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Kelly Reichardt’s watchful cinema is one of the indie world’s most exquisite bounties, a space for pioneers (“Meek’s Cutoff,” “First Cow”), artists (“Showing Up”) and wanderers (“Old Joy,” “Wendy and Lucy”) who command your attention the way an ER waiting room does, lingering tensely.

One might not consider a heist film in such anthropological terms. And yet “The Mastermind,” Reichardt’s latest and one of her best, while set in motion by a daylight art grab orchestrated by Josh O’Connor’s middle-class Massachusetts suburbanite, is another precisely turned Reichardt movie: honest, sad, funny and inherently philosophical about our engagement with the world. As you might expect, it’s really about the crime’s aftermath, our cut from this robbery being a deft, fascinating character study rooted in an apathy that’s starkly juxtaposed with the restive year it’s set in: 1970.

By the look of things, preppy, soft-spoken James Mooney (O’Connor), an unemployed carpenter, isn’t obvious criminal material, no matter what composer Ray Mazurek’s propulsive, horn-forward jazz score might imply. James cases his local art museum, often with his unwitting wife, Teri (Alana Haim), and two young boys in tow. Otherwise, James is just a distracted dad, checked-out husband and disappointing son living off the status and largesse of his parents, an esteemed judge (Bill Camp) and a society mother (Hope Davis).

Still, based solely on the error-prone heist — it’s been ages since pantyhose masks seemed so ridiculous — thievery isn’t this spoiled man’s strong suit either. (You didn’t think that title was respectful, did you?) When he’s stashing the stolen paintings later in a farmhouse’s hayloft and accidentally knocks the ladder out from under him, the moment is amusing and appropriately metaphorical.

Reichardt is laying bare a privileged man’s half-assed delinquency, especially with O’Connor so hypnotic at conveying self-absorbed cluelessness with his woeful eyes, posture and movement. As the movie then hits the road for his escape, the early fall colors of Christopher Blauvelt’s cinematography shift to gray tones and darker interiors, and James’ vibe is less rebel eluding capture — even if a pal he visits (John Magaro) expresses admiration — than alienated loser leaving behind a mess, an assessment radiating from Gaby Hoffmann as Magaro’s wife. The bebop groove abandons James, too, slowing into jagged drum solos.

The last contextual indignity are the details of the period itself: Nixon posters, anti-war signs, Vietnam footage on televisions, a protest march. Unforced but ever-present in Reichardt’s mise-en-scène, they remind us that this bored aesthete’s misadventure is an especially empty way to buck conformity. When good trouble beckons, why pick the bad kind?

One can even detect, in this brilliant, captivating Reichardt gem about fortune and fate, a what-if attached to her disaffected male protagonist: Would today’s version of James, just as adrift and arrogant, steal art to assuage his emptiness? Or, thanks to the internet, succeed at something much worse? “The Mastermind” may be an ironic title as heists go. But it also hints at the male-pattern badness still to come.

The Milwaukee Brewers have no chance.

Neither will the Seattle Mariners or Toronto Blue Jays.

The clear truth emerged from the Dodger Stadium shadows late Thursday amid a downtown-shaking roar of delight and disbelief.

This is ridiculous. This is simply ridiculous, how well the Dodgers are playing, how close the history books are beckoning, and how an ordinary summer has been followed with unbelievable days of the extraordinary.

The Dodgers are not going to lose another game this October. Write it down, bet it up, no major league baseball team has ever played this well in the postseason, ever, ever, ever.

With their 3-1 victory over the Brewers Thursday in Game 3 of the National League Championship Series, the Dodgers take a three-games-to-none lead with a sweep likely in the next 24 hours and coronation coming in the next two weeks.

The Dodgers are going to win this NLCS and follow it with a four-game whitewash of the World Series because, well, you tell me.

How is anybody going to beat them?

Match their aces-flush rotation? Nope. Equal their hot closer and revived bullpen? Sorry. Better than their deep lineup? Nobody is even close.

The Dodgers are more than halfway to finishing the most dominant postseason in baseball history, it’s all there in the numbers.

The only team to go undefeated through the playoffs since the divisional era began was the 1976 Cincinnati Reds. But the Big Machine only had to win seven games. Since the playoffs were expanded and the test became tougher, the greatest October streaks have belonged to the 2005 Chicago White Sox and 1999 New York Yankees, both of whom went 11-1.

These Dodgers were forced into that early wild-card series, so if they end this postseason without another loss, they will finish 13-1.

The last time a team in this town had such a dominating postseason was the champion 2001 Lakers, who went 15-1 in the postseason with only one stumble against Philadelphia on the night Allen Iverson famously stepped over Tyronn Lue.

Those Lakers were legendary. These Dodgers will be soon.

They are currently 8-1 in the playoffs and have won 23 of their previous 29 games and again, who’s going to beat them?

Start with that rotation. Tyler Glasnow followed gems by Blake Snell and Yoshinobu Yamamoto Thursday by twirling 5 ⅔ innings of swing and miss, holding the Brewers to one run with eight strikeouts, and in three games the Brewers have scored two runs in 22 ⅔ innings against Dodger starters.

And perhaps their best pitcher hasn’t even taken the mound yet, that being Friday’s starter Shohei Ohtani.

Now for their deep lineup. Ohtani is still mired in a career-worst slump, but his one hit Thursday was a leadoff triple that led to him scoring the first run, and seemingly everybody else chipped in. Mookie Betts had the first RBI, Tommy Edman knocked in Will Smith with the go-ahead run in the sixth, a hustling Freddie Freeman scored on a wild pickoff attempt, and on and on..

Finish with their bullpen, which is actually finishing. Taking over for Glasnow with a runner on first and two out in the sixth Thursday, Alex Vesia, Blake Treinen, Anthony Banda and Roki Sasaki shut the Brewers down the rest of the way, and their regular-season weakness has become their strength.

Incidentally, Sasaki’s ninth-inning shutdown was aided by a brilliant in-the-hole putout by shortstop Betts, and that’s just one more way the Dodgers can beat you.

All this, and as Thursday confirmed, they have arguably the best home-field advantage in baseball.

No place is bigger. No place draws more fans. And no place is louder, from the bleacher-rattling roar to the cover-your-ears sound system.

“This place has an aura about it,” Max Muncy said of Dodger Stadium. “It’s the biggest capacity in baseball. Everybody talks about it when you come here. The lights seem a little brighter. The music seems a little louder — that might actually be because it is a little louder.”

Yeah, fans, you might hate the otherworldly stadium volume, but the players like it.

“That’s part of the perks of being at Dodger Stadium, we have that sound system,” said Muncy. “It sounds silly to say something like a sound system could be an advantage. But it really is. When the speakers in the center field are cranking and the crowd is going absolutely nuts and you feel the field shaking beneath your feet, it’s a really big advantage. And that’s something we’ve always had here.”

The stadium rose to the occasion Thursday as it always does this time of year, filling up despite the weird mid-afternoon starting time, constantly standing and screaming by the game’s end.

“When we’ve had those big moments, there’s arguably no place that can get louder than Dodger Stadium, especially in the postseason,” Muncy said. “When you have 56, 57,000 people screaming all at the same time in a big moment, it’s pretty wild. That’s an advantage that we’ve always had here, and the guys love it.”

There’s a lot to love.

Among my many memories of hiking around Southern California, I have a few that haunt me.

The time I got briefly lost around Mt. Waterman, where I’d been several times. When I ran out of water hiking Strawberry Peak on an unseasonably hot day. When I was dressed appropriately for a long day hike until I fell into the river and was uncomfortably cold for the rest of the day. When I thought I was on trail only to realize I was kind of stuck on a steep, unstable hillside.

Each time, I was underprepared. Each bad experience was preventable. That’s the lesson of today’s Wild.

I spoke to Dr. Rob Scanlon, author of the newly published “Surviving the Trail” (Falcon Guides), a guide book that lays out how we can prevent the most common hiking emergencies by slowing down and planning long before we hit the trail.

Scanlon said he sees his work as less of a “hiker safety” book and more of a “hiker empowerment” book.

“I’m hoping people will recognize that this is intrinsically a dangerous place to be,” said Scanlon, who is board certified in internal medicine, pulmonology, critical care and sleep medicine. “Being a little bit anticipatory, and certainly concentrating on the simple things you can control, will really lead to an almost near guarantee that you will not end up the subject of a news headline.”

I never want to write about any of you, dear Wilders, unless it’s to amplify the great work you’re doing in the outdoors. I do, however, want to help us all learn — through a thoughtful, not sensationalist, approach — how we can make the kinds of memories we enjoy reflecting on.

The subtitle to Scanlon’s book is “Five Essential Skills to Prepare Every Hiker for Adventure’s Most Common Perils.” Let’s dive into what those are.

1. Dehydration 🥵

Long before 7-Eleven, Buc-ee’s and (as an Okie, I must mention) QuikTrip, humans had to actually plan for hydration. Today, if you’re out and about and you’re thirsty, there are generally “20 places you could stop within a rock-throwing distance where you could grab something to drink,” Scanlon said. “We’re more acting in real-time in our off-trail lives, not anticipatory like it used to be.”

This mindset can lead to a lack of planning around hydration. And it shows in the data, as Scanlon notes in his book. “Thousands of hikers” require rescue every year because of issues around dehydration, he wrote.

In his book, Scanlon outlines not only how to determine whether you’re dehydrated on the trail but also, arguably more important, how to plan out your fluid needs. The key factors for determining how much water you should pack are: how fast you’ll be hiking, the terrain you’re traversing, the temperatures you’ll encounter and how humid it’ll be.

Scanlon outlines this in a handy chart, which I used to determine I’m generally bringing enough water: about 32 ounces an hour, given I’m going about 2.5 mph, gaining between 1,200- and 2,000-feet elevation and hiking in moderate temperatures.

“I try to stress strategy. Stopping at the local gas station on the way to the trailhead and grabbing a 12- or 16-ounce bottle of [water] is not a strategy,” said Scanlon, who lives in Georgia. “The strategy begins before the hike.”

2. Perilous weather ☀️❄️

As we head into colder temperatures here in Southern California — we just got snow in our mountains! — it is crucial to layer appropriately, including with the right materials.

Any hiker has experienced the phenomenon of bundling up at the car and then needing to shed at least one layer at the start of the hike. Scanlon said as we move and generate heat, we need to either shed or open layers, aiming to maintain feeling a little on the cool side.

My favorite cool-weather layering approach is a merino wool base layer with a puffer vest on top. Sometimes I add gloves, but it really depends on the wind temperature. I often wear either fleece-lined hiking pants, especially if I will be around snow, or thick leggings. And I almost always have on these socks, which all my friends are tired of hearing about. In my pack, I carry extra socks and another base layer that I often change into at my destination. I also like to have my rain jacket (with pit vents!) in case it’s windy at the summit.

All of this is informed by one basic thing I do before hiking: I extensively check the weather, which is not always a straight-forward process.

“Most only look at the weather forecast before traveling, but it often changes as hike time approaches and may not apply to whether the hike will actually take place,” Scanlon wrote. “Forecasts often pertain to the conditions in the nearest city center or local airport and not necessarily those in the hiking areas and surrounding mountains.”

Scanlon outlines great resources to be better prepared for mountain conditions, including this website.

3. Crossing rivers and creeks

Drowning is the most common cause of death in national parks, including misunderstanding how to safely swim in or cross a river. Even the experts struggle with that, which emphasizes just how challenging — and dangerous — it can really be.

Scanlon told me about a five-day backpacking trip he took to the majestic Banff National Park. There was a man-made bridge over every creek crossing, except for one. The trail directed Scanlon and his friends to cross a wide, swift, deep river, and despite scouting other options, they found there was no good spot to cross elsewhere.

At first, Scanlon felt safe, knowing how to cross a river, including facing upstream

, leaning into the oncoming water flow and shuffling slowly, moving through stable sidesteps.

But as he entered the outside curve, which he knew would be the fastest and deepest part, he was in water almost to his hips, “which is the no-go zone.”

“But I was almost there, and I got pretty close to getting toppled over, but I leaned into the oncoming water extra hard to counterbalance it and somehow got through,” he said. “Even when you do it right, you can still have issues, but I think the majority of times it’s not knowing the technique, not knowing where it’s best to cross and maybe the hubris factor.”

