Dodgers in Need of Sweeping Changes

To Bill Russell: Great baseball from late July to late September does not constitute a winner. Baseball is played from mid-April to late October. Please set your sights on finding the players that believe a May 5 game means as much as an Oct. 1 playoff game.

JOHN C. PALKA

Anaheim Hills

*

If this were the old West, and we could run people out of town on a rail, I’d run out the extremely confused, and perhaps sinister, Fred Claire. How can he not understand that when your team’s lifeblood is your sore-kneed catcher and your starting pitching, the future is now?

Jeff King or Jim Eisenreich would have meant at least five more wins to a team that couldn’t hit its way out of a wet paper bag with a machete. Please give us someone who knows something, anything, about baseball, and please don’t tell me this was a successful season.

STEVE FREEMAN

Los Angeles

*

As fast as the Dodgers left the playoffs, you’d have thought they had spit in the umpire’s face.

P.S. The first job for Fred Claire during the off-season should be to hire Greg Louganis as a coach to help the Dodgers perfect their dive.

PAUL ECKER

Diamond Bar

*

“We Went Out to the Playoffs” (sung to the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”):

We went out to the playoffs.

We went out to the crowd.

Atlanta’s pitchers were showing their clout.

Piazza said that we just “fizzled out.”

Still we root, root, root for the Dodgers.

But now we’re out playing golf.

‘Cause it’s Smoltz, Maddux, Glavine, we’re out!

Of the old playoffs.

KENNETH McCARTHY

Chino