Dodgers’ start has been a real heartbreaker for him, and for Ned Colletti
I have a good heart.
Dr. Paul Weinstein has pictures to prove it following my angiogram, the chest pain now attributed to the stress from attending a Kings game and reading columns gushing about Kobe.
I took my initial concerns to Dr. Thomas Parsa and his tireless nurse, Danielle Davis, who recommended Weinstein, a heart specialist — the pair dubious, but still willing to learn if I had one.
I then had the choice of going to Oklahoma City as planned, or allowing the cardiologist to dig a hole below my belt line, stick a tube up north, wiggle it here and there, and then have me lie absolutely still for five hours with the wife watching “Days of Our Lives” sitting beside me.
Couldn’t wait to get to the hospital. I’ve been to Oklahoma City.
I was told there was only one chance in 1,000 of the absolute worst happening, although I would have felt better had nurse Scott Benedict said, “The Clippers have a better chance of winning a title than you buying it.” My final thought as the cutting began, though, was of Kobe.
It was written this week that Kobe “felt like being heroic again,” which got me thinking: What if Weinstein, whom some might really consider a hero, just didn’t feel like giving it his all on occasion?
I was kind of hoping this wasn’t going to be one of those occasions, and maybe Weinstein would feel like being heroic again.
When he was finished, the news all good here and I no longer had to worry about keeling over from emotional stress, I turned on a Dodgers game.
Talk about making someone sick.
I heard General Manager Ned Colletti had already called out the Dodgers on the radio. The boys seemed to be reacting very well to it too, losing their latest only 2-0, a victory of sorts for these guys.
Funny, but everyone sort of predicted this after an uneventful off-season, and yet Colletti reacted as if shocked.
I’ve known Colletti only as the “Schmoozer,” the former Cubs PR guy, but here he was outraged and disgusted with the team he built — pouncing on Matt Kemp, I guess, before anyone got around to asking who hired the team’s pitchers.
“Did you listen to the interview?” Colletti asked when I called, suggesting it didn’t necessarily go the way it’s been portrayed. So I did.
He was right. He was tougher on Kemp, who plays both left field and center when Manny Ramirez is in the lineup, than I had read. Colletti said when a ball is hit to Kemp, he’s “not sure if it’s going to get caught.”
He said, “I would have discussed whatever player came up, but I was never asked about anyone else.”
The interview was conducted on the Dodgers’ home radio station, and the McCourts’ divorce proceedings were also not brought up, so I asked if they were playing a role in the demise of the Dodgers.
“I would say no at this time,” Colletti said. “What should I have said, ‘I’m fine with being last in defense and in the bottom third of pitching’?
“When we started this season we needed to get off to a good start, play strong fundamentally, stay in it and hope to find some pitching halfway through the year or have one of our young guys mature and fill the gap.”
You would think the Dodgers would have loftier plans than that. I told Colletti some fans had suggested Colletti was shifting the blame for the team’s poor start from himself to Kemp.
“I haven’t heard that from people,” he said, while adding he doesn’t concern himself with what people have to say. “I just worry about how the team is playing.”
He’s really not that callous, or that bad of a guy — a blowhard maybe, but by the end of his radio interview he was so worked up, he was saying, “If they don’t want to be in L.A., we’ll figure that out too.”
Who was he talking about?
“Everyone having anything to do with the major league product is at fault,” he said, those in the organization thinking to themselves, “Hey, I’m not the guy who left this team with no choice but to start Charlie Haeger.”
When the season began in Pittsburgh, Colletti was already disappointed with this team. He said “it wasn’t sharp coming out of spring training.”
In his radio outburst, he said, “I’m just disappointed in the approach we’ve taken from the beginning on.”
Now it sounds as if he’s pointing the finger at Joe Torre, who is in charge of making sure his team is sharp, as well as the approach it takes from the beginning.
“I read things and if I don’t know the person who is saying them, I might get bent out of shape,” Torre said. “But I know Ned, you know his personality and he’s frustrated. He’s entitled to blow off steam.”
Maybe so, but it feels more like a smoke screen, bluster in place of the players the Dodgers’ organization should have pursued this past off-season to prevent such an embarrassing start.
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