4. Falling from high places

People are increasingly getting too bold in high places, especially in the name of selfies and social media posts, Scanlon said.

The way to get ahead of this problem on your own journey is to decide yourself and within your group that you will not let the glory ahead of you influence your behavior.

I did similar on a recent trip to Taft Point, where multiple travelers have fallen to their deaths. I’d seen the gorgeous images of hikers sitting or posing on a rock that juts out dramatically over Yosemite Valley, and I’d told myself, “Maybe not.” Instead, my dear friend Patrick captured my image safely from a lookout point (which, per optical illusion, looks like I’m much closer to the edge than I am).

It can be hard to fight against this FOMO, but going beyond safety rails or going off-trail for better views or trying to impress our friends can all lead to deadly outcomes.

“There are certainly people who’ve fallen from unstable ground beneath them, and that you can’t necessarily prepare for,” Scanlon said. “But the majority of [accidents] are bad behaviors, like poorly executed selfies and [people] doing things they really shouldn’t. We should not be doing our first handstand ever on an 800-foot cliff.”

5. Getting lost

This is arguably both the most important chapter (Skill 5: Land Navigation) of Scanlon’s book and the most important thing you can understand outside of hydrating appropriately.

Because, as Scanlon pointed out to me, understanding the factors around how we get lost “is extraordinarily important to nail down because getting lost is the gateway to the other perils.”

So, how do we not get lost?

In an estimated 40% of cases, a hiker got lost because they wondered off-trail, Scanlon wrote. This could be because they accidentally followed a spur or game trail, thinking it was the true trail. Another 17% of cases involve bad weather striking, and hikers moving off-trail to seek shelter.

Scanlon goes into extensive detail — just over 100 pages — about how to navigate in the wilderness, including how to use the different types of compasses, understanding the different parts of the compass and more.

One of his suggestions is easy enough to follow: “Before venturing out on any day hike or backpacking trip, study the map ahead of time and identify the nearest safety point,” whether that be a nearby road, railway, local airport or nearby town. Whatever you choose, it should hold the highest potential for seeing other people who can help and have the fewest visible obstacles on the map to arrive there.

“Navigating to this safety point will be our fallback plan when we have become lost and all else fails to get us back to the trail or trailhead,” Scanlon wrote.

I hope you can take this knowledge and apply it to your next hike. I know I will (and probably also pack Scanlon’s book in my backpack), along with carrying this mindset with me on the trail:

“The No. 1 goal is everyone gets home in one piece, and the secondary goal to get to the summit” or wherever you’re headed, Scanlon told me. “As long as you start out with the predetermined goal that everybody gets home, I think everything you prepare for and every on-trail decision you make should be serving that goal.”

3 things to do

1. Roast marshmallows in the Baldwin Hills
The Nature Nexus Institute and California State Parks will host a campfire stroll from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday at Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook. Families can participate in hands-on activities, listen at storytime and roast marshmallows for s’mores by the campfire. Register using the park’s Google form.

2. Heal the land in Elysian Park
Volunteers are needed in two shifts Friday at Elysian Park to help maintain native plant life. From 8 to 10 a.m., volunteers will work at the burn plot, an experimental restoration garden. Later in the day, volunteers will prune and water plants from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. Learn more about the morning event at testplot.info and the afternoon event here.

3. Document flora and fauna in Pacoima
L.A. city’s junior urban ecologist Ryan Kinzel will host a community science-focused hike from 8 to 10 a.m. Saturday at Hansen Dam (10965 Dronfield Ave., Pacoima). Kinzel will lead guests in participating in the L.A. Nature Quest by using app iNaturalist to document plant and animal life as the group hikes. Learn more at the parks department’s Instagram page.

The must-read

There are so many ways to experience Catalina Island, including bikepacking. Times contributor James Murren took a two-day trip from East End to Little Harbor Campground and back to Avalon, covering 40-plus miles and about 5,000 feet of elevation. In his guide on how to bikepack the island, Murren writes about not only the beauty but also the surprising solitude he found there. “I had not seen another person for quite a while as I biked deeper into the hinterlands of the island, connecting to East End Light Road,” Murren wrote. “Along the ‘backside’ of the southern end of Catalina, it felt even more remote. East End afforded stunning views of the ocean and San Clemente Island to the south.” What a remarkable opportunity — and it’s only a ferry ride away!

Happy adventuring,

P.S.

Birders off the coast of Sonoma and Marin counties got quite the surprise last week when they spotted the critically endangered waved albatross, the largest bird in the Galapagos! It’s believed to be the first sighting of the bird north of Costa Rica, and it remains unclear what brought it more than 3,000 miles north of its homeland. Those lucky enough to see it included a seabird tour. “The excitement level on the boat when the bird was first identified was intense, with much screaming and shrieking, followed by beatific smiles from a dream come true,” passenger Glen Tepke told a Press Democrat reporter. Ah, the mystery and surprise that each new adventure brings!

For more insider tips on Southern California’s beaches, trails and parks, check out past editions of The Wild. And to view this newsletter in your browser, click here.

More than two decades after their peak, the music of Yellowcard is a pop punk message in a bottle. The note that washed ashore from a simpler time describes the image of a young, sharply-dressed band full of aspirations, thrashing on their instruments — violin included — in the echoey tomb of an underground parking garage in the music video for “Ocean Avenue” as the chorus kicks into overdrive.

“If I could find you now, things would get better, we could leave this town and run forever, let your waves crash down on me and take me away,” frontman Ryan Key sang ecstatically at the top of his lungs.

That hit song, the title track of 2003’s “Ocean Avenue,” created a tidal wave of success that changed the course of their career from struggling artists to a world-touring headliner and darlings of MTV’s Total Request Live.

“The first time it happened, we were really young,” Key said, gingerly grasping a spoon with his heavily tattooed hand while stirring a cup of hot tea. “We were quite literally a garage band one minute, and then we were playing on the MTV Video Music Awards and David Letterman and whatever else the next minute.”

It’s a moment that hasn’t escaped his memory 22 years later. Now, he and his bandmates — violinist Sean Mackin, bassist Josh Portman and guitarist Ryan Mendez — are far from the ocean but not too far from water as they look out at a sparkling pool from the window from a suite at the Yaamava’ Resort and Casino in Highland. A couple hours from now, the band will play a splashy pool party gig for 98.7 ALT FM. The set will include a raft of all the old hits, including “Ocean Avenue” of course, as well as their first new songs in almost a decade.

Before the release of the first singles for the new album, “Better Days,” it might’ve been easy to write off their 11th album as another release destined to be overshadowed by their early catalog. However, with the right amount of internal inspiration and outside help from Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker, who produced and played all the drums on the album, the result was a batch of new songs that haven’t simply been washed out to sea. Quite the opposite, actually.

Prior to the album’s release, the title track “Better Days” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart. This achievement came after a 22-year wait since their first appearance on the chart with the “Ocean Avenue” single “Way Away.” Key also notes that it’s the first time fans are using the band’s new music for their TikTok videos instead of “Ocean Avenue.”

“That’s crazy,” Key said. “Everyone is using ‘Better Days.’ I don’t think we’re alone in that. I think for bands in our scene, new music is getting a lot of love and a lot of attention again, and it’s amazing to see.”

It’s been about three years since the band reemerged to play a reunion set at RiotFest in Chicago, following their 2017 farewell show at the House of Blues in Anaheim. At the point they were ready to call it quits, the band was struggling to sell enough tickets to their shows to keep the dream alive. For Mackin, fatherhood forced him to also consider his family’s financial stability, prompting him to enter the corporate workforce as a sales rep and eventually becoming a service director for Toyota. At one point, he was responsible for managing 120 employees. “I just thought that was going to be what I was going to do to take care of my family for the next 20 years,” Mackin said.

After Yellowcard’s hiatus, Key continued playing music in several projects that distanced themselves from the pop punk sound — including recording solo work under his full name William Ryan Key, touring with bassist Portman at his side. Key also produced a post-rock electronic-heavy project called Jedha with Mendez, and the pair also does a lot of TV and film scoring work. For a long time, Key and his bandmates mourned the loss of what they had with Yellowcard. It was the most important thing in Key’s life, though he said he didn’t realize how much the band truly shaped him until it was over.

“Ungrateful is not the word to use about how I felt back then. It’s more like I didn’t have the tools to appreciate it, to feel gratitude and really let things happen and and stay in the moment and stay focused. Because I was so young, I was so insecure about my place, my role in all of it,” Key said.

But after some time away, the raucous 2022 Riot Fest reunion show relit the band’s fire in a way they hadn’t expected. They followed up with a 2023 EP “Childhood Eyes” that pushed the band to take things further with a new full album. Along with these plans came the stunning news that Barker would sign on to produce and play drums for them on the project. For a band that grew up idolizing Blink 182 and Barker specifically as the band’s red-hot engine behind the kit who spent the last 20 years evolving into a music mogul, it was a surreal experience.

“We look at him like a general. It was never lost that the best drummer of our generation is playing drums with us,” Mackin said. “We know him as Travis now, but man, this guy is just oozing talent — he’s doing all these amazing things and he doesn’t seem overrun by it, not distracted one bit. While we were recording, he was right there with us.”

Key says he was initially intimidated singing in front of Barker in the studio and had a few moments where negative, self-conscious thoughts were getting the better of him in the vocal booth during recording. Instead of getting annoyed, he says Barker helped ease his anxiety with a few simple words.

“Travis came into the booth, closed the door, put his hand on my shoulder, and he said, ‘You’re gonna do this as many times as you need to do it. I’m gonna be here the whole time.’” Barker was truly speaking from experience. He told Key at the time that he’d just recorded 87 rough takes of his parts on “Lonely Road,” his hit song with Jelly Roll and MGK. “That was a real crossroads for me,” Key said.

The aspect of the album that feels most akin to “Ocean Avenue” was that Barker never really allowed them to overthink anything when it came to songwriting, a skill the band had unwittingly mastered as kids back in the “Ocean Avenue” days by writing songs on the fly in the studio with little time to care about how a song might end up before they recorded it.

“There’s something about the way we did this record with Travis, where we would walk in and did it in a way we haven’t done in 20 plus years with him saying ‘We’re gonna write and record a song today,’” Key said. “ It was a return to that style of songwriting where you have to kind of get out of your comfort zone and just throw and go.”

The final product moves swiftly over 10 songs, the track list starts with a flurry of energy from the bombastic opening drums of “Better Days” that propel a song on inner reflection on the past. It moves on to the high-energy heartbreak of “Love Letters,” featuring Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio. Avril Lavigne lends her soaring vocals to the unrequited love song “You Broke Me Too.” Songs like “City of Angels” and “Bedroom Posters” track episodes in Key’s life where his band’s hiatus took a negative toll on his outlook on life but also about looking for a way back to rediscovering himself. The album wraps with the acoustic lullaby “Big Blue Eyes,” which Keys wrote as a tribute to his son.

Though the songs on “Better Days” frequently wrestle with self-doubt and uncertainty, the response from fans has been surprisingly supportive, Key said.

“I cannot recall seeing this level of overwhelming positive feedback. People are just flipping out over these songs,” the frontman said. “The recording was such a whirlwind. When I listen to it, it’s still kind of like ‘When did I write that song?’ It happened so fast, and we made the record so fast, but I’m glad we just did it.” Despite the success, Key is hesitant to label the band comeback kids, “probably because we are officially passed kids label,” he said.

“Maybe it’s the return of the gentlemen?” Mackin joked.

Whatever they call themselves, coming back to the band after so many years of different experiences has made Yellowcard’s second shot at a career feel all the more rewarding.

“Because you feel like you know you’re capable of something other than being in this band, capable of connecting with your family in a way that you couldn’t when you were on the road all the time,” Mackin said. “There’s things that happened in that break that set us up for success as human beings, not just as creative people.”

For Key, it’s about taking all the lessons they’ve learned as a band and applying them to their future, realizing that the album’s title refers not just to the past behind them, but what lies ahead.

“This record needed to be the ultimate revival, the ultimate redemption song for our band,” Key said. “And so far it’s, it’s proven to be that.”

Gabriel Pec had a goal and an assist, Elijah Wynder also scored a goal and the Galaxy beat FC Dallas 2-1 on Saturday night.

