The Smith Park Dodgers of Pico Rivera...

The Smith Park Dodgers of Pico Rivera aren’t exactly the Bad News Bears.

Still, the team’s sponsors were evidently a bit surprised when the Dodgers won the Pacific Division tournament of the American Amateur Baseball Congress and qualified for the World Series in Atlanta.

“They told us they couldn’t sponsor our trip back there,” said Anita Morris, whose son, Matthew, is a star pitcher for the Dodgers.

“I don’t know whether they (the sponsors) didn’t think we’d make it or whether they were having financial problems, but I just couldn’t tell those little 10-year-olds that they couldn’t go,” said Jim Morris, her husband.

In need of about $10,000 for air fare and other expenses for the 19 players and their coaches, the Morrises contacted radio station KZLA-FM last week. Disc jockey Brian Roberts began putting out a daily appeal, and businesses and individuals responded.

The Smith Park youngsters are scheduled to fly to Atlanta tomorrow

So, a Dodger team will be in a World Series this year, after all.

Congestion in mini-malls isn’t limited to traffic. Even the signs don’t have much breathing room. One Long Beach mini-mall (see accompanying photo) seems to offer an unusual feature for people doing their wash.

The city of Duarte, age 32, is thinking about a name change again. A decade ago, voters in the San Gabriel valley city rejected a proposal to switch to the ritzier-sounding Rancho Duarte. Now, a group is circulating a petition to qualify the more scenic Duarte Hills for the ballot.

The big question, as always, is: Would a name change be worth the cost of printing up a new batch of official stationery?

Duarte isn’t the first city to experience an identity crisis. Simi Valley has considered Santa Susana. Oxnard once pondered Cabrillo. Years ago, some citizens of El Segundo actually proposed lengthening the name to El Segundo a Nada (“second to nothing”).

But one of the few locals to actually go through with a change was Dairy Valley, which in 1967 became Cerritos (or “little hills”), even though the city was almost totally flat except for a 50-foot mound of manure at a fertilizer co-op.

A front-page headline in the Fresno Bee the other day said: ‘Fresno’ fever cools with TV show rerun. A survey of Fresnans found that interest in the Carol Burnett spoof about rival raisin barons, which premiered three years ago, had “shriveled” this time around.

No doubt Fresnans remembered that “Fresno” didn’t exactly turn out to be a travelogue of their city. In fact, a total of about five minutes of the six-hour series was filmed in the raisin capital, the rest in the freeway capital.

The most appropriately named official in the city of Los Angeles? Could be the parking systems coordinator----Jay Carsman.