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Originally Posted by Strangler Lewis
The Fans: They've never shaken or attempted to shake the "come late/leave early/baseball is just another form of disposable family entertainment" rep, except, of course, to cultivate a counterbalancing thuggishness.
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If you don't work within 10 miles of the stadium, it's neigh impossible to make it on time for a 7PM game without ditching work early. And neigh impossible to get home before 1AM if you leave after the 8th inning of a 7PM game.
I was at Matt Cain's perfect game at AT&T last year. I showed up around the 3rd inning because I was coming from the south bay after working. I was not the only person entering the stadium at the time, it was still filling up, just like Dodger stadium on a weeknight.
Obviously not many people left early that night.
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The Ownership Dey took da team oudda Brooklyn. More recently, they seem bent on giving the George Steinbrenner era a run for its money.
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The new ownership actually gives a crap about the team and its success, after years under a greedy, money-only regime. They're spending money Yankees-style now because the previous owners decimated the once historic farm system and spending money is their way to create some value and interest in the short term while they rebuild from within. It's smart...and now that people are healthy, it's working.
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The Team Hard to tell from a distance, and it is the nature of the era, but is there anyone other than Kershaw that you look at and think "I can't imagine him in another uniform."
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Hardly unique to the Dodgers. But even so - Billingsley, Kemp, to a lesser degree Ethier are thus far career Dodgers. And Puig has the look of a franchise player early (and I suspect the new ownership is sensitive enough to such things to make that happen). The thing that's missing is iconic championship moments with those players which would cement them as Dodgers - but again that's not due to some unique shortcoming of the team or the players, or how the players have been acquired. That's simply due to the team not winning the Series since they've been playing (a condition they share with ~70% of the teams in the league)