Pec put away a shot from nearly the penalty spot to give the Galaxy (6-18-9) a 2-1 lead in the 87th minute.

Dallas (10-12-11) is eighth in the Western Conference with 41 points, three behind seventh-place Portland. Salt Lake and Colorado are tied with 40 points.

Logan Farrington was shown a straight red card in the 16th minute and Dallas played a man down the rest of the way.

Wynder slipped behind the defense and ran onto a long ball ahead played by Pec and then scored on a shot from the edge of the penalty area that deflected off goalkeeper Michael Collodi, who had charged off his line, to give the Galaxy a 1-0 lead in the 42nd minute.

Anderson Julio put away a first-touch finish — off a cross played by Samuel Sarver — from the center of the area to make it 1-1 in the 52nd.

The Galaxy had 67% possession and outshot Dallas 13-9.

When Shohei Ohtani was asked about his woeful performance at the plate in the Dodgers’ National League Division Series against the Philadelphia Phillies last week, he first gave credit to the opposition.

Then, after a series that saw the Phillies counter him with one left-handed pitcher after the next, he was also quick to point out that he wasn’t alone.

“It was pretty difficult for left-handed hitters,” Ohtani said in Japanese amid the Dodgers’ clubhouse celebration following their Game 4 victory. “This was also the case for Freddie [Freeman].”

The Phillies did indeed make life tough on the Dodgers’ best lefty bats.

Freeman was only three for 15 in the series, albeit with a key Game 2 double and a .294 on-base-percentage.

Max Muncy was four for nine in the series, but spent most of it waiting on the bench, not getting a start in any of the three contests the Phillies had a southpaw on the mound.

And as a team, the Dodgers hit just .199 with 41 strikeouts in the four-game series.

However, no one’s struggles were as pronounced as Ohtani’s — the soon-to-be four-time MVP winner, who in the NLDS looked like anything but.

Ohtani struck out in each of his first four at-bats in Game 1. He didn’t get his first hit until grounding an RBI single through the infield in the seventh inning of Game 2.

After that, Ohtani’s only other time reaching base safely was when the Phillies intentionally walked him in the seventh inning of Game 4.

His final stat line from the series: One for 18, nine strikeouts and a whole lot of questions about what went wrong.

Ohtani, who was coming off a three-hit, two-homer wild-card round, did acknowledge Thursday night that “there were at-bats that didn’t go the way I thought they would.”

But, he quickly added: “The opposing pitchers didn’t make many mistakes. They pitched wonderfully, in a way that’s worthy for the postseason. There were a lot of games like that for both teams.”

The real question coming out of the series was about the root cause of Ohtani’s unexpected struggles.

Was it simply because of the tough pitching matchups, having faced a lefty in 12 of his 20 trips to the plate? Or had his faltering approach created more legitimate concerns, the kind that could threaten to continue into the NL Championship Series?

“I think a lot of it actually was driven by the left-handed pitching,” manager Dave Roberts said Saturday, as the Dodgers awaited to face either the Chicago Cubs or Milwaukee Brewers in an NLCS that will begin on Monday.

However, the manager also put the onus on his $700-million superstar to be better.

“Hoping that he can do a little self-reflecting on that series, and how aggressive he was outside of the strike zone, passive in the zone,” Roberts said. “The at-bat quality needs to get better.”

For the Dodgers, the implications are stark.

“We’re not gonna win the World Series with that sort of performance,” Roberts continued. “So we’re counting on a recalibration, getting back into the strike zone.”

From the very first at-bat of Game 1 — when he was also the starting pitcher in his first career playoff game as a two-way player — Ohtani struggled to make the right swing decisions.

He chased three pitches off the inside of the plate from Phillies lefty Cristopher Sánchez, which Roberts felt “kinda set the tone” for his series-long struggles, then took a called third strike the next two times he faced him.

From there, the 31-year-old slugger could never seem to dial back into his approach.

He went down looking again in Game 1 against left-handed reliever Matt Strahm. He led off Game 2 with another strikeout against another lefty in Jesús Luzardo. On and on it went, with Ohtani continuing to chase inside junk, flailing at pitches that darted off the plate the other way, and finding his only reprieve in a rematch with Strahm in Game 2 when he got just enough on an inside sinker.

Roberts’ hope was that, moving forward, Ohtani would be able to learn and adjust.

“Understanding when he faces left-handed pitching, what they’re gonna try to do: Crowd him in, off, spin him away,” Roberts said. “He’s just gotta be better at managing the hitting zone. I’m counting on it. We’re all counting on it.”

Roberts also conceded that Ohtani’s at-bats on the day he pitched in Game 1 seemed to be especially rushed.

“[When] he’s pitching, he’s probably trying to conserve energy, not trying to get into at-bats,” Roberts said. “It hasn’t been good when he’s pitched. I do think that’s part of it. We’ve got to think through this and come up with a better game plan.”

After all, while Ohtani might not have been the only struggling hitter in the NLDS, his importance to the lineup is greater than anyone’s. The Dodgers can only endure without him for so long.

WASHINGTON — It has been four months since Elon Musk, President Trump’s bureaucratic demolition man, abandoned Washington in a flurry of recriminations and chaos.

But the Trump administration’s crusade to dismantle much of the federal government never ended. It’s merely under new management: the less colorful but more methodical Russell Vought, director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget.

Vought has become the backroom architect of Trump’s aggressive strategy — slashing the federal workforce, freezing billions in congressionally approved spending in actions his critics often call illegal.

Now Vought has proposed using the current government shutdown as an opportunity to fire thousands of bureaucrats permanently instead of merely furloughing them temporarily. If any do return to work, he has suggested that the government need not give them back pay — contrary to a law Trump signed in 2019.

Those threats may prove merely to be pressure tactics as Trump tries to persuade Democrats to accept spending cuts on Medicaid, Obamacare and other programs.

But the shutdown battle is the current phase of a much larger one. Vought’s long-term goals, he says, are to “bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will” and “deconstruct the administrative state.”

He’s still only partway done.

“I’d estimate that Vought has implemented maybe 10% or 15% of his program,” said Donald F. Kettl, former dean of the public policy school at the University of Maryland. “There may be as much as 90% to go. If this were a baseball game, we’d be in the top of the second inning.”

Along the way, Vought (pronounced “vote”) has chipped relentlessly at Congress’ ability to control the use of federal funds, massively expanding the power of the president.

“He has waged the most serious attack on separation of powers in American history,” said Elaine Kamarck, an expert on federal management at the Brookings Institution.

He’s done that mainly by using OMB, the White House office that oversees spending, to control the day-to-day purse strings of federal agencies — and deliberately keeping Congress in the dark along the way.

“If Congress has given us authority that is too broad, then we’re going to use that authority aggressively,” Vought said last month.

Federal judges have ruled some of the administration’s actions illegal, but they have allowed others to stand. Vought’s proposal to use the shutdown to fire thousands of bureaucrats hasn’t been tested in court.

Vought developed his aggressive approach during two decades as a conservative budget expert, culminating in his appointment as director of OMB in Trump’s first term.

In 2019, he stretched the limits of presidential power by helping Trump get around a congressional ban on funding for a border wall, by declaring an emergency and transferring military funds. He froze congressionally mandated aid for Ukraine, the action that led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Even so, Vought complained that Trump had been needlessly restrained by cautious first-term aides.

“The lawyers come in and say, ‘It’s not legal. You can’t do that,’” he said in 2023. “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office over whether something is legal.”

Vought is a proponent of the “unitary executive” theory, the argument that the president should have unfettered control over every tentacle of the executive branch, including independent agencies such as the Federal Reserve.

When Congress designates money for federal programs, he has argued, “It’s a ceiling. It is not a floor. It’s not the notion that you have to spend every dollar.”

Most legal experts disagree; a 1974 law prohibits the president from unilaterally withholding money Congress has appropriated.

Vought told conservative activists in 2023 that if Trump returned to power, he would deliberately seek to inflict “trauma” on federal employees.

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work.”

When Vought returned to OMB for Trump’s second term, he appeared to be in Musk’s shadow. But once the flamboyant Tesla chief executive flamed out, the OMB director got to work to make DOGE’s work the foundation for lasting changes.

He extended many of DOGE’s funding cuts by slowing down OMB’s approval of disbursements — turning them into de facto freezes.

He helped persuade Republicans in Congress to cancel $9 billion in previously approved foreign aid and public broadcasting support, a process known as “rescission.”

To cancel an additional $4.9 billion, he revived a rarely used gambit called a “pocket rescission,” freezing the funds until they expired.

Along the way, he quietly stopped providing Congress with information on spending, leaving legislators in the dark on whether programs were being axed.

DOGE and OMB eliminated jobs so quickly that the federal government stopped publishing its ongoing tally of federal employees. (Any number would only be approximate; some layoffs are tied up in court, and thousands of employees who opted for voluntary retirement are technically still on the payroll.)

The result was a significant erosion of Congress’ “power of the purse,” which has historically included not only approving money but also monitoring how it was spent.

Even some Republican members of Congress seethed. “They would like a blank check … and I don’t think that’s appropriate,” said former Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

But the GOP majorities in both the House and Senate, pleased to see spending cut by any means, let Vought have his way. Even McConnell voted to approve the $9-billion rescission request.

Vought’s newest innovation, the mid-shutdown layoffs, would be another big step toward reducing Congress’ role.

“The result would be a dramatic, instantaneous shift in the separation of powers,” Kettl said. “The Trump team could kill programs unilaterally without the inconvenience of going to Congress.”

Some of the consequences could be catastrophic, Kettl and other scholars warned. Kamarck calls them “time bombs.”

“One or more of these decisions is going to blow up in Trump’s face,” she said.

“FEMA won’t be capable of reacting to the next hurricane. The National Weather Service won’t have the forecasters it needs to analyze the data from weather balloons.”

Even before the government shutdown, she noted, the FAA was grappling with a shortage of air traffic controllers. This week the FAA slowed takeoffs at several airports in response to growing shortages, including at air traffic control centers in Atlanta, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth.

In theory, a future Congress could undo many of Vought’s actions, especially if Democrats win control of the House or, less likely, the Senate.

But rebuilding agencies that have been radically shrunken would take much longer than cutting them down, the scholars said.

“Much of this will be difficult to reverse when Democrats come back into fashion,” Kamarck said.

Indeed, that’s part of Vought’s plan.

“We want to make sure that the bureaucracy can’t reconstitute itself later in future administrations,” he said in April in a podcast with Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who was slain on Sept. 10.

He’s pleased with the progress he’s made, he told reporters in July.

“We’re having fun,” he said.

As someone who spends entirely too much time reading trail reviews posted on outdoors apps, I often wonder what everyone would agree is a five-star hike.

Because sometimes folks puzzle me when they recount their experiences in the L.A. wild.

An AllTrails user categorized Josephine Peak, one of my favorite hikes, as “by far the worst highly rated trail” they’d experienced, as it was essentially just a “gradually inclining fire access road.” No mention of the stunning views, the beautiful plant life or the short drive to the trailhead that leaves you feeling grateful for how close we all live to this magnificence.

I’ve seen people give a trail a one-star review because of something that happened during their hike, like they got stung by a bee or tripped over a rock. I’ve noticed other folks who angrily write how horrendously maintained a trail is, but I know from hiking it that those users didn’t actually take the correct path.

Once, I saw someone post a Craigslist-style missed connection as a review. (I can’t remember how many stars they gave the trail.)

I find the concept of rating trails a bit bizarre, especially when we zoom out and consider our luck. We live in Southern California, where we can hike every day of the year, often for free. In the winter, you can find snow within a short drive of L.A.

In the summer, you can escape the heat by traveling high into Angeles National Forest where the mountain air is cooler. Or by lounging in a cool river under the shade of native sycamores and oaks in the San Gabriel or Santa Monica Mountains. And of course, there’s Griffith Park, with more than 4,210 acres smack-dab in the middle of L.A. where you can hike at all hours of the day for free.

Here’s what I would like to propose: Outside of serious hazards or maintenance issues, the best trail is the one you’re on. That’s the spirit that went into my adventures for this week’s Wild. I wanted to highlight less popular jaunts through our public lands.

