2- Uh oh – This Can’t be Happening Cheers and stay hydrated. The Clippers mindlessly signed Kawhi Leonard to a huge extension, only to see him continue to sit out big chunks of the season with one injury after another as his team barely stayed afloat. He has yet to play this season. Billionaire owner […]
2- Uh oh – This Can’t be Happening
Cheers and stay hydrated.
The Clippers mindlessly signed Kawhi Leonard to a huge extension, only to see him continue to sit out big chunks of the season with one injury after another as his team barely stayed afloat. He has yet to play this season. Billionaire owner Steve Ballmer needs to fire everybody in the front office and start over. The only way to get elite young talent in the NBA is to finish at the bottom for several years in a row and get top-five draft picks. Right now, the Clippers are stuck in the middle with no path to get back to the top.
With the bad-news stories out of the way, let’s count the feel-good stories first – the first three are related.
Soccer Continues to grow in Popularity
Racism existed long before Caitlin Clark came along, and it will exist long after she’s gone. So don’t blame her for her fan’s devotion. Other sports have transcended race – notably the NBA, MLB, NFL, golf and tennis – and All Ball thinks women’s basketball will too eventually.
Overview: It’s been an incredible year for Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers, and they are still – justifiably – celebrating their World Series win six weeks after the last Yankee struck out.
Women Arrive Big-Time
On to 2025!
It started in December 2023 when the Dodgers announced they had signed Angels pitcher/slugger Shohei Ohtani to a 0 million contract over 10 years, with most of the money deferred to give the Dodgers the flexibility to build the roster around him and ensure they did everything they could to achieve his oft-stated dream: to play in a postseason game (something he never did in six years with the Angels) and of course to win a World Series. It’s impossible to overstate the excitement that gripped Dodgers fans – and even those who aren’t baseball fans but who follow pop culture – when the acquisition was announced. Expectations for the Dodgers immediately went through the roof. It was like the Dodgers had signed Taylor Swift. That’s how much of a cross-over pop star he became the minute he signed his contract.
Local Heroes
3- On to the World Series
For nearly everyone else in the LA sports scene, not so much.
by Paul Teetor
1—The biggest heist since the Yankees stole Babe Ruth from the Red Sox for the price of a Broadway Musical.
Congrats to the Galaxy and their growing legion of fans.
Locally, the Palos Verdes football team and the Mira Costa water polo team both won state CIF championships, so congrats to both of them.
In early December the LA Galaxy posted a 2-1 win over the New York Red Bulls before a sell-out crowd of 26,812 fans at Dignity Health Sports Park to win the Major League Soccer championship. Dejan Joveljić recorded the game-winning goal, while Gastón Brugman was named the MLS Cup MVP.
The Lakers continued their downward spiral as LeBron made every day a bring-your-kid-to-work day by forcing the Lakers to draft his son Bronny, give him a 4-year, million contract and then produced the most artificial, manufactured “Iconic moment” of NBA history when he played with Bronny in an early season game. It was an NBA first that should have been the last time Bronny – just a pawn in LeBron’s game — was seen on an NBA court.
Once that near-disaster was averted, the Dodgers led the National League West race wire-to-wire and hit the post-season as clear favorites to win it all. Then they ran smack into the San Diego Padres in a mini-freeway series, fell behind 2-1 in the best-of-five Divisional Series and were facing a third straight first round elimination from the playoffs. But they won game four 8-0, and in the winner-take-all game five, Japanese rookie Yoshinobu Yamamoto pitched a 2-0 shutout that justified every dollar of the 5 million he got for signing a 12-year contract.
The USC and UCLA football teams both self-destructed by getting out of the PAC-12 and running into the buzzsaw that is the Big Ten (really the Big 16, but who’s counting?)
Once they got past the Padres, the Dodgers ran through the New York Mets and then the New York Yankees thanks to unlikely hitting hero Tommy Edman and some stellar pitching from starters Yamamoto, Jack Flaherty and Walker Buehler. Their bullpen was pretty good too.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com
The Angels – for those dwindling few who actually care about them – continued to suck thanks to the ineptitude of owner Arte Moreno, who passed his sell-by date long ago. Note to Arte: Please get Mike Trout out of Orange County and give him a chance to shine once again before it’s too late. He would look good in Dodger blue.
The spring training hysteria continued right into the early season, even though the team let it be known that Ohtani was not going to pitch this year due to elbow surgery. Then something unthinkable happened, something that threatened to be almost as damaging to baseball as the infamous “Black Sox” betting scandal of 1919 when the Chicago White Sox tanked the World Series at the behest of gamblers who paid them peanuts and made off like bandits on the fixed games. But this time it wasn’t a group of shadowy gamblers who cast a dark cloud on the Dodgers and specifically on Ohtani. It was Ohtani’s best friend and long-time interpreter Ippei Mizuhara who was at the center of the story. Mizuhara was caught up in a multi-million-dollar gambling scandal, and for a few days at least the Dodgers were facing the very real prospect that Mizuhara might have been a front man for Ohtani and that Ohtani would be suspended for the season or even banned from Major League Baseball forever. But Ohtani faced down the baying media mob, flatly denied any involvement or knowledge of what was going on, kept on hitting home runs, and waited to be found innocent. His performance under intense internal and outside pressure was truly remarkable. When it was all sorted out by US Attorney Martin Estrada – remember that name, for he is going places in California politics – it turned out that Mizuhara had stolen more than million from Ohtani, fooling bank examiners by impersonating his voice over the phone. It was a cautionary tale about big-time athletes needing to keep a closer eye on their money. But it was also a foreshadowing of future betting scandals sure to come as sports – from the pro level down to college and even high school – embraced what it gently calls “the gaming industry.” There’s a sucker born every minute, and the sports world – led by a corrupt partnership with industry giant ESPN — is bound and determined to separate them from their money.
The story of the year nationally was the emergence of women’s sports onto the elite media radar and the subsequent fan reaction. It was driven by basketball superstar Caitlin Clark, the rookie of the year in the WNBA who developed a devoted – and even at times fanatical fan base – with her long-range bombing and incredible drop-a-dime passing that opened up endless opportunities for her teammates on the Indianapolis Fever. By the end of her rookie year, she was one of the top five players in the world. There were plenty of crazy critics – mostly online, but some in pro locker rooms too – who attributed her popularity to her white skin. They said that other, equally great Black players who came along earlier than she did had never gotten a fraction of the acclaim and fan following she so quickly developed. And while there was some truth to that criticism, and some validity to the larger cultural point that some sports fans are racist, there was nothing Clark could do about it except keep shooting her laser-guided bombs, keep throwing her no-look passes to wide-open teammates and hope that the wider world caught up with her race-neutral approach to the game.
We lost two all-time greats of the hardwood in Jerry West and Bill Walton, both of whom far transcended their on-court feats with a prolific afterlife. West was the best front office executive and talent evaluator in NBA history. Walton was a quirky, one-of-a-kind broadcaster who brought tales of the Grateful Dead, his own bike trips and life lessons learned from fellow legend John Wooden to new generations of fans. They were both irreplaceable and will be missed terribly.
