moment? It all started with Fred Claire, the longtime Dodger executive who died Monday in his Pasadena home on his 91st birthday.
His quiet presence will forever be missed. His audacious impact should never be forgotten.
Claire was an endlessly kind, disarmingly honest and eternally humble sort whose love for the Dodgers was perhaps best illustrated by the story of his most prized souvenir.
After the Dodgers clinched the 1988 World Series championship in a stunning victory over the heavily favored Oakland A’s, catcher Rick Dempsey approached Claire in the champagne-soaked clubhouse. In Dempsey’s back pocket was the game ball used by Orel Hershiser to strike out Tony Phillips for the game’s final out.
Fred Claire talks with Dodgers coach Joe Amalfitano at a batting cage during spring training.
(Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)
Dempsey handed the ball to Claire in gratitude for the belief shown by the general manager in signing Dempsey and several other journeymen who helped lead the team to the title.
Claire quietly accepted the ball, took it home, put it on a shelf, but several years later realized it was needed elsewhere. At the time, the National Baseball Hall of Fame only had two final-out balls. Once again believing that the Dodgers were more important than himself, he donated his jewel to Cooperstown. The shelf remained empty.
“I just played one role in all this,” Claire told me several years ago. “In getting through our difficult times, I always believed in ‘We.’”
Referring to the Dodgers’ 1987 season as a difficult time was an understatement.
In April, longtime general manager Al Campanis was fired for making racist remarks about Black Americans on the TV show, “Nightline.”
Peter O’Malley, the Dodgers’ president at the time, made the sudden and strange choice to replace Campanis with Claire, the team’s public relations boss who had spent the first 11 years of his career as a sportswriter.
There was much criticism. There was overwhelming disbelief. But instead of apologizing for the promotion, Claire ran with it. One day after taking the job he cut popular pitcher Jerry Reuss and signed unemployed Mickey Hatcher and set the stunt man tone.
”I wanted some fire, and Mickey was the guy who could give us that,” Claire told me. “I don’t know if there were people who doubted me, but I never doubted myself. I knew I had the job for today, and I was going to make the most out of that day.”
He slowly turned a stuffy and entitled team into a lean and scrappy one, and by the time he made the brilliant move of signing free agent Kirk Gibson in January of 1988, the stage had been set.
Nine months later, it was only fitting that Gibson’s famous walk-off homer against Dennis Eckersley of the A’s in the World Series opener scored Mike Davis, who was also signed by Claire.
And the most valuable position player in that series? None other than the guy Claire signed first.
“Fred Claire was amazing,” Hatcher told me. “For a guy who was suddenly put into the limelight, he asked all the right questions, listened to everyone, and believed in all of us.’’
It was this great belief in collaboration that burned Claire in 1993 when he traded seemingly frail pitcher Pedro Martínez for second baseman Delino DeShields on the advice of his medical staff.
Martínez, of course, became a Hall of Famer while Claire became saddled with the stain of one of the worst trades in Dodger history. The perception surely irked a man who was just following organizational advice, but Claire never backed down from his role in the deal.
“The facts have to be the facts, and those facts are, I traded Pedro,” Claire told me.
That was Fred Claire personified, honest to the end, refusing to sacrifice his integrity, never surrendering his dignity.
Because he was too modest for acclaim and too quiet for headlines, Claire essentially disappeared from the Dodgers orbit for nearly two decades after his firing, instead focusing on teaching, consulting, and co-writing an autobiography entitled, “Fred Claire: My 30 Years in Dodger Blue.”
During this time he also became a touchstone for all Dodger alumni, as many former players contacted him daily for advice or help or just to remember the good old days. He never failed to answer a call, never turned down a request, seemingly every former Dodger knew his number and leaned on his goodness.
He was finally honored at Dodger Stadium in the summer of 2017 in an emotional ceremony that was long overdue. By then, he was heavily involved in the last great fight of his life, a battle against cancer that led him to become an important advocate and fund raiser for City of Hope.
In one of his final visits there last month, Claire didn’t focus on his illness, but rather his room number. He was quite proud that it was 4217, because Jackie Robinson was 42. Claire was with Robinson shortly before his death and constantly stressed the connection between the icon and his franchise.
In our final correspondence, on the day before he died, Claire texted me and several others with seven photos.
There were images of him with wife Sheryl, with Lasorda, with Dave Roberts, with several champagne-stained Dodgers in a celebratory clubhouse.
There was also a picture that did not contain him but spoke volumes about his character. It was a simple photo of a plaque bearing the number 42 and accompanied by a quote.
“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”