1. Hoyt Mountain via Grizzly Flat

Distance: About 4.6 miles out and back
Elevation gained: About 1,450 feet
Difficulty: Strenuous
Dogs allowed? Yes
Accessible alternative: Mount Wilson Observatory paved route

Hoyt Mountain is a 4,415(ish)-foot peak in the front range of the San Gabriel Mountains in Angeles National Forest. There are multiple routes to reach it. I chose to start at the Grizzly Flat Trailhead because it is an easier and shorter path to Hoyt Mountain than other options, like starting near the Clear Creek fire station.

You’ll start this trail via Hoyt Mountain Road, a wide dirt fire road. As you climb, notice the increasingly beautiful views. You’ll pass loads of buckwheat and other flowering plants, including California fuchsia, and chaparral yucca bursting out of the mountainside.

About two-thirds of a mile in, you’ll come to a split in the trail. Continue north on Hoyt Mountain Road. You’ll observe the trail’s foliage grow thicker about a third of a mile farther in. Take a moment to smell the spicy California bay laurel leaves (my favorite aroma of our local landscape). You’ll also likely see big berry manzanita, thick-leaved yerba santa and sugar bush.

I did notice a lot of animal scat — including bear — on this trail, so keep your eyes peeled for our mammalian neighbors. You will also notice that you can still hear the traffic from Angeles Crest Highway from the trail, but I think the striking panoramic views make up for it.

About 1.8 miles in, you’ll come to a wide, flat area where you might, if more observant than this outdoors journalist, notice three paths. There’s one that leads to a transmission tower, which this reporter may have taken before realizing it was the wrong way. There’s also a wider path, Telephone Trail. If you’re planning to hike to Hoyt Mountain, you’ll want to take the goat trail in between these routes.

This narrow, steep path is a fire break and is not an “official” trail. Its steepness reminded me of the scramble from Brand Park up to Mt. Thom. You will need hiking poles and footwear with good traction to help you find purchase on the steep hillside.

There are multiple false summits before reaching Hoyt Mountain. You do have the option — as controversial as it might be to suggest — to just vibe out on one of them. Go all the way to Hoyt Mountain if the spirit (and your legs) moves you.

2. Castaic Rock Trail

Distance: 1.3 miles out and back
Elevation gained: About 200 feet
Difficulty: Moderate
Dogs allowed? Yes
Accessible alternative: San Francisquito Creek Trail

The Castaic Rock Trail is a 1.3-mile out-and-back hike near Castaic Lake. It leads to a massive boulder — by some measurements, over 200 feet tall — that is known by many names, including Castaic Rock, Raven’s Roost and Rabbit Rock.

You’ll park on the shoulder of Lake Hughes Road and ascend a short, steep dirt path that quickly flattens out to become a pleasant jaunt through California buckwheat, sagebrush and other native plants. Look around, and you’ll notice panoramic views of Magic Mountain in the southeast and Cobblestone Mountain and Whitaker Peak in the northwest.

The trail meanders to the east side of the rock, where there’s historically been a bench located under the shade of hollyleaf cherry trees. Keep your eyes peeled for snakes and coyotes, as they’re common sights in the area.

3. Briar Summit Open Space Preserve

Distance: About a mile out and back
Elevation gained: About 250 feet
Difficulty: On the easier end of moderate
Dogs allowed? Yes
Accessible alternative: Lake Hollywood Trail

The Briar Summit Open Space Preserve is a 52-acre park north of Laurel Canyon that’s full of native plants, including laurel sumac. The preserve offers striking panoramic views of L.A. County that you’ll likely have to yourself (especially if you go on a weekday).

The hike is simple. You will park in the neighborhood near the entrance, taking care to read signage and be respectful of residents. Past the gate, you’ll take a short, steep paved path up until you reach a locked gate. You will quickly be rewarded with views of downtown L.A. to the southeast, the Griffith Park Observatory to the east and multiple mountain ranges in essentially every direction.

Briar Summit was saved from development just over 20 years ago thanks to private donations and public money. “Development of even a few of the property’s five legal lots could have spelled the end [for] all medium- and big-sized mammal species in the range between the Cahuenga Pass and Laurel Canyon,” according to a 2004 news release.

There is a spectacular lookout point just a third of a mile in where you can sit on a boulder and observe the city around you. From here, you’ll notice a dirt path leading south. You can take it for a short distance, but it will quickly lead you down a dusty, unstable hill. I wouldn’t recommend taking it downhill unless you’re ready for an intense off-trail workout. There are several unofficial “goat trails” or spurs leading in various directions throughout the preserve. You should follow these with caution, as they’re not regularly maintained.

Regardless of where you go, I hope you have a five-star time out there — whatever that means to you!

3 things to do

1. Celebrate Indigenous People’s Day around L.A.
Several Indigenous People’s Day celebrations are scheduled throughout mid-October in L.A. County. The 5th Tuxuunga Indigenous Peoples Day is scheduled from 11:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Sunday at 12400 Big Tujunga Canyon Road in Tujunga. The event will include live music, dancing, storytelling and hands-on workshops. Vasquez Rocks Natural Area, the ancestral village of Mapipinga, will host a fireside gathering and celebration from 3 to 7 p.m. Sunday. Visitors can listen to live music and storytelling around the campfire. The San Dimas Canyon Nature Center will co-host two events with the San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians Gabrieleno/Tongva: a tribal history and native seed planting event from 5 to 7 p.m. Wednesday and a tribal history and necklace-making workshop from 5 to 7 p.m. Oct. 17. The Stoneview Nature Center will co-host its celebration with the Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians — Kizh Nation from noon to 3 p.m. Oct. 18, an event that will include a nature walk and drum circle. Learn more at the Instagram pages linked above.

2. Sow seeds in Ascot Hills in L.A.
The Ascot Hills Park Green Team will host its monthly restoration event from 8 to 10:30 a.m. Saturday. Volunteers should meet at the park’s nursery on the west end of the gravel parking area. The work will include collecting and sowing California buckwheat and other native plant seeds. Learn more at the group’s Instagram page.

3. Nurture oak trees in Topanga
The Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains needs volunteers from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday to help restore native oak woodlands at Trippet Ranch. Volunteers will water trees, yank weeds and apply mulch as well as potentially plant new acorns as needed. Learn more and register at eventbrite.com.

The must-read

Wild horses grazing in the Mono Lake area are the source of a heated debate among environmentalists, Indigenous leaders and animal rights activists, and the government over how to best manage the herds so they don’t decimate the land. “This year, the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management approved a plan to round up and remove hundreds of wild horses roaming beyond the roughly 200,000 acres designated for them along the California and Nevada border,” Times staff writer Lila Seidman wrote. “No date has been set, but it could be as soon as this fall.” Environmentalists argue the move is necessary to save the otherworldly landscape at Mono Lake, but local tribes and nonprofits point out the government’s method of rounding up horses — hiring contractors with helicopters to drive them into stables — is dangerous, and even deadly, to the horses. “They’re going to run them down with helicopters and genocide them, just like they ran down us,” Rana Saulque, vice chairwoman for the Utu Utu Gwaitu Paiute tribe, said through tears.

This is yet another debate occurring around California about the best use and management plan of our public lands.

Happy adventuring,

P.S.

Want to help scientists understand our local wildlife? You can do just that by participating in the L.A. Nature Quest, which runs through the month of October. First, download iNaturalist, a citizen scientist app, on your smartphone. Next, simply go outside and start observing what plants and animals are in your neighborhood. Take good care to notice indicator and invasive species. After you’re finished snapping photos, upload your finds to the L.A. Nature Quest 2025 project on iNaturalist. Thanks for doing your part to protect our native species.

For more insider tips on Southern California’s beaches, trails and parks, check out past editions of The Wild. And to view this newsletter in your browser, click here.

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Mercedes Bryce Morgan’s horror film “Bone Lake” announces itself with a startlingly cheeky opener and closes with a bloody gore-fest, the song “Sex and Violence” by U.K. punk outfit the Exploited spelling out the thesis of the film for us. It’s about the intertwining of sex and violence, you see. But what unfolds between these naughty, viscera-drenched bookends is less of a traditional horror film and more of a psychosexual thriller, like “Funny Games” played between two, young attractive couples, with a setup borrowed from “Barbarian.”

In the script by Joshua Friedlander, a double-booking of a secluded rental mansion becomes a double date when Will (Alex Roe) and Cin (Andra Nechita) stumble in on the intimate weekend vacay of Sage (Maddie Hasson) and Diego (Marco Pigossi). The couples decide to make the best of it and stay, promising to rock-paper-scissors for the house if anything gets “weird.”

And get weird it does. While Diego and Sage seemed perfectly happy on arrival, the sexy, uninhibited Will and Cin have a way of nosing out their insecurities, finding the cracks in their connection and weaseling their way in. Suddenly, their lackluster sex life is on trial, and Sage’s resentment about financially supporting Diego while he pursues his dream of writing a novel bubbles to the surface.

Like any weekend-goes-awry horror movie (e.g., “Speak No Evil”), the female half of the couple catches a bad vibe that her male partner dismisses, due to his vested interest in wanting to stay. For Diego, it’s the promise that Cin will share his writing with his favorite author, for whom she claims to work. They overlook the red flags, blow off their opportunities to leave and decide to go all in with this wanton pair, drinking, playing games, breaking into secret rooms and dodging sexual overtures from each of them.

Morgan and her cinematographer Nick Matthews make the location fun to look at, with a saturated color palette and clever camera movements. However, there are scenes where the film is frustratingly dim and underlit, even if it might be justified by the power going out during a storm.

While there’s a certain verve and style to the middle section, where Will and Cin draw in their prey and toy with them, the Grand Guignol climax bears no rhythm or suspense; it’s merely a bludgeoning of the audience with carnage — too much too late.

Other blunt instruments? Roe and Nechita, who don’t play their roles with any subtlety. Roe’s Will comes off as a dangerous himbo; Nechita’s Cin is an over-the-top minx in her seduction of both Diego and Sage. While Hasson’s Sage is a plausibly strident freelance journalist type, you wonder if she has much experience with female friendship, because Cin’s manipulation is so painfully obvious. Pigossi’s self-obsessed novelist, however, is perfectly pitched in his all-around obliviousness.

There’s a kernel of something fascinating at the center of “Bone Lake,” a melding of sex and violence into gestures that are familiar from true crime stories. But there’s not enough motivation baked into the big third-act twist, and the performances just aren’t strong enough to suggest anything deeper.

“Bone Lake” offers up an appealing surface but it’s ultimately too shallow to get you immersed.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

In hindsight, Mookie Betts made the mystery of his worst career season sound rather simple.

Looking back on it now, the reasons were right there all along.

There was the stomach virus at the start of the year, which caused him to lose 20 pounds and develop bad swing habits while overcompensating for a decline in physical strength. There was the defensive switch to shortstop, which occupied much of his focus as he learned a new position on the go.

There was also an unfamiliar mental strain, as the former MVP slumped like he never had before.

There was a newfound process of having to flush such frustrations, forcing the 12-year veteran to accept failure, concede to a lost season, and reframe his mindset as the Dodgers approached the fall.

“I just accepted failing, so my thought process on failing changed,” Betts said in an introspective news conference on the eve of the playoffs.

“Instead of sulking on, ‘Well, I tried this and it failed, now I don’t know where to go,’ I just used it as positive things, and eventually turned.”

Betts’ full season, of course, will remain a disappointment. He posted personal low-marks in batting average (.258) and OPS (.732). He spent most of the summer with his confidence seemingly shot.

But from those depths has come a well-timed rebirth.

Amid a year of continuous turmoil, Betts finally found a way to mentally move on.

Over his final 47 games of the regular season, he batted .317 and nearly doubled his home run total, jumping from 11 on Aug. 4 to 20 by the end of the term.

During the Dodgers’ 15-5 finish to the schedule, he was one of the lineup’s hottest hitters, posting a .901 OPS that was second on the team only to Shohei Ohtani.

In the club’s wild-card-round sweep of the Cincinnati Reds, Betts’ production was even more prolific. He had six hits in the two games, including three doubles and three RBIs in the series clincher Wednesday night at Dodger Stadium.

And afterward, having helped the team book a spot in the National League Division Series against the Philadelphia Phillies, he reflected on his turbulent campaign again — attributing his recent success to the grind that came before it.

