Tallying the losses of 2011

Not a bad year for news, 2011, and I hate to see it fade away so quickly.

In fact, I'm not going to let it.

In Southern California, I'm not sure who had the worse year. Was it Dodgers owner Frank McCourt or L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca?

A tossup, I'd say.

McCourt lost a wife, alienated a city with the help of his ex, drove the Dodgers into both mediocrity and bankruptcy, and is now being forced to sell the team.

If McCourt is looking for a silver lining, it will be nearly impossible for him to have a worse year in 2012. But I'm not counting him out.

Baca, meanwhile, ended the year promising to look into the small matter of 1,480 cases of wrongful incarcerations in the last five years. And believe it or not, that wasn't the low point of 2011 for Baca. It was one of his better days, in fact, because the responsibility for the faulty incarcerations extends beyond his department.

Baca had much worse days trying to defend himself and his department against mounting evidence that deputies abused inmates in the jail, allegations that are now the subject of an FBI investigation.

One day he blasted the idea of outside review, another day he welcomed it.

One day he seemed skeptical of the charges, insisting that people shouldn't necessarily believe what inmates said and speculating that any problems could probably be attributed to a bad apple or two rather than to systemic issues. Another day, under an onslaught of good old-fashioned reporting by Times scribes Robert Faturechi and Jack Leonard, he blamed his staff for not letting him know how bad things were.

And when a former jail official came forward to say that he'd repeatedly tried to alert Baca and other officials that deputies were pummeling inmates?

Baca blamed the whistle-blower for not fixing the problem himself.

Baca had such a miserable year that if he were up for reelection in 2012, Frank McCourt would have a shot at beating him. Unfortunately, Baca's term runs through 2014, so we're probably stuck with him until then.

As kind as Baca and McCourt were to serve up the occasional softball, there was plenty of other fodder in 2011.

Among the year's other big local stories was Occupy L.A. I pitched my tent with them for one memorable night, which I suppose means I'm partly responsible for killing the grass at City Hall, which city officials estimate will cost about $400,000 to replace.

Most of the occupiers I met weren't fans of mainstream media, and I had my criticisms of their movement, too. But I do think they started an important conversation about how things are rigged to benefit a few at the expense of the many. If you don't think they had a point about that, consider these headlines from 2011, which I pulled straight from the pages of the Los Angeles Times:

March 5: "State is No. 1 in gas prices."

April 14: "Exxon CEO gets $21.5 million."

April 15: "Chevron CEO earns $14 million."