Locals Are One Unit Shy

Upon phoning the Dodgers Monday--they are courageously still taking calls--I was briefly put on hold.

From the receiver came the taped voice of Vin Scully.

“In a year that has been so improbable,” he intoned above the roar of a 1988 crowd, “the impossible has happened.”

I thought, “You can say that again.”

In fact, you can say that today.

In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.

After the Dodgers and Angels lost an auction for one of baseball’s best properties, it is the Dodgers who are slamming their fists against a wall.

The Angels can almost shrug.

The excitement occurred Monday when pitcher Randy Johnson blew off both our local nines to sign with a 65-win expansion team near his Arizona home after he’d said he wanted to play for a winner.

Stranger than Johnson’s rationalization--why doesn’t anyone ever just admit he wants big bucks and a short commute?--is its effect.

The Angels’ season will withstand this loss.

The Dodgers’ season may not.

“We’ve lost our edge a bit,” acknowledged Bob Graziano, Dodger president, referring to the team’s overall state. “We’re trying to get that edge back.”

And exactly why can’t the recent increase in ticket prices buy that edge?

If that money can’t buy Johnson, how about another starting pitcher? Or a left-handed power hitter?

Can’t they buy something beside Devon White, who fills a hole, but whose signing was supposed to be just the start?

“That’s a fair observation by our fans, but we increased the payroll by $10 million last May and did not raise ticket prices then,” Graziano said. “Even this increase will not cover our payroll for the last year and a half.

“We are spending every last dime we generate--and then some--in trying to get the best players we can.”

Since mishandling last summer’s midseason purge on the day Al Campanis died, Graziano has done some good things in cleaning up the long-neglected front-office mess.

He hired Kevin Malone as general manager instead of Tom Lasorda’s buddy, Jim Bowden, and Malone knows the game.

He essentially hired Davey Johnson, who knows about winning fast.

And he has quietly quieted Lasorda.

Now he needs to persuade his baseball people to do something else--and do it soon--before fans start remembering that their ace pitcher is Chan Ho Park, and their third baseman is Adrian Beltre.

And that the future is in Anaheim.

Since last summer, when the Dodgers lost an identity while the Angels found one, it has been increasingly tough to tell who is who.

Say you are a baseball fan with $100. Say you can take the family to the 1999 home opener in either Anaheim or Chavez Ravine.

In past years, it was simple. You would try to buy Dodgers, and settle for Angels.

This spring, in a very different sort of way, it is even simpler. It is a child’s verse.

Eenie, meenie, minie . . . Mo.

With Mo Vaughn in the lineup, Edison Field is where you want to be on opening day, even without Randy Johnson on the mound.

With Vaughn, the Angels have the depth to trade for another starting pitcher.

With Vaughn, the Angel clubhouse will have the sort of culture into which an eccentric like Johnson rarely fits.

Would Johnson have made them a better team? Absolutely.

Would he have caused a ruckus while doing it? Absolutely.

“Randy Johnson is a great pitcher,” said Manager Terry Collins from an airport telephone Monday. “It would have been nice to have him in the rotation. But we do have some options.”

One of those options is not a clubhouse cat fight, which might eventually have happened if Johnson showed up every five days in an Angel uniform, but disappeared otherwise, which is sort of what he does.

During an interview on the final Saturday of the regular season in Houston, he made a couple of things clear.

“I look at this like a business now,” he said.

And this:

“Teammates rely on me too much. It’s like, when I’m pitching, I can’t make a mistake out there, and that’s not right.”

Given the teamwork ethic instilled by Collins and Larry Bowa, the Angels are not the sort who can easily accept someone who openly looks at this as a business.

And for $52.4 million, don’t you want someone who wants to be relied upon?

In the end, it seemed the Astros weren’t playing as hard for a guy they never considered one of them.

The Angels still could have won big with Johnson. They still need somebody who can throw even remotely like him.

But at least they can do something about it.

“Yes, I’d like to see if we can come up with another pitcher,” Collins said. “And if there’s a deal that will make us better, we’ll make it.”

They’ll make that deal because they have the player--Jim Edmonds--with which to make it.

Trading him won’t bring a guy who can throw like Randy Johnson. It won’t even bring Andy Pettitte anymore, seeing as the New York Yankees no longer need Edmonds after re-signing Bernie Williams.

But it will get them a decent No. 1 or No. 2 pitcher, and that could be enough to get them to the playoffs.

The Dodgers are a different story.

The Dodgers needed Johnson, despite his baggage, because they don’t have the luxury of just trading for somebody else.

With their depth devastated during Lasorda’s brief stint as general manager, they don’t have anybody to trade.

Remember the good old days, when all anybody worried about was Dodger clubhouse chemistry?

Today’s subject is physiology. They need bodies, and plenty of them.

The Dodgers needed Johnson more than the Angels because they may not be able to get a good starting pitcher except by buying one.

And if they don’t get a good starting pitcher--because they also haven’t acquired a good left-handed power hitter or left-handed setup reliever--this could be one lousy year.

It has certainly been one lousy off-season.

If Johnson had signed here, that ticket price increase might be forgiven.

Because he didn’t, it becomes as tall and bright as that Union 76 sign.

You’re charging us more? Then you owe us more.

“In a trade, clubs want prospects, and it’s difficult . . . we’ve used some of our prospects,” Graziano said. “So we will continue to be active in looking at available free agents.”

This, of course, means one person.

“We’re interested in Kevin Brown,” he said.

Kevin Brown? The one free-agent pitcher who could make everything better, shut all of us up, return the Dodgers to the playoffs?

The guy who, it seems, would stay in San Diego if he stays on the West Coast, the guy who wants to be nearer to his Georgia home?

The Dodgers can really sign Kevin Brown?

In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible will have happened.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com