“I went through arguably one of the worst years of my career,” Betts said. “But I think it really made me mentally tough.”

All year, speculation swirled about the root causes of Betts’ struggles, which saw him miss the All-Star Game for the first time in a decade and bat as low as .231 through the first week of August.

His shortstop play was the most commonly blamed public culprit. The correlation, to many, seemed too obvious to ignore.

At the time, Betts pushed back against that narrative. He noted the MVP-caliber numbers he posted during his three-month stint at the position in 2024.

But this week, he finally granted some credence to the dynamic, putting the difficulties of the transition in a different, but connected, context.

“It’s hard to go back and forth,” he said of the balance between learning the fundamentals of shortstop while also trying to work through his offensive scuffles. “It’s a learned behavior going back [and forth] between offense and defense.”

This wasn’t a problem for Betts when he played right field, where he has six career Gold Glove awards.

“When I was in right, I didn’t have to do that,” Betts said. “I was just playing right. I didn’t have to think about it.”

At shortstop, on the other hand, he “had to think about everything,” from how to attack ground balls, to how to remake his throwing motion, to where to position himself for cutoff throws and relay plays.

“I was making errors I never made before,” Betts said. “I had never been in these situations.”

It hearkened back to something teammate Freddie Freeman said about Betts early in the season.

“It’s a lot to take on, to be a shortstop in the big leagues,” Freeman said in late May. “But once he gets everything under control, I think that’s when the hitting will pick right back up.”

Eventually, that prediction came true.

By the second half of the season, Betts finally stopped thinking his way through the shortstop position, and developed a comfort level that allowed him to simply play it.

“Now when I go out and play shortstop, it’s like I’m going out to right field,” Betts said. “I don’t even think about it. My training is good. I believe in myself. I believe in what I can do. And now it’s just like, go have fun.”

“Once short became where I didn’t have to think about it anymore,” he added, “I could really think about offense.”

Shortstop, of course, failed to explain the full extent of Betts’ hitting problems. Those started with the stomach virus he suffered at the beginning of the season, which wreaked havoc on his swing as much as his body.

Even after Betts regained the weight he lost, his strength remained diminished. It left his already underwhelming bat speed a tick lower than normal. It rendered his usual swing fixes ineffective as he battled mechanical flaws to which he struggled to find answers.

“It’s just hard to gain your weight and sustain strength in the middle of a season, when you’ve been traveling and doing all these things,” he said.

It felt like one domino kept bumping into the next. To the point where everything was on the verge of falling apart.

“My season’s kind of over,” Betts ultimately declared in early August. “We’re going to have to chalk [this] up for not a great season.”

That, though, is precisely when everything started to turn.

Moving forward, the 32-year-old decided then, he would commit himself to a new mindset: “I can go out and help the boys win every night,” he said. “Get an RBI, make a play, do something. I’m going to have to shift my focus there.”

Suddenly, where there was once only frustration, Betts started stacking one little victory after another. He would fist-pump sacrifice flies and ground balls that moved baserunners. He turned acrobatic plays on defense that refueled his once-dwindling confidence.

“When he kind of said that the year was lost, when he made that admission, that’s when I think it sort of flipped for him,” manager Dave Roberts said. “Just freeing his mind up.”

It helped that, down the stretch, Roberts committed to keeping Betts at shortstop; last year, the Dodgers shifted Betts to the outfield when he came back from injury in August.

“I take a lot of pride in it,” said Betts, who wound up leading all MLB shortstops in defensive runs saved this year. “At the start of the season, I wasn’t sure I would end the season there. I thought there may have to be an adjustment at some point, from lack of trust or whatever. I just didn’t know. So I’m just proud of myself for making it all the way through the year, and actually achieving a goal that I kind of set out to do: Being a major league shortstop, and say I did it and I’m good at it.”

His bat also started to gradually come around. Part of the reason was simple. “I was just able to finally get my strength back,” he said. But much of it was the result of hard work, with Betts spending long hours in the cage with not only the Dodgers’ hitting coaches, but former teammate and longtime swing confidant J.D. Martinez as well (who worked with Betts during both an August trip to Florida and a visit to Los Angeles for Betts’ charity pickleball tournament a few weeks later).

“I didn’t really have to try and add on power anymore,” Betts said. “I could just swing and let it do its thing.”

All of it amounted to one long process of Betts learning to move on. From his early physical ailments. From his persistent mental anguish. From a set of season-long challenges unlike any he’d previously endured.

“Slowly but surely,” Betts said, “started to get better and better.”

And now, entering Game 1 of the NLDS on Saturday, it has him back in a leading role for the Dodgers’ pursuit of a second straight World Series title: Starting at shortstop, swinging a hot bat, and having solved the mystery of a season that once looked lost.

“Better late than never,” he quipped Wednesday night. “It’s just one of those things where, you’ve just gotta keep going, man … So now, there’s just a different level of focus.”

Tony Shalhoub is loath to compare his upcoming CNN series, “Breaking Bread,” to the travel food shows hosted by his frequent collaborator Stanley Tucci, who directed him in the gourmand classic “Big Night.”

“I don’t consider myself a foodie,” Shalhoub says in a video interview. “He is the ultimate foodie, amazing chef. He really knows what he’s talking about and I don’t know anything.”

But Shalhoub, best known these days as one of the stars of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” makes up for his lack of knowledge with utter enthusiasm. As host and executive producer of “Breaking Bread,” premiering Sunday at 9 p.m. Pacific, he traipses the globe trying different breads and bread-related products while uncovering stories of how these staples relate to migration, labor and his own family history. In fact, the legacy of Shalhoub’s father, who settled in Wisconsin after leaving Lebanon, is present in multiple episodes. The elder Shalhoub’s love of the stuff served as one of the inspirations for the whole enterprise.

“We were eating most often bakery bread rather than just commercial store-bought packaged bread, and he really had a great appreciation for it and wanted to model that for us,” Shalhoub says.

Still, Shalhoub’s goals go beyond food porn. Days before the premiere, Shalhoub spoke about why he sees “Breaking Bread” as being about something bigger. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How did doing a food show even come to you?

Well, I was so enamored of Stanley [Tucci’s] show.

I was going to ask if Stanley had something to do with it.

We never really talked about it a lot, but I’ve been inspired by Stanley for so many things. But even prior to his travel food show [“Searching for Italy”], a nephew of mine [Michael Matzdorff], when I lived in Los Angeles, came to me and he was making bread at the time. This was way before the pandemic, when that became the thing to do. We got into talking about bread, and I was so impressed by what he was doing in his own kitchen, and he just casually mentioned, “Wouldn’t it be cool to explore bread making all over the globe?” We got a pitch together. It didn’t really get a lot of traction then, and this was a couple decades ago, but the idea stayed with me. I mentioned it to another friend who’s a producer on the show, Tamara Weiss, and she just kind of had this great idea to reformat it, and I guess the timing was right.

Was this your nephew that appears in the Tokyo episode or a different nephew?

This is an older nephew than that. I have many nephews and many nieces and they’re all geniuses. But there’s another leg to this too, aside from my fascination with bread and bread around the world. I’ve been acting for so many years and felt very fortunate with all of the breaks that I’ve gotten. But I’ve been starting to feel a little bit like I wanted to reconnect to the world again, in some way. When you are working and your experiences are mostly coming through scripted, mostly fictional stuff, after a while, there’s that possibility that you start to feel a little disconnected from actual life and the world. That also was one of the main drivers here. I wanted to meet new people, travel to new places or even familiar places, but with a different point of view. In a lot of ways, it’s been eye-opening. The food component aside, I’ve found it’s been really good for me. You get out of your own head and out of your own sphere, and you’re reminded that there’s so much else going on out there.

How did you choose where you were going to go? So many of the places have a personal connection for you: You said you wanted to start in Lebanon, where your father is from, but the political situation didn’t allow for it so you went to Brazil, where there is a large Lebanese population. You spend time in New York, where you live, and Wisconsin, where you are from.

We initially had a list of about 12 different locations, and some of those were locations that I just thought, “Boy, it would really be fun to travel there.” When we got into it with CNN, you know, especially for the first season, they wanted for me to have a personal connection to each of these locations. We gave them a list of about 10 places, and they chose six. So obviously New York, because this is now my second time living here in the city, and I love it. I consider it my home and where so much of my career has taken place. I think Marseille, because even though I traveled to France several times, is a place where my father, when he was immigrating from Lebanon over a hundred years ago, as many immigrants did, had to stop in Marseille in the process. We’ve always been curious about that part of his journey because we knew about his departure from Beirut, and we knew about his arrival in Ellis Island, but we didn’t know about the middle part of his journey. So we were able to explore that and get some more new information about that.

Members of your family also show up, including your daughter Josie Adams and another nephew. Why did you want to involve them?

Whenever there’s a discussion about bread or about food in general, it mostly stems from or grows out of my childhood, growing up, my parents, my other older relatives, and I guess that’s the closest connection for me. It has been such a part of what connects us all.

How did your relationship to bread, clearly something you love, change over the course of making the show?

The main takeaway was that the show, for me, really became more about the people that I met than the product itself. There were familiar things, some of them done in a kind of innovative and new way and other things that I had not experienced before or tasted before, but [it was] really more about the people and their devotion to that work and the reasons that they become so obsessed and so devoted to that kind of work. For me, the show really becomes about those stories and those histories, whether it’s a family history or a story about immigration or a story of a war-torn country. To be really frank about it, bread is really more the vehicle that brings us into these other discussions.

I want to say this in a very tactful way, but the risk of doing this kind of show is that there is a point, I believe, of diminishing returns when we talk about food. This is my fear. It was like, will someone stand up and say, “Stop it.” There’s so many important things that are going on that deserve our focus and our attention, but because we’re talking about food, it’s inevitable because we have to have it every day. It sustains us, and that’s all fine and good, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I want bread to be that thing that sparks other conversations.

In the Marseille episode, you uncover part of your father’s story, discovering details of his trip to America in the municipal archives. What was that experience like?

It was quite moving and also doing it with my daughter and having those discussions with my daughter. She didn’t know my father because he passed away before she was born. But I don’t think I would’ve had the opportunity or the access to uncover these things had I not been doing this show at this time in that city. It would’ve just gone undiscovered and unknown.

Obviously, you’ve eaten on screen before, that’s part of an actor’s job, but did you think about how you were going to react to what you try?

I didn’t really think about it or plan it. I wanted to figure out ways to avoid or sidestep stock reactions. “God, that’s delicious.” Of course, that’s what everyone says when they’re eating something exciting and new. But I was really trying to stay open and rather than using words, a lot of times I just felt I let it go into my body and my body kind of did the work.

There’s a moment when you almost do a little dance.

Because some of this stuff just transcends words.

Was there something you tried that truly surprised you?

Certainly, I think given the amount of pastry I consume and have consumed in my lifetime, I thought that Mary O’s Irish Soda Bread scones were kind of a revelation. I’ve made scones. I’ve had scones. I love them, but this was revelatory. In Brazil they couldn’t grow wheat for a time, and before they were importing it, they were relying on cassava flour everywhere. They make a cheese bread. They were making it out of cassava flour, which is delicious, not heavy, and no gluten and all of that, and with cheese. Somehow miraculously, you’re eating these things and you’re never feeling full or bloated.

The normally surf-themed bar at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort and Spa has transformed into Pete’s Spookeasy for the month of October with Halloween-themed decor, food and drinks. Order mains such as Pasta from the Black Lagoon, with squid ink spaghetti, sautéed shrimp, lobster cream sauce, roasted tomato, asparagus and micro parsley, plus starters including “Bugs” in Stinky Cheese with whipped goat cheese, dates, marzipan “grubs,” figs, hot honey, micro thyme and crackers. Seasonal cocktails include Hex on the Beach, with rum, pineapple juice, orange juice, coconut and nutmeg, and BooBerry Margarita, with tequila, fresh blackberries, lemon and lime juice, agave and a black salt rim.

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I thought I’d noticed everything on the four-mile stretch of the Gabrielino Trail from its western trailhead near Pasadena to the Gould Mesa campground in Angeles National Forest.

I have a favorite sycamore tree about a mile in that, if it weren’t surrounded by poison oak, I would climb. I know some of the best water spots to splash around in the Arroyo Seco. I know how to identify and spot sacred datura, a common sight along the path.

