Loves Me, Loves Me Not....

The pitcher who signed the contract that kick-started baseball’s death-spiral to Work Stoppage 2002 stares in at the catcher who led last season’s charge of the blight brigade into the Wrigley Field stands.

The journeyman infielder, former property of the Kintetsu Buffaloes and the Orix Blue Wave, guards the line at third because the regular third baseman, the one who was illegally signed to a contract before his 16th birthday, is still recovering from a botched appendectomy performed during the off-season.

The second baseman who couldn’t cut it at shortstop plays back a step or two, positioned there because the man they acquired in exchange for the best pitcher in baseball couldn’t cut it at second base.

The star left fielder who threatened to reveal dirty secrets about the team if he wasn’t traded, who called his bosses clueless and his teammates undeserving of “dumb” contracts that have affected his ability to earn more than $9.5 million this season, smooths out the uniform of the team for which he swore he’d never play again.

The manager, the team’s fourth in four seasons, studies a lineup card featuring a leadoff batter who struck out nearly 120 times last season because the front office, which has already spent more money on this team than any in baseball history, didn’t want to shell out for a pricier model, while the general manager, who refused to trade a pitching prospect for Johnny Damon, sits upstairs, thinking up new nicknames for himself in eager anticipation of his next radio talk-show interview.

Ladies and gentlemen . . . your 2001 Los Angeles Dodgers!

Assuming, of course, you have successfully deluded, or medicated, yourself into thinking these are still your Dodgers, the Dodgers you were weaned on, back when the name still meant something more than Fox programming filler between “Cops” and “When Animals Attack.”

Half a century ago, a good half-dozen years before Kevin Malone was born, Dodger foot-in-mouth disease was restricted to a midsummer utterance by Brooklyn Manager Charlie Dressen that “The Giants is dead.” He was talking about the 1951 National League pennant race, at a time when the Dodgers looked unstoppable. (Again, this was 50 years ago.) Dressen’s attention to detail was as bad as his grammar, as the Giants rallied to tie the Dodgers in the standings, then won the pennant, won the pennant, won the pennant on Bobby Thomson’s playoff-deciding home run.

Fifty years on, a safer bet can be made from the evidence at hand.

The Dodgers is dead.

Oh, there’s still a team using the name, though it might as well be the Devil Rays or the 3rd Rocks From the Sun or, if Fox truly wanted to trade on a brand that represents tradition, quality and continuity to an entire generation of fans, the Simpsons.

But the Dodgers Los Angeles once knew, the summer perennial that sent millions of kids to bed with their transistor radios, dreaming of Danny Goodman souvenir specials and fairy tales spun by Uncle Vinny, are no more. Everything those Dodgers stood for, everything Dodger blue once symbolized, has been buried behind home plate at Chavez Ravine, where Mike Piazza once squatted, where Dusty Baker once trotted.

Dodger stability? The franchise that employed two managers, Walt Alston and Tom Lasorda, from 1954 to 1996 has gone through four since 1998. Since Piazza made his last start for the Dodgers, in May ‘98, the team has brought in Charles Johnson and let him go, brought in Todd Hundley and let him go, brought in Chad Kreuter, kept him and will now platoon him with Paul LoDuca. Shortstop? Greg Gagne in ‘97, Jose Vizcaino in ‘98, Mark Grudzielanek in ‘99, Alex Cora in 2000. Second base? Delino DeShields in ‘96, Wilton Guerrero in ‘97, Eric Young in ‘98-99, Grudzielanek in 2000.

The fabled Dodger farm system? Only two position players in Monday’s opening-day lineup, Cora and first baseman Eric Karros, have spent their entire careers with the Dodgers. To assemble the starting outfield of Gary Sheffield, Tom Goodwin and Shawn Green, the club said goodbye to three former rookies of the year--Piazza, Todd Hollandsworth and Raul Mondesi. Baseball Weekly recently ranked the Dodger farm system 28th of 30 clubs.

“The Dodger Way To Play Baseball,” which once upon a time meant pitching, speed and defense? The pitching is still there, with General Manager Malone kicking and dealing $105 million to lure Kevin Brown from San Diego and $55 million more to keep Darren Dreifort in the rotation. But the Dodgers have become station-to-station plodders on the base paths--no player stole more than 24 bases last season--and an amusement park in the field. The team that long preached strength up the middle has had no infielder win a Gold Glove since Davey Lopes in ‘78, no center fielder since Willie Davis in ’73 and only one catcher since John Roseboro in ’66.

(For trivia enthusiasts, Johnson was the NL Gold Glove catcher in ’98. The Dodgers celebrated this momentous achievement by trading Johnson a month later to the New York Mets.)

