by Paul Teetor
It was a crazy year for local sports – and by that we mean sports in both Los Angeles and the beach cities. The biggest story of all was also the last big story, breaking in late December. And it didn’t matter if you lived at the beach or on Figueroa Street: this story was huge locally and nationally.
There was a time not too long ago when $700 million could have bought you the whole Dodgers team. Now it buys you one ballplayer, albeit one very special ball player. Indeed, the most unique ballplayer in history, the modern version of Babe Ruth.
Shohei Ohtani signed the largest contract in North American sports history last week and in one stroke of the pen he changed the entire narrative around the Dodgers. Before that moment It had been a year to reaffirm the tired old refrain: the Dodgers were great in the regular season, but choked like dogs in the playoffs.
They won their 11th National League West division title in the last 12 years, but flamed out in the first round of the playoffs because their pitchers couldn’t get anybody out. In what was most likely his last appearance in a Dodger uniform, Clayton Kershaw started the nightmare in game one when he was shelled in the first inning of an 11-2 loss. Then someone named Lance Lynn gave up four homers in the third inning of game two and that was pretty much it for the Dodgers postseason hopes. They were swept once again.
Their off-season mission was clear: get some front-line pitching that will stand up in the heat of the playoffs. And boy, did they ever deliver. First, they signed Ohtani, who happens to be an elite hitter as well as an elite pitcher, the winner of the American League MVP award two out of the last three years.
Then they traded for Tyler Glasnow, a reliable starter, and signed him to a five-year, $136 million extension. Then they doubled down on the Japanese connection by signing Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the most coveted free agent pitcher not named Otani, to a 12-year, $325 million contract.
Within a week they had spent over a billion dollars and acquired a pitching staff for the next decade to equal an offense led by Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, who finished second and third in the National League MVP voting.
Are there issues still to be settled? Sure.
Ohtani will only be able to hit, not pitch, next year while he rehabs from Tommy John surgery on his elbow. And Yamamoto, 25, has not thrown a single pitch in the major leagues. He’s only 5-foot-10 and 175 pounds, so there are doubts about how he will stand up to the bulked up, free-swinging beasts that populate major league lineups these days.
But that kind of nit-picking will be reserved for next summer. For now, the Dodgers have won the off-season. They can easily afford the contracts because they have one of the most lucrative deals in all of sports with Spectrum SportsNet La. The team is sure to bring in more revenue through higher ticket prices and Japanese sponsorship, but this deal is about winning the narrative for Dodgers management.
The Suicide of the Once Mighty PAC-12
This is on its own, a major story and a sad one for lovers of the history of West Coast sports. The bulk of the blame for this tragic, history-breaking move falls directly on UCLA and USC, who both led the charge to the Big 10 (actually the Big 16 and still growing.) All Ball warned right from the start that they were making a huge mistake, but once they committed to the move all the other conference teams scrambled to find a new home. There’s plenty of blame to go around, but it speaks to two ever-growing trends: one, the power of big media money to alter the collegiate sports landscape, and second not to assume digital players are riding to the rescue. The Pac-12 essentially waited too long to re-up its media deals and was left standing when the game of musical chairs ended. But its fallback option of going fully with a streamer imploded when only Apple showed up and then offered significantly less than other conferences were getting. That led Pac-12 schools to jump ship and flee to conferences with reliable media money, even if geographically these moves were illogical. Now USC and UCLA fans can look forward to their annual tailgate parties in West Lafayette, Indiana and Piscataway, New Jersey.
Happy Trails to the PAC-12: you didn’t know what you had till it was gone.
LA Times guts its sports section
This sad story is important because the Times had a long-standing connection with sports fans who tolerated its incredibly woke stance in the rest of the paper as long as they had a great sports section. From the late, great Jim Murry to the not-as-great-but-still interesting Bill Plaschke, the Times was a must-read for local sports fans.
But over the last five years the inevitable grinding down of the sports section progressed incrementally with the rest of the paper as round after round of budget cuts were implemented.
A breaking point was reached in mid-July, when the Times had to adapt to a new printing schedule that prevented most breaking stories from appearing in the next day’s paper. But instead of just admitting that they were caving in to economic pressures beyond their control, sports editor Iliana Limon Romero tried to pitch it as a new format to better serve their readers. In a note accompanying the changes she wrote: “Today we are introducing a new era for the Los Angeles Times sports section. The printed sports section will take on the look and feel of a daily sports magazine, with a different design show-casing our award-winning reporting and photography. Our new layout highlights our best, most ambitious sports journalism – distinctive work you cannot find anywhere else.”
Five months later, the daily reality is a lot more pedestrian than her over-cooked rhetoric: no more box scores, no more league standings, no more daily listing of leading scorers or home run leaders. The only standalone sports section is Sunday, and even that is filled with huge photos, day-after stories, and columns by Plaschke, who can still throw an occasional fastball, and Dylan Hernandez, who is really just a beat reporter – and a mediocre one at that – masquerading as a sports columnist.
By the end of the year, the Times had accomplished something that seemed impossible just a few months ago: by default, the Daily Breeze now has the best sports section in the Southland.
El Segundo wins the Little League World Series
The feel-good story of the year started out as strictly a local story in the Beach Cities. But as the scrappy band of El Segundo ball players kept on winning and advancing, winning and advancing, it morphed into a national story that actually made the front page of the LA Times when El Segundo ran the table and won the Little League World Series.
The story was so inspiring in so many ways – a bunch of neighborhood kids with stars in their eyes actually achieved their dreams – that it sparked talk of a book and even a Disney movie. Not to mention a float in the Rose Bowl parade.
In a year dominated by news of two horribly depressing wars, the increasingly real possibility that insurrection-inciting Donald Trump could be president again in spite of his 91 felony indictments, and hard proof that man-made climate change is occurring faster than ever, this was a story that we needed just to keep our sanity in an increasingly mad, mad world.
Mira Costa, so Close and yet so far away
The Mira Costa football and girls volleyball teams came oh-so-close to winning a CIF title – and yet both of them fell short in what seemed to be a common theme for the school that keeps upping its athletic game even as its academic profile is higher than ever.
The girls volleyball loss was the toughest to digest. Led by superstar Charlie Fuerbringer (named after her mother’s favorite perfume) the team that lost in the CIF finals last year once again battled all the way to the CIF Finals, driven by thoughts of redemption — only to suffer the same fate once again.
The football team almost pulled off what would have been a miracle – losing their first seven games, then winning the next seven and advancing to the CIF Finals. But after grabbing a 21-0 lead against Simi Valley, it all slipped away. They lost in overtime.
Happy Trails to three giants of the sporting scene who left us in 2023
Jim Brown, the greatest college and NFL running back ever, who successfully transitioned to an acting career in Hollywood; Dick Butkus of the Chicago Bears, the greatest linebacker ever, who also successfully transitioned to an acting career in Hollywood; and Willis Reed, the New York Knicks center who personified courage in the face of injury and adversity and provided the inspiration to beat the LA Lakers in game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals. Hobbling on one leg, he scored the first two buckets, sat down and didn’t play again. He had done a captain’s most important job: inspire his teammates.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. Follow: @paulteetor. ER