But then I hiked the trail with a group of children (and a handful of grown-ups) from the L.A.-based adventure club Hiking Adventures With Kids (or HAWKs for short) and was reconnected with the childhood sense of wonder that our day-to-day adult lives grind down.

I saw the trail through the eyes of tweens who love nature so much, they screamed multiple facts at me, often all at once, including how cool vampire squid are, that rolly-pollies are related to crabs and that my skin was actively dying and falling off my body. It was such a comfort.

Here’s what I learned from my new trail buddies. I hope these tips help remind you to slow down and appreciate the wonders of our local flora and fauna.

1. A group of canines being walked on the trail by a human is a ‘dog parade.’

Wave accordingly.

2. If you see poison oak, tell a friend.

These kids saved me multiple times from brushing up against the woody shrub. They reminded me: “Leaves of three, let it be; if it’s hairy, it’s a berry!”

3. Eggnog.

This is less of a tip and more of an inside joke between best friends Lila and Elliot, both 10, who asked really nicely for me to include it. May they forever remember the time one of the largest newspapers in America published this.

4. Put animals down that don’t want to be touched.

Bradley Rydholm, a HAWKs educator co-leading the day’s hike, found a diabolical ironclad beetle to show the kids. It was at first playing dead, and some of the children reached out to touch it.

“You need to put him down because he looks like he doesn’t want to be touched,” Kaija, 8, said. “If they’re moving in your hand, that means it’s OK, but if they’re playing dead, you gotta put them back.”

Rydholm gently agreed and placed the beetle back in its pile of dirt and leaves.

5. When naming bugs, consider a compromise.

OK, perhaps this is a lesson the kids learned from me. The group was in a debate over whether to name the aforementioned diabolical ironclad beetle, with some voting for “Desi” and others voting for “Jim.”

This reporter, in the name of peace, suggested Desi Jim. “Bye, Desi Jim!” they called in unison as we continued onward.

6. Follow the ethics of frog catching.

Kaija, who asked whether I could make her a wolf in my story, told me that it’s best to catch frogs, name them and then release them.

I asked her whether she had any tips for naming frogs. “Jeremy, Fred, Pineapple,” she said, adding that she names them by their color.

I wanted to learn what color Jeremy was, but she discovered something far more interesting than me on the trail and ran off.

7. If you want to touch a bug, take a picture first.

Ella, 8, told me that after you take a picture of the insect, you can use a smartphone to identify it and figure out whether it is venomous. (Note: Unlike plenty of adults, she knew the difference between “poisonous” and “venomous” and used the words correctly!)

“If it isn’t [venomous] and it’s totally safe, I would probably bring gloves because I’m scared of picking up bugs,” Ella said. “One time a lady bug peed on me.”

8. It is important to have a compass.

“Because if you get lost, it’s not very efficient to always rely on the North Star. Because it’s only around for a little bit [of] time. So if you don’t have a compass and you get lost, you’re going to have to wait until night to be able to move,” said Luca, 9, who bought himself a compass in a local shop in Felton.

Luca and I swapped adventure stories, as he is quite the world traveler. As a bonus tip, he informed me that it’s easier to roast marshmallows on a volcano (he visited one in Guatemala) than over a campfire. The volcano’s heat slow roasts the marshmallows; with a campfire, you’re more likely to accidentally light them on fire.

9. Avoid hills.

A few of the kids recently went on a HAWKs hike that apparently involved a “death road” that felt like “the stairwell of a million stairs” that went “pretty much nowhere” and had no real views, per Luca’s description.

Elliot, when asked for tips that adults should consider while hiking, told me that she enjoys being outside, but “I don’t really like going uphill.”

Same, girl. Same.

10. Appreciate the beauty of nature.

“I really like water,” Luca said. “Just enjoy the sound of water and just enjoy the nature, and check out the animals, lizards, snakes, butterflies and moths.”

“It’s really beautiful to see all these paths,” Lila said. “The beauty of nature is so fun, and it’s a good way to get a workout in or just get off screens because kids these days are on screens a lot. Brain rot!”

“I just remember it’s really good for me,” Elliot said. “The same thing about screens too, even though I don’t have an iPad since my brother broke it. … Honestly, I don’t want to think about anything from school or anything. Just want to be in the moment, ya know?”

3 things to do

1. Explore a marsh in Carson
The Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts will host a tour from 8 a.m. to noon of the Bixby Marshlands, a 17-acre marsh near the intersection of Figueroa Street and Sepulveda Boulevard in Carson. Formerly part of a large freshwater marshland area called Bixby Slough, the Bixby Marshland was cut off from its water supply when the Wilmington Drain was installed in the mid-1970s, according to the agency. Docents will be at the event to help visitors spot the dozens of ducks, herons, hummingbirds and many other animals that frequent the marsh. Learn more at lacsd.org.

2. Yank weeds in Chino Hills
Volunteers are needed from 9 a.m. to noon Saturday at Chino Hills State Park to help restore a walnut woodland. Participants will pull and dig up invasive weeds, bagging and removing them from the area. The exact location of the volunteer opportunity and directions will be emailed upon registration. Sign up at volunteer.calparks.org.

3. Can’t fight the moonlight in Burbank
The Stough Canyon Nature Center in Burbank will host a full moon hike at 7 p.m. Monday. Hikers will meet at the Stough Canyon trailhead. This is a free all-ages hike. Children younger than age 12 must be accompanied by an adult. Register using the “Stough Canyon Nature Center” tab at burbankparks.com.

The must-read

Even with months of training and prep work, Megan Eskew did not stay long at the Mt. Whitney summit. There was a chance of thunderstorms in the area. Eskew was on her way down when she felt the first sprinkle. “Before you could even process the thought, ‘Oh, that’s rain,’ thunder boomed,” Eskew said. Times staff writer Jack Dolan wrote about the dangers that hikers faced as late-summer monsoons spread across California in recent weeks. Jack also covered the perils of trying to hide from the storm — and the importance of knowing when to turn around. Stay safe out there!

Happy adventuring,

P.S.

I love looking for signs of our local mammal population on trails. In a recent Instagram post, So Sinopoulos-Lloyd, co-founder of Queer Nature, explained how to identify mountain lion markings left on a tree, including how to distinguish between scratches left by a big cat versus a bear. The grooves left in the tree reminded me of the marks that my cats leave on their scratching posts (and other less-than-ideal places around our home!). Let me know if you notice similar out on the trails.

For more insider tips on Southern California’s beaches, trails and parks, check out past editions of The Wild. And to view this newsletter in your browser, click here.

Though on first glance this pairing seems an unlikely double bill, the fine folks at the New Beverly know what they’re doing, and this will make for an evening of subliminal messages and energizing subversion. Directed by John Carpenter (who also wrote the screenplay under a pseudonym), 1988’s “They Live” comes on like an alien invasion B-movie about a drifter (wrestler-turned-actor Roddy Piper) who becomes part of the resistance, but reveals itself to be an angry rebuke of Reagan-era greed. 2001’s “Josie and the Pussycats,” written and directed by Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, is an uproarious satire of pop culture consumerism as a small-time rock band (Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson) come to realize the true aims of the record company that shoots them to stardom. (Parker Posey and Alan Cumming are camp delights as nefarious executives.) Though both movies are very much of their respective moments, they sadly still have a lot to say about our current one.

“They Live” is playing with “Josie and the Pussycats” on Oct. 10, 11 and 12 at the New Beverly. Tickets here.

This isn’t a series, it’s calisthenics.

The Dodgers shouldn’t be here battling baseball’s junior varsity, and they know it, and they’re intent on pounding and pitching their way out of this embarrassing situation as quickly as possible.

Wild card round? The defending champions are nobody’s wild card.

The Cincinnati Reds? Human byes.

October came a day early to Chavez Ravine Tuesday and the shouldn’t-be-here Dodgers welcomed it with their annoyance, tying a club postseason record with five homers and dismantling the Reds 10-5 in the opener of a three-game wild-card series that should be mercifully completed by midweek.

The Dodgers finished 10 games ahead of the Reds in the standings, and won five out of six during the regular season, and only got lumped with the pretenders when their bullpen fell apart and they blew a chance at having the week off.

If the Dodgers had taken care of business they would have finished with one of the two best records in the National League and would have drawn a first-round bye as they did the previous three seasons. But, no, they finished behind Milwaukee and Philadelphia and so, even though they claimed the National League West title for the 12th time in 13 years, they were forced into a three-games-at-home wild card round.

Hello, Reds.

Good-bye, Reds.

The Dodgers will sweep this series with a win in Game 2 Wednesday, and considering they’re sending ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto to the mound, a victory seems likely. In any event, there’s no way the Reds are winning two straight at rollicking Dodger Stadium, so book your attention to Philadelphia this weekend for the beginning of the five-game division series against the Phillies.

The only way the Reds made it this far was because the New York Mets lost in Miami on the final day of the season. And if Tuesday was any indication, there’s no way the Reds are getting out of here alive.

The Dodgers knocked them backward on the game’s fifth pitch with a scorching home run by Shohei Ohtani against Reds ace Hunter Greene, the second consecutive year Ohtani has started the Dodgers postseason with a longball.

The Dodgers knocked them flat two innings later with four runs on homers by last season’s playoff heroes Teoscar Hernández and Tommy Edman.

The game was over within its first hour, and the Dodgers were just getting started.

Hernández later added a second home run and, oh yeah, so did Ohtani, and neither qualified as the game’s hero.

That title belonged to starter Blake Snell, who fooled the Reds into quick swings, wild swings, silly swings, and just four hits with nine strikeouts in seven innings. Perhaps just as important, he lasted 91 pitches, allowing Dodger Manager Dave Roberts to stay out the dreaded bullpen as long as humanely possible.

Of course, Roberts had to eventually crack that left-field door, and disaster very nearly occurred when three Dodger relievers accounted for four walks that led to three eighth-inning runs. But Jack Dreyer managed to get two outs with the bases loaded and Blake Treinen finished the game by allowing just a bloop single in the ninth.

It turns out, even the weakest part of this Dodger team was enough to eventually quiet the visitors, who shouldn’t be here too much longer.

It’s almost as if the Reds were intimidated even before the game began, as the Dodgers buried them in their thickest pregame brine.

Ice Cube was on the video board screaming that it’s time for Dodger baseball. Mariachi Joe Kelly was on the mound delighting the roaring crowd with a ceremonial first pitch that appropriately bounced. Keith Williams Jr. was bringing the chills with his usual falsetto-laden national anthem.

Jason Alexander was on the video board begging the fans to cheer louder… wait a minute. Jason Alexander? Didn’t his Seinfeld character work for the New York Yankees? What was he doing in the heart of Dodgerland? No wonder the fans were ignoring him.

Alexander’s appearance was the only mistake on a night that gave hope that the Dodgers’ late-season steam — they finished 9-2 and led the league in scoring in the final weeks — could carry them far past this miserable little first-round dalliance.

“Momentum is real,” Roberts said, later adding, “I think that whether it’s the Rangers find their way into the postseason to then win the World Series or some team finishing hot and remaining hot or in a particular game, I do believe in a postseason game, momentum is real.”

As usual at Chavez Ravine, that momentum built as the game went along, rare empty seats in the stands but full-throated scream from the fans, yet another reason the Dodgers blew it by not getting home-field advantage in later rounds.

“I do love being at home because a lot of times that’s what perpetuates it, the home crowd, the energy,” said Roberts.

But, seriously, about that bullpen…

Before the game, Dodgers baseball boss Andrew Friedman bravely faced the question of his bullpen, a mess that he created with poor winter signings and unwise midseason inactivity.

Not surprisingly, he defended his guys.

“They’ve had stretches of good, they’ve had some stretches where it’s been really tough and challenging,” he acknowledged. “At the end of the day, as we’re working through it the last couple of weeks, it’s not a talent issue.”

In other words, they’re competent relievers just going through a bad, awful, horrible, season-altering stretch?

“Relievers, kind of like place kickers, are tightrope walkers,” Friedman said. “It’s what they do for a living. They do well, people forget about them. They don’t do well and they’re in the ire of everything. So it’s tough.”

Friedman said it’s a matter of confidence, which is understandable when a group gets hammered all season like these guys.

