This Was One Fan Dodgers Didn’t Disappoint

Dwight Decker’s friends and family will tell you that he was the best Dodger fan they ever knew.

On April 14, Decker, known as Dwightie Boy even at 97 1/2, fell at his Rancho Cucamonga home and was taken to the hospital. He returned home that evening and, consistent with his routine during the baseball season, turned on the radio to listen to the Dodger game.

But, after his ordeal, he was too tired to stay awake for the entire game. When that had happened in the past, granddaughter Elaynne Edwards would update him the next morning, reading to him from the Dodger Web page on the Internet.

Just that morning, she had unhappily informed him that the Dodgers had blown a two-run lead in the bottom of the 16th and lost, 7-6, to the Arizona Diamondbacks in a game that hadn’t ended in Phoenix until 19 minutes after midnight.

Dwight was not discouraged. He liked the team that the new general manager, Kevin Malone, had put together and believed him when he said he was the new sheriff in town and that the Dodgers would be playing the New York Yankees in the World Series.

When Dwight retired on the night of April 14, the Dodgers led the Diamondbacks, 2-0, and he was sure that they would hold onto the lead and win for the sixth time in the first nine games of this bright, young season.

He said as he went to bed, “I know they’re going to win this one.”

He died in his sleep of congestive heart failure. He would never know that the Diamondbacks had come back to win again, 6-2, or that the Dodgers would never be over .500 again after the second week in June, or that they would finish 23 games behind Arizona in the National League West.

The way I figure it, Dwight Decker was the last happy Dodger fan.

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Just when you thought it was impossible for the Dodgers to sink lower, they played their season finale at Houston with a chance to impact a division race and tanked.

I’m not accusing the players who did play of not trying in a 9-4 loss that gave the Astros the National League Central title, but where were the Dodgers’ two best players, Kevin Brown and Gary Sheffield?

Davey Johnson said that he didn’t want Brown to pitch on three days’ rest as a precaution against an injury that might affect him next season--as if he doesn’t have five months to recover before spring training. But OK, I’ll buy that.

Yet Johnson also said that he would have taken the risk if Brown had been going for his 20th victory.

In other words, it’s OK to risk a $105-million arm in pursuit of an individual goal but not for the sake of making sure that a championship team is crowned fairly. I don’t buy that. I’ve got to believe Johnson could have asked Brown to give the Dodgers at least five more innings without jeopardizing his future.

As for Sheffield, he was protecting ankle and shoulder injuries and a .301 batting average--Tony Gwynn he’s not--but he was willing to play if Johnson had thought the game was important.

It was important, to baseball.

Considering that Johnson was fired by the teams, the Cincinnati Reds and the New York Mets, that had the most to lose by the Astros finishing their season strong, some imagined a conspiracy theory by the Dodger manager to fix both.

Johnson denied it. His explanation was that he didn’t give a fat rat’s patoutie, or words to those effect, about any team other than his own.

Fortunately for baseball, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Milwaukee Brewers had more respect for the game in their series over the weekend against the Mets and the Reds. The Pirates and Brewers played with integrity, a word you don’t hear so often any more in connection with the Dodgers.

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I’m not sure what the Dodgers can do to improve next season or that Malone is the man to do it.

They have a lot of players who produce too little and make too much money, which doesn’t make them very valuable on the trade market. They are particularly challenged up the all-important middle, where Todd Hundley, Eric Young and Devon White might be as good as it gets for them for another season.

Malone likes to blame his predecessors in Dodger management, but he’s the one who brought in Hundley and White. Throw in the long-term deal for Carlos Perez, the Dave Mlicki trade and his delusions of grandeur for the team and Malone’s batting average was down there with Hundley’s.

Beyond next season, there has been speculation in the business journals that Fox will sell its baseball team. That would probably be the best thing for the long-term future of the Dodgers and probably for Rupert Murdoch and his operatives as well. Let’s hope they’re not discouraged from it just because Disney thought of it first.

Randy Harvey can be reached at his e-mail address: randy.harvey@latimes.com.