Letters: Wanted: A Dodgers manager to push the right buttons

The new Dodgers manager should wear a suit and sit in the stands during games. His responsibilities will be to motivate the players before and after games, hand the lineup card to the umpires, and meet with the press. A data clerk sitting in the dugout with a laptop will direct the players electronically before every pitch based on a solution selected by a supercomputer after making trillions of calculations per second with the mad scientist team of Andrew Friedman and Farhan Zaidi at the controls in a closet deep in the bowels of Dodger Stadium. I can hardly wait.

Steve Hart

Murrieta

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The Dodgers’ front office should look up from their Strat-O-Matic boards and take note of two things: Both teams in the World Series made major, morale-boosting pickups at the trade deadline (Cespedes to the Mets and Cueto to the Royals), and both teams are guided by experienced older managers with minds of their own.

Josh Clark

San Gabriel

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Was sitting here helping Andrew Friedman count all the World Series rings that Billy Beane, the father of sabermetrics, has won.

Wait, what? Oh.

Andy Shmuckler

Hollywood

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Friedman and Zaidi do not realize, appreciate, or consider that baseball players and people, not machines, and the intangibles of leadership, chemistry, camaraderie and consistency are just as important as performance statistics in building a championship.

Baseball isn’t “Moneyball” — it’s “42.” Let’s hope the ownership group sees this and puts both these gentlemen on a very, very short leash.

James Chew

Washington

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I got a kick out of Mike DiGiovanna’s Oct. 26 article about going bold in the playoffs. Although I don’t think it was his intention to do so, his article was perfectly timed to answer the nagging question of just why Donnie Baseball and the Dodgers parted ways. Mattingly’s utter lack of feel for the abilities of his players and the strategy of the game made it impossible for him to go bold in the playoffs, dooming the Dodgers to early elimination from the postseason at least the last two seasons.

Larry Weiner

Culver City

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So Gabe Kapler is on the short list to manage the Dodgers? What I’d pay to be there when Tommy Lasorda addresses the single-A players about the Dodger Way in spring training and demonstrates the art of nude sunbathing to improve testosterone levels.

Phil Alvarez

Huntington Beach

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It is great to see Don Mattingly get the job in Miami. Everyone in Los Angeles wishes him well. Maybe he could take Yasiel Puig, Charley Steiner, Rick Monday and Kevin Kennedy with him.

Marc Gerber

Encino

Coaching the Trojans

With unranked USC’s resounding victory over No. 3 Utah, one has to wonder how harmful a coach is to top athletes when his focus is elsewhere.

Seems that Coach Helton had the Trojans playing against the Utes like others predicted they should all season. Will this be the way USC plays the rest of its games? Will USC look to ignore a coach with less experience, that motivates the team to excel, for a new hire that puts the program in limbo for the rest of the year, especially when it comes to recruiting?

And now the problem for USC fans. Can they and will they root for UCLA to beat Utah, to put them back in the race for the division title?

Barry Levy

Hawthorne

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I hope that USC realizes it has the best option for head coach right now. He is a man of honor and integrity. If I had a son playing college football, I would love Clay Helton coaching him. He is a winner both on and off the field.

Dan Heller

Redondo Beach

Trivial ticker

ESPN’s sports ticker during college football games misses the mark. As if the too-frequent updates of top-25 scores isn’t overkill enough, being shown about a thousand times that Ohio State’s game starts at 8 p.m. EDT clinches the deal! Who doesn’t know that already? And if someone must know how the Celta de Vigo soccer team fared, that someone probably doesn’t watch college football.

Gene Miller

Huntington Beach

Whose Rams?

I got quite a laugh reading that St. Louis Rams fans were quite upset at a recent Town Hall meeting about “their” team possibly being moved back to Los Angeles. Now the shoe is on the other foot and they are as angry as we were in 1994 when the idiot Rams owner moved our team to St. Louis!

Joe Bonino

Glendale

And so it begins

It is now clearer than ever that the Lakers are run by a more dysfunctional family and inept front office than that of Clippers past and Knicks present. I’m not even talking about their drafting of a power forward who can’t shoot, is smaller than advertised and can’t defend (Julius Randle) to drafting a point guard who is slow, unathletic and can’t shoot (D’Angelo Russell). I am talking about cutting a young 7-footer (Robert Upshaw) and keeping an absolute stiff (Robert Sacre) while cutting a young guard (Jabari Brown) and keeping an absolute has-been who was cut by the team two years ago and cut by every other team since (Artest/Peace/Panda).

The Lakers have absolutely no clue what they are doing. They have a coach who has never proved he could develop young talent and they have a management group that thinks this is the ‘80s. I hope I am wrong about Randle and Russell and that Upshaw and Brown never materialize into serviceable NBA players, but from the eye test, I don’t think I am. This is going to be a long, long season that will fall apart rather quickly. I guess the only good news would be that we will find out if Jimmy Buss is a man of his word and quits.

Geno Apicella

Placentia

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Metta World Peace says that the No. 1 goal this year is for the Lakers to win the championship. There’s a better chance of having world peace.

Gary H. Miller

Encino

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Hmmm.... Kobe goes eight for 24 while missing his last eight shots and the Lakers lose. Some things never change.

Apparently Kobe doesn’t yet realize that his belief that “I can make the next one,” no matter how badly he’s shooting, is a fairy tale, fantasy and nightmare all rolled into one. He’s always taken bad shots, but unfortunately it doesn’t appear he has learned anything during the last two years. He’s not as smart as many sportswriters portray him, and he doesn’t care about winning if it means he has to shoot less.

The Lakers need to be saved from Kobe, and the only one capable of doing that is Byron Scott, as difficult as it may be for Scott to do so.

Ray McKown

Los Angeles

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What does the 2016 Rose Parade have that the 2016 NBA championship parade won’t have? The Lakers.

Allan Kandel

Los Angeles

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