“And when the confidence is wavering, the execution is off,” Friedman said. “When the execution is off, you get behind and you come in zone and you’re just more likely to take on damage. So it’s kind of that imperfect storm in a lot of ways.”

Storm, is right. What kind of bullpen fools around with an eight-run lead, as the Dodgers reliever did Tuesday night when threatening to ruin everything?

The bullpen survived, but for how long? This series may soon be over, but Philadelphia awaits. This first step into October was an impressive one. It will also be the easiest one.

After a disappointing start to the season in which UCLA’s offense ranked among the worst in the nation, the Bruins and offensive coordinator Tino Sunseri mutually parted ways Tuesday evening, a university official told The Times.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the move has not been publicly announced.

Sunseri becomes the second coordinator to depart in the wake of coach DeShaun Foster’s dismissal, after defensive coordinator Ikaika Malloe left earlier this month in another mutual parting of ways.

Tight ends coach Jerry Neuheisel will be the offensive playcaller when the Bruins (0-4 overall, 0-1 Big Ten) face No. 7 Penn State (3-1, 0-1) on Saturday at the Rose Bowl. Plans are underway to finalize additional staff and it is anticipated that former UCLA offensive coordinator Noel Mazzone will assume analyst responsibilities, pending completion of the appropriate university processes.

Neuheisel and Mazzone have a long history together, starting when Mazzone was UCLA’s offensive coordinator and Neuheisel a backup quarterback from 2012-15. After a stint playing professionally in Japan, Neuheisel joined Texas A&M’s staff as a quality control assistant before the 2017 season at the urging of Mazzone, then the Aggies’ offensive coordinator.

“He said, ‘You’re coming with me, I don’t care what you say,’ ” Neuheisel recalled. “And I said, ‘You’re right, I’m coming.’ I got on the next plane to Texas A&M.”

Sunseri’s hiring was hailed as a coup for the Bruins given that he was co-offensive coordinator last season at Indiana, which averaged 47.8 points on the way to reaching the College Football Playoff. But the Bruins’ offense has struggled mightily in Sunseri’s first season as a playcaller, averaging 14.2 points to rank No. 132 out of 134 major college teams. UCLA also averaged 321.2 yards per game, ranking No. 117 nationally.

The lack of offensive production has been a big reason why UCLA has fallen behind in every game, trailing 20-0 against Utah, 23-0 against Nevada Las Vegas, 14-0 against New Mexico and 17-0 against Northwestern.

Sunseri also couldn’t replicate the success he had as quarterbacks coach at Indiana and James Madison. While UCLA quarterback Nico Iamaleava has completed a career-high 65.3% of his passes, he’s averaging only 197 passing yards per game and has logged nearly as many interceptions (three) as touchdowns (four), leading to a career-low quarterback rating.

Mazzone helped generate dynamic, high-scoring offenses in four seasons under then-UCLA coach Jim Mora. Mazzone later served as offensive coordinator at Texas A&M and Arizona before going on to serve in that same capacity for three teams in the United States Football League and United Football League.

Mazzone, 68, favors no-huddle offenses light on plays and heavy on simplicity. He’s also known for tailoring offenses to his personnel, particularly the quarterbacks.

“I try to create space for playmakers,” Mazzone told The Times in 2012. “I’m going to get you the ball where all you’ve got to do is beat one guy man-to-man. I do that, then it’s up to you.”

Neuheisel is a lifelong Bruin, having been born at UCLA Medical Center before going on to play quarterback for the team his father once coached, coming off the bench to lead the Bruins to a come-from-behind victory over Texas in 2014. He returned to his alma mater in 2018 as a graduate assistant before subsequent promotions to wide receivers coach and tight ends coach.

One of Neuheisel’s most visible roles is leading postgame locker-room celebrations after victories, yelling, “It’s a great day to be a Bruin!” before players repeat the phrase.

Neuheisel’s latest promotion to playcaller represents another step toward what he’s long said was his dream job: UCLA head coach.

“I didn’t get to put roses on my shoulder as a player,” Neuheisel told The Times in 2016, referring to a Rose Bowl game tradition, “but I’m going to come back and put the roses on the players as a coach.”

With next week’s publication of his ninth novel, “Shadow Ticket,” Thomas Pynchon’s secret 20th century is at last complete.

For many of us, Pynchon is the best American writer since F. Scott Fitzgerald. Since the arrival in 1963 of his first novel, “V.,” he has loomed as the presiding colossus of our literature — revered as a Nobel-caliber genius, reviled as impenetrable and reviewed with increasing condescension since his turn toward detective fiction with “Inherent Vice” in 2009.

Now comes “Shadow Ticket,” and it’s late Pynchon at his finest. Dark as a vampire’s pocket, light-fingered as a jewel thief, “Shadow Ticket” capers across the page with breezy, baggy-pants assurance — and then pauses on its way down the fire escape just long enough to crack your heart open.

Only now can we finally see that Pynchon has been quietly assembling — one novel at a time, in no particular order — an almost decade-by-decade chronicle no less ambitious than Balzac’s “La Comédie Humaine,” August Wilson’s Century Cycle or the 55 years of Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury.” This is his Pynchoniad, a zigzagging epic of America and the world through our bloodiest, most shameful hundred years. Perhaps suffering from what Pynchon called in “V.” our “great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in,” he has now filled in the only remaining blank spot on his 20th century map: the 1930s.

It all begins in Depression-era Milwaukee as a righteously funny gangster novel. In a scenario straight out of Dashiell Hammett’s early stories, a detective agency operative named Hicks McTaggart gets an assignment to chase down the runaway heiress to a major cheese fortune. Roughly midway through, Pynchon’s characters hightail it all the way to proto-fascist Budapest, where shadows more lethal than any Tommy gun begin to encroach. By the end, this novel has become at once a requiem, a farewell, an old soft-shoe number — and a warning.

When Pynchon’s jacket summary of this tale of two cities first surfaced six months ago, cynics could be forgiven for wondering whether an 88-year-old man, hearing time’s winged chariot idling at the curb, hadn’t just taken two half-completed works in progress and spot-welded them together. Younger people are forever wondering — in whispers, and never for general consumption — whether some person older than they might have, you know, lost a step.

Well, buzz off, kids. Thomas Pynchon’s voice on the page still sings, clarion strong. Unlike most novelists, his voice has two distinct but overlapping registers. The first is Olympian, polymathic, erudite, antically funny, often beautiful, at times gross, at others incredibly romantic, never afraid to challenge or even confound, and unmistakably worked at. The second, audible less frequently until 1990’s “Vineland,” sounds looser, freer, warmer, more improvisational, more curious about love and family, increasingly wistful, all but twilit with rue. He still brakes for bad puns and double-negative understatements, but he avoids the kind of under-metabolized research that sometimes alienated his early readers.

“Shadow Ticket’s” structure turns the current film adaptation of “Vineland” inside out — that would be “One Battle After Another,” whose thrilling middle more than redeems an only slightly off-key beginning and end. By contrast, “Shadow Ticket” offers a wildly seductive overture, a companionable but occasionally slack midsection, and a haunting sucker punch of an ending.

Mercifully, having already set “The Crying of Lot 49” and “Inherent Vice” largely in L.A., Pynchon still hasn’t lost his nostalgia for Los Angeles, a place where he lived and wrote for a while in the ’60s and ’70s. “Shadow Ticket” marks Pynchon’s third book to take place mostly on the other side of the world, but then — like so many New Yorkers — the novel finds its denouement in what Pynchon here calls “that old L.A. vacuum cleaner.”

Pynchon may not have lost a step in “Shadow Ticket,” but sometimes he seems to be conserving his energy. His signature long, comma-rich sentences reach their periods a little sooner now. His chapters end with a wink as often as a thunderclap. Sometimes he sounds almost rushed, peppering his narration with “so forths,” and making his readers play odds-or-evens to attribute long stretches of dialogue.

Maybe only on second reading do we realize that we’ve been reading a kind of Dear John letter to America. Nobody else writing today can begin a final chapter as elegiacally as Pynchon does here: “Somewhere out beyond the western edge of the Old World is said to stand a wonder of our time, a statue hundreds of meters high, of a masked woman. … Like somebody we knew once a long time ago.”

Is this the Statue of Liberty, turning her back at last on the huddled masses she once welcomed? One character immediately suggests yes, another denies it. Either way, it’s a sobering way to introduce an ending as compassionately doom-laden as any Pynchon has ever given us.

Bear in mind, this is the same Pynchon who, a hundred pages earlier, has raffishly referred to sex as “doing the horizontal Peabody.” (Don’t bother Googling. This one’s his.) One early reviewer has compared “Shadow Ticket’s” shaggy charm to cold pizza, and readers will know what he means. Who’s ever sorry to see a flat box in the fridge the next morning?

For most of the way, though, “Shadow Ticket” may remind you of an exceptionally tight tribute band, playing the oldies so lovingly that you might as well be listening to your old, long-since-unloaded vinyl. The catch is, for an encore — just when you could swear the band might actually be improving on the original — the musicians turn around and blow you away with a lost song that nobody’s ever heard before.

Thus, with a flourish, Pynchon types fin to his secret 20th century. But what does he do now? The man’s only 88. (Anybody who finds the phrase “only 88” amusing is welcome to laugh, but plenty of people thought Pynchon was hanging it up at 76 with “Bleeding Edge.” Plenty of people were mistaken.)

So, will Pynchon stand pat with his 20th century now secure, and take his winnings to the cashier’s window? Or will he, as anyone who roots for American literature might devoutly wish, hold out for blackjack?

Hit him.

Kipen is a contributor to Cambridge Pynchon in Context, a former NEA Director of Literature, a full-time member UCLA’s writing faculty and founder of the Libros Schmibros Lending Library and the just-birthed 21st Century Federal Writers’ Project.

Of all the reams of words publicly spilled at Lakers media day Monday, only one really mattered.

When LeBron James was wrapping up his interview with the folks at Spectrum Sportsnet, host Chris McGee asked, “By the way, see you at next year’s media day?”

James’ laughing answer set the template for a season.

“Maybe.”

So the Lakers should treat the next eight months emptying their assets and foregoing their future and playing with the desperation of a team trying to earn one last piece of jewelry for arguably the greatest player ever?

Maybe.

So should the fans here and around the league show up in droves and line up around the block for their last live look at a living legend?

Maybe.

Or, if everything goes wrong and things get ugly, should the Lakers and James willingly part ways through a midseason buyout?

Maybe.

No matter what happens, the fact that James didn’t reveal his intentions in his first public appearance since last spring means that this Laker season has the chance to be a murky maybe mess.

Everybody knows where the Lakers stand, as Rob Pelinka said last week. He wants James to finish his career here.

“We would love if LeBron’s story would be he retire a Laker,” Pelinka said. “That would be a positive story.”

But still nobody knows where James stands, and it’s not obvious, because, while he’s 40 and entering his NBA-record 23rd season, he looks young, and acts energetic, and Monday at the Lakers facility he was at his charming best.

“Just excited about the journey and whatever this year has in store for me,” he said.

He’s probably not saying because he truly does not know. Next spring is a lifetime away. He doesn’t know how he’s going to feel. He doesn’t know how his basketball future could look.

But because he’s not saying, this season could seemingly go one of three ways.

It could go the Kershaw Way. James could once again be one of the top players in the league but get worn down by the strain on his body and in the last weeks of the season he could call it quits. The Crypto.com crowd gets a chance to say goodbye and his Lakers teammates can use his retirement as inspiration for a deep postseason run.

Or, it could go the Kobe Way. James could decide in the middle of the season that he’s had enough and embark on a league-wide farewell tour, the sort that once brought the tough Kobe Bryant to tears.

Or, given the organization’s recent sketchy history, it is entirely possible it could go the Typical Lakers Implosion Way.

James could spend the year making the Lakers dangle on that “maybe,” subtly fighting against the loss of his team leadership to Luka Doncic, passively aggressively chiding Pelinka to improve the roster at the trade deadline, even occasionally threatening to quit on the spot.

Because it’s too tough to trade him and the Lakers don’t want to spend the bucks to buy him out, they spend the rest of the season dodging his barbs, then, simply let James’ contract expire and watch him flee to home Cleveland for his swan song.