And, be it myth or not, the Dodgers had a reputation for carrying themselves with style, of holding themselves to a higher standard. Anyone who ever listened in on a post-defeat media briefing by Tom Lasorda knows this wasn’t always the case. But to the general populace, the Dodger logo connoted class the same way the Chicago Cubs’ red “C” evoked lovable ineptitude.

But that was then, this is now.

Then: Watching a fan run onto the Dodger Stadium field to try to light the American flag on fire, outfielder Rick Monday, a Cub that day but later a Dodger, swoops in to save the flag.

Now: Having a fan sneak up from behind to snatch the cap from his head, Kreuter leads a Dodger SWAT team into the Wrigley Field stands for a skirmish that results in 19 Dodger players and coaches being suspended and fined a total of $72,000.

Then: The Dodgers revolutionize major league baseball with their scouting and development of players in the talent-rich Dominican Republic.

Now: The Dodgers are fined and sanctioned by major league baseball for doctoring the birth certificate of Dominican third baseman Adrian Beltre in order to sign him to a contract a year earlier than rules permit.

Then: Rick Sutcliffe rearranges Lasorda’s office in a fit of anger after being left off the Dodgers’ 1981 playoff roster. The next spring, Sutcliffe finds himself pitching for the Cleveland Indians.

Now: Sheffield burns every bridge from here to Vero Beach, doing everything to provoke a trade short of pulling down Chairman Bob Daly’s pants during a staff meeting. But because Sheffield just tied the club single-season record for home runs, and because the Mets won’t trade back Piazza for a $9.5-million malcontent, the Dodgers keep Sheffield in the heart of the lineup, pretending nothing ever happened, for as long as Sheff continues to clear National League fences.

As goes Sheffield, so go the Dodgers?

From a Los Angeles baseball fan perspective, the commute to Edison Field looks shorter every day.

*

Man may penetrate the outer reaches of the universe, he may solve the very secret of eternity itself, but for me, the ultimate human experience is to witness the flawless execution of the hit-and-run.

--Branch Rickey

My new nickname, I want you to know, is Dodger Boy.

--Kevin Malone

The Dodgers pulled out of Brooklyn in 1958 and, for 40 years, we humored pathetic New Yorkers as they ranted about a public trust betrayed, about a civic institution pirated away, about their unrelenting seething hatred for Walter O’Malley. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we said as we ran another pennant up the Dodger Stadium flagpole. Life goes on--maybe you need to finally get one?

Now, however, we know.

The sins of the father on one coast have been revisited by the son on the other. Welcome to Flatbush West. Brooklyn had the wrecking ball crashing down on Ebbets Field, Los Angeles had Peter O’Malley selling out to Fox. Remember where you were when you heard the news? Remember that burning feeling in the pit of your stomach?

We knew then it was all over. We tried to pretend it wasn’t, overdosing on Dodger Dogs and turning up the volume on Vin Scully, but we knew. It was the summer of 1997. The Rams were gone. The Raiders were gone. Suddenly, the Dodgers were gone too.

Technically, the moving vans never showed up at Chavez Ravine. But the Dodgers were whisked away, dismantled one agonizing piece at a time.

Piazza, the greatest hitting catcher in history and the most popular Dodger since Fernando Valenzuela--traded to Florida for Johnson, Jim Eisenreich, a thrown-in pitching prospect and two bad actors to be blamed later, Sheffield and Bobby Bonilla.

Bill Russell, longtime dutiful servant to the club as shortstop and manager--fired 72 games into Fox’s first full season as owner.

Lasorda, the best carnival barker the Dodgers ever had--teased with the general manager’s chair, then shunted upstairs to a ceremonial role as “senior vice president.”

The best thing that can be said about the Fox tenure so far: They weren’t the ones who traded Pedro Martinez for DeShields.

Forget Mike Busch; these are the replacement Dodgers. Rank impostors who beg the question: If it doesn’t talk like a Dodger, walk like a Dodger, think like a Dodger or act like a Dodger, is it still a Dodger?

Fans old enough to remember the Dodgers’ last playoff victory--high school sophomores and older, basically--know that the answer is no.

Eric Spotts, 35, of Redondo Beach, remembers when being a Dodger fan meant knowing the lineup from year to year without name tags or a scorecard.

Two weeks before the team’s 2001 opener, however, Spotts said he “couldn’t tell you who’s going to open the year for them in center. And I couldn’t tell you for sure who’s going to open the year for them at short or catcher. And that’s a joke. Because for 25 years, I’ve always known.”

Don Sveen, 33, of Studio City, remembers when being a Dodger meant developing a plan, staying the course and resisting every ridiculous fad, trend and gimmick that came wandering down the pike.

“I liked the fact that in the 1970s, when everybody went to the stretchy, waistband uniforms, the Dodgers still kept their button-down jerseys and the belt sort of thing,” he says, “which everybody else eventually went back to.

“They were never tempted to put in AstroTurf. There was never a multipurpose football stadium. A family-owned team, I liked that.”

Fox has kept the uniforms and the stadium reasonably intact, but has changed virtually everything else.

“With Fox, it’s, ‘Oh, that move sucks, so we’ve got to make an even bigger move,’ ” Sveen says.

The Dodgers may look like a baseball team, but they feel like a Hollywood studio, says Seth Swirsky, a 40-year-old songwriter and author living in Beverly Hills.

“It became deeply corporate with Fox,” he says. “I think Bob Daly is running it in a way that feels very Warner Brothers-ish to me. It’s almost like, ‘I don’t care that much about the script, get me Mel Gibson.’ ”

So the Dodgers throw $105 million at Brown--big name in San Diego, Fox saw him pitch in the World Series--and $12.4 million at Devon White--who used to make a lot of highlight-show catches for the Angels in the ‘80s--but refuse to take a flier on Damon, maybe the game’s next great leadoff hitter, who went instead to Oakland.

“I really think Kevin Malone has been behind the curve,” Swirsky says. “There is no reason not to get Johnny Damon. That changes your team. And you have a chance to get somebody for Gary Sheffield, like Jay Payton. That changes the vibe of the team, it makes it more exciting to the fans.

“They don’t want store-bought players, especially Dodger fans. There’s tradition to that uniform, there’s tradition behind it. But these guys they have, you can’t relate to. Wouldn’t you be more excited to see Johnny Damon, Shawn Green and Jay Payton in the outfield? I would.

“I don’t care if the Dodgers win games because Gary Sheffield hits a home run. I want to root.”

Can you root for a team that kept Carlos Perez on its active roster for two cancerous seasons simply because it didn’t want to eat the remainder of his three-year, $15.6-million contract? For a team that can no longer grow its own, which explains why a soon-to-be 35-year-old refugee from the Japan League, Chris Donnels, will open the season at third base for the Dodgers? For a team that traded away a modern-day Dodger icon, Piazza, because they didn’t want to pay him $90 million--then went out six months later and spent $105 million on Brown, whose surly disposition has yet to ignite any rapturous spasms of Kevinmania?

“If I was a kid, it would be more difficult,” says Lewis Leader, the 53-year-old editor of The Times Valley Edition, who developed his passion for Dodger baseball as a young boy growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s. “My daughter still has a Piazza T-shirt that we got her a number of years ago when she was about 8 or 9. She asked me, ‘How could they trade Piazza?’ And it was difficult to explain what was going on.

“They certainly didn’t trade Campanella. Although, of course, he was tragically injured. . . . I think to be a fan, in some ways, you just kind of have to almost swallow hard and say, ‘Yeah, that’s not good.’ But on the other hand, I really enjoy this. I get some pleasure, and aggravation, out of watching them. As a Dodger fan, one certainly has had plenty of both.”

Roger Kahn, author of “The Boys of Summer,” the quintessential study of the old-time Brooklyn Dodger experience, believes the team in its modern incarnation has failed its forefathers on a grander scale.

“Here was a team that led the way out of American apartheid,” Kahn says. “That’s really what the last edition of the Brooklyn Dodgers was about. It was the team of [Jackie] Robinson and [Don] Newcombe and Campanella and Joe Black. . . . It was living proof for everybody who had any doubts that blacks and whites could work side-by-side and be friends. You can’t imagine what a hot issue it was, compared to today’s climate. It was a burning issue.

“I felt they’ve ratted out on their historic mission, by not having a black manager. Or not, to my knowledge, ever having a black third base coach. . . . They simply didn’t follow through on their noble mission.”

In short, the Dodgers used to be special, apart from the pack, ahead of the curve. Now, they’re indistinguishable from the Rockies or the Diamondbacks, just another team lined up to lose to the Braves, just another stop on the Mark McGwire Homers Across America tour.

Once, “the Dodgers were a team that other teams hated,” says James Fujita, 27, of Rancho Palos Verdes. “Other teams chanted ‘Beat L.A.’ at games. I knew that to be ‘Dodger-like’ was to be good. The Dodgers weren’t the Milwaukee Brewers.

“Nowadays, I’m not so sure. I think some things haven’t changed. In many ways, the team is a lot like the city of Los Angeles itself. It’s flawed, but still admired by outsiders, with a nice history and some redevelopment needed.”

As for Brooklyn, Kahn reports the borough has finally gotten over the heartbreak.

“If you tried to give the Dodgers back to Brooklyn, Brooklyn wouldn’t take them,” he says. “You gave up [John] Franco, you gave up Todd Zeile, you gave up Piazza. We don’t need you. We’ve got the Mets.”