Three scenarios, but only two happy endings, and to make matters even more complicated, much depends not on James, but on the roster around him.

Are the Lakers going to be any good? Are you ready for it?

Maybe.

The Lakers only played 23 games with both James and the recently acquired Doncic last season, and they were 15-8 and grabbed a third seed and were acting like the best team in the NBA at one point before they disintegrated against Minnesota in the playoffs.

They added Deandre Ayton for length, Jake LaRavia for defense, Marcus Smart for toughness, and a new body for Doncic, a formerly pudgy and breathless kid who has acknowledged his very adult transformation.

“I’m in a better place for sure,” he said Monday.

Is that good enough to lead a team to a better place in the competitive West? Who knows?

Will it be good enough to convince James to ask for a new contract and stick around for yet another year? That doesn’t seem likely but then again, The Oldest Living Baller currently exists in the unlikely.

The only certainty is that James is going to make this decision on his own time, in his own voice, through his own podcast or social media or heck, maybe another 30-minute TV special called, “The Last Decision?”

How ever this plays out, he’s not saying anything now, which was obvious when he answered the first question at his media day news conference with dodgy utterances.

“I mean, I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I’m excited about today, I’m excited about an opportunity to be able to play a game that I love for another season. And whatever the journey, however the journey lays out this year, I’m just super invested, because … I don’t know when the end is, but I know it’s a lot sooner than later.”

He provided his most telling hint that he’s leaning into retirement when he talked about appreciating his final tours around the league.

“Knowing that the end is soon, not taking for granted, you know, a Tuesday night in a city that maybe I don’t want to be in that night … let’s lock in because you don’t know how many times you get the opportunity to play the game or to be able to compete,” he said. “So there’s times where you wake up and you just feel like you just don’t have it. So those will be the days where I know I can lock back in real fast, like, OK, well, you won’t have many days like this, so let’s lock in and enjoy the moment, enjoy the rest of the ride.”

He was asked if, now that he’s played with son Bronny, would he stick around to play with his Arizona-freshman son Bryce? His answer was LeBron at his fatherly best.

“No, I’m not waiting on Bryce,’ he said. “No. I don’t know what his timeline is. He’s his own young man now, like he’s down in Tucson. We’ll see what happens this year, next year, you know, but he has his own timeline. I got my timeline, and I don’t know if they quite match up.”

He was asked if his decision would be influenced by a chance to play with Doncic. His answer was LeBron at his jabbing best.

“Ah, nah. As far as how long I go in my career? Nah. Zero,” he said. “The motivation to be able to play alongside him every night, that’s super motivating. That’s what I’m going to train my body for. Every night I go out there and try to be the best player I can for him, and we’re going to bounce that off one another. But as far as me weighing in on him and some other teammates of how far I go in my career, nah.”

It may be Luka Doncic’s team, but it’s still LeBron James’ world, and he’s going to control his narrative down to the last syllables of the last sentences of his final goodbye.

And that don’t mean maybe.

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In 1997, the comedy “In & Out” did its shiny, star-studded best to mainstream the story of a closeted gay man in a rock-ribbed American community embracing his truth. The fine new indie drama “Plainclothes,” which takes place in 1997 in Syracuse, N.Y., and centers on a young police officer in the throes of desire, wants to remind us that the reality of such reckonings was a bit more fraught.

In first-time screenwriter-director Carmen Emmi’s tense, sensitively threaded scenario, fresh-faced cop Lucas (Tom Blyth) isn’t just holding a secret — he’s involved in the enforced criminalization of it. His assigned undercover detail is the mall, using a seductive look (not entirely acting) to lure gay men to the restroom, silently clocking the moment they meet the minimum requirement for breaking indecent exposure laws, then having them arrested.

Something shifts inside Lucas during one of these stings, however, when he locks eyes with a target named Andrew (Russell Tovey), whose soulful return gaze promises a deeper connection than instant gratification. He spares Andrew the planned indignity waiting outside, but secures a phone number away from the watchful eye of his sergeant (Christian Cooke). Weeks later, the pair arrange to meet in the upstairs balcony of an old movie palace. (Though we never see the screen, sharp-eared film buffs will recognize allusions to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 surveillance classic “The Conversation.”) After a couple of warm, intimate exchanges in secluded spaces, Lucas allows himself to imagine a future free from hiding, even if Andrew cautions that what they have can only ever be temporary.

Early in “Plainclothes,” thanks to changes in aspect ratio and Lucas’ facial hair, we realize that this timeline amounts to an extended memory, triggered in the present scenes by tense New Year’s Eve preparations at Lucas’ childhood home and a misplaced letter that he hopes neither his adoring, recently widowed mother (a wonderful Maria Dizzia) nor his obnoxious, hot-headed uncle (Gabe Fazio) find.

The backward-forward structure creates entwined tracks of suspense between the outcome of the Andrew relationship and the expected ramifications of what’s assumed to be a revealing letter. That framework gives “Plainclothes” the feeling of an emotional chase film where pursuer and pursued are the same, stuck in a loop of possibility, torn about what being caught really means.

Emmi’s well-conceived screenplay does justice to the ways a compartmentalized life can crack. When Lucas is with Andrew — and even in scenes with a nice ex-girlfriend (Amy Forsyth) — acceptance is palpable, understanding real. Among family, the pressure to conform activates his guardedness. And when his department, steeped in macho culture and eager for more mall arrests, starts deploying a video camera behind a one-way mirror, an increasingly anxious Lucas is made to feel nothing but risk about his identity.

There may be little that’s psychologically fresh about “Plainclothes,” but the fact that its low-key, close-framed style suggests a taut, moody gay indie you might have seen in the ’90s works in its favor. It’s also well cast, with the appealing Blyth always in control of the undercurrents, especially alongside the excellent Tovey, playing a sadder, wiser closetedness. I wish Emmi hadn’t overegged the visual motif that Lucas’ POV in moments of stress is akin to the fuzzy texture of Hi8 video: A little of it goes a long way and too often pulls us out of the tone in a room. But it’s the kind of choice that’s easier to forgive in a movie so well-attuned to shifts in perception, one that dimensionalizes the problem of achieving clarity when leading a double life.

“You’re in this now! You’ve got a lot of work to do!”

The gravelly voice was unmistakably Kirk Gibson. The object of his growl was a journalist who spent two years battling him on the Dodgers beat.

Only this time, Gibby wasn’t yelling at me. This time, he was cheering for me.

“I’m fighting it, you gotta fight it! You gotta take it head-on, because this s— ain’t going away!”

Thirty-five years after we sparred in the Dodger clubhouse, Gibson and I have found ourselves on the same team.

We both have Parkinson’s Disease, and he spent much of a recent 45-minute phone call pushing me to battle the incurable illness the way he once battled a certain backdoor slider.

“Is it fun being depressed? You cannot succumb!”

It’s that time of year when folks talk about arguably the greatest moment in Dodger history, Gibson’s one-legged, two-run homer against future Hall of Famer Dennis Eckersley to win the World Series opener against the Oakland Athletics and spark the team to a 1988 championship.

For many, an indelible memory. But in many ways, he’s no longer the same Kirk Gibson.

In 2015, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a progressive neurological disorder that affects movement.

Today, his home-run gait around the bases would be wobbly, and his right fist pumps would be shaky, and afterward he might need help in the locker room buttoning his shirt.

But one thing that has remained powerful is his fire.

“You battle through it!”

He is battling it such that this fall, he will hit another monumental home run, this one far more impactful than any previous October blast.

On Oct. 6, in a gleaming building located in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills, Gibson will formally open the Kirk Gibson Center for Parkinson’s Wellness.

For those like me, heaven.

There are few places in the country quite like it — this giant, 30,000-square feet warehouse dedicated to Parkinson’s patients, complete with two gyms, 11 spaces for movement classes, a track, a social space and even quiet rooms for those experiencing the off times that occur during those dreaded gaps in the daily medication.

And it’s all free. For everyone. All the time.

“It was fun to hit the home run, but this involves a lot more people,” Gibson said. “We’re trying to create a culture where people with Parkinson’s can thrive. Instead of sitting home being depressed, you come out and occupy your mind and participate in classes and deal with your life.”

Gibson is so ingrained in his created community that he has an office in the middle of the building and shows up nearly every day to coach a most unlikely looking squad.

“We’re not a good-looking group, but we’re a great group,” he said. “We’re a bunch of people moving around, shaking, some have walkers, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. We’re a beautiful bunch.”

When Gibson gives speeches, he asks the audience to identify their own personal World Series. Gibson was a Fall Classic hero in 1984 and 1988, but it’s clear, his World Series is here, his World Series is now, and as he strongly encouraged me in my situation, you could almost hear the drumbeat of October.

“Fight it! Take it head on!”

The night Kirk Gibson made Dodger history, he did so alone. Because he was certain leg injuries would prevent him from playing in the 1988 World Series opener, he sent his family home before the game. When he hit his historic blast, he was unable to share it with loved ones, so it didn’t seem real.

“All these years, I didn’t really know what happened,” he said. “I never really felt it.”

That all changed last October when Freddie Freeman matched Gibson’s dramatics with a Game 1 grand slam to beat the New York Yankees.

The moment Gibson heard Joe Davis say, “Gibby, meet Freddie,” the impact finally sunk in.

“When he made that call, that put it all in perspective,” Gibson said. “He took that moment and made it what it had been all those years. I got it, and I was handing it off to Freddie, and I was so honored.”

Gibson said his Parkinson’s diagnosis, which was made official in 2015 after his left arm became glued to his side, has made him appreciate every small wonder.

“After all these years of gruffness … I’ve changed,” he said. “It’s like you’re living a different life.”

Several years ago Gibson was playing golf with an Australian businessman who had no idea that Gibson was once a baseball and football star. Steve Annear was struck by Gibson’s devotion to seeking a Parkinson’s cure, which had become the focus of the Kirk Gibson Foundation.

“Here was this popular athlete who could have been doing anything,” said Annear. “But he was spending his time helping other people. I so admired him.”

Annear, an amputee who recently climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with the sort of fighting spirit that first attracted Gibson, became CEO and director of the foundation. Their team came up with the idea of a wellness center in 2023, raised $27 million to build it and construction was completed in July. In the process, it became obvious that Gibson’s approach was different.

The legendarily abrasive superstar? It had been replaced by a more sensitive soul, one who will give impromptu pep talks to anyone he encounters who is clearly suffering from Parkinson’s, whether it be in an airport terminal or grocery store checkout line.

”There’s no doubt that Parkinson’s has humbled Gibby,” said Annear. “He is selfless, very determined, very passionate, all about other people.”

Nearly 900 folks have already registered to become members during a recent soft launch, and Gibson has joined them in their daily activities, doing everything from playing pool to taking spin classes

”What’s always mattered most to Kirk is the team, and this is his new team,” said Annear. “The center is his new locker room, and the attendees, the administrators, the staff, they’re all his new teammates.”

Not that he has forgotten his old teams, as a large cutout of Gibson celebrating in a Detroit Tigers uniform can be found in the center. With help from the great Peter O’Malley, Gibson will also soon decorate a room with Tommy Lasorda’s legendary Vero Beach dinner table.

“The way this has all come together is unbelievable,” said Gibson. “It’s divine intervention.”

Just the other day, Gibson was getting a haircut when somebody walked up and handed him $300 for the wellness center.

”We’re trying to help as many people as possible,” he said. “I hate going to the doctor, I hate going to the hospital. The wellness center isn’t anything like that. It’s a cool place.”

Like everyone with Parkinson’s, Gibson has his good days and bad days. Life is not measured by how one falls, but how one gets back up.

Two years ago while fishing in Alaska, Gibson tumbled out of the boat. This year he didn’t.

“I’m pretty proud of that,” he said.

Rarely has he felt the pride he will feel on Oct. 6 when, with the formal opening of the Kirk Gibson Center for Parkinson’s Wellness, baseball’s ultimate competitor once again creating the impossible out of the improbable.

“I don’t get scared,” said Gibson. “I attack.”

And so he ended our conversation by strongly urging me to fly cross country and visit his center, to be enriched and educated and basically get my Parkinson’s-laden butt moving.

I told him I would try. The phone exploded in my hands.

“Try? You know what Lasorda always said. ‘I could get a truck driver to try!’ Don’t just try! Do it!”