Dodger fans are hurting, but they’re still bleeding blue.<\/b>
\nIn Yucaipa, Peter and Cathy Bond feel abandoned.
They can\u2019t get the Dodgers on TV because of a blackout now in its fifth season, the signal on radio broadcasts doesn\u2019t carry into their neighborhood, and ticket price increases have put a trip to Dodger Stadium out of reach.
In defiance, they did not raise their Dodger flag in the front yard this year.
In Mar Vista, Anne Goldfarb spent many years watching Dodger games on TV with her husband, Jack. She\u2019s now a widow, legendary broadcaster Vin Scully is retired, and Goldfarb is indignant about not being able to see the team she\u2019s watched since the days of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale.
In Chinatown, Sheila Boyd is a Dodger die-hard who went to her first game in 1969, with her grandfather. At the World Series last year, she went to Game One wearing a locket with photos of her deceased grandparents. But as a fed-up blackout victim, she\u2019s no longer making a point of listening to games on the radio.
In Encino, Josh Weisel is no longer a Dodger fan after 50 years of loyalty to the team, and he is convinced he knows the reason for the Dodgers\u2019 horrible start this season.
\u201cIt\u2019s karma,\u201d said Weisel, who is in direct communication with the baseball gods. \u201cIt\u2019s a curse on the Dodgers, and they won\u2019t win until the fans can watch the games again.\u201d
He may have a point. If you take fans for granted, year after year, the bill eventually comes due.
In the previous four seasons, the Dodgers were winners, and for fans, missing out on televised games was painful.
So far this year, the team is a smoldering wreck, hovering near last place in the division and getting kicked around by the worst clubs in baseball.
Finally, the interminable TV blackout is a gift.
I began wondering, though, if this could be the year when greed inflicts mortal wounds on one of L.A.\u2019s most beloved institutions.
Think about it.
In the entertainment capital of the world and of the largest media markets in the hemisphere, six or seven households out of 10 can\u2019t get Dodger games on TV.
The Dodgers broke hearts in Game Seven of the World Series, but the owners jacked up ticket prices more than any other team.
And this year the Dodgers are lousy.
That\u2019s three strikes, and the curse theory isn\u2019t so crazy.
\u201cWhen you start losing the DNA\u2026 and when you screw around with the nature of the universe, you can be in big trouble,\u201d said Andy Dolich, a marketing consultant who grew up as a Brooklyn Dodger fand and worked as an executive for several professional sports teams.
Dolich said the Dodgers could turn it around and still win the division, and they have the luxury of a huge fan base and loyalties passed down from grandparent to parent to kids to grandkids. But if you can\u2019t see the games on TV, and you don\u2019t get to know the players, there may be fewer Dodger Dogs in your future.
\u201cMore and more people have a nano-second attention span, so if the Dodgers are not in first or second place in people\u2019s minds as far as how to spend their time, that can be almost more negative than the fact that they\u2019re increasing ticket prices,\u201d Dolich said.
\u201cMy whole life, I always looked at the Dodgers as the ultimate example of how to run a quality professional sports franchise,\u201d he said. \u201cThat being said, in today\u2019s world the defining fluid that runs through the veins of professional sports is green.\u201d
The Dodgers have plenty of that, thanks to the $8.3-billion deal they struck with Time Warner Cable. Time Warner was bought by Charter Communications, whose cable service is called Spectrum.
If you\u2019ve got Spectrum, you get Dodger games broadcast on the team\u2019s own SportsNet LA. But DirecTV and other carriers have refused to pay Spectrum\u2019s asking price for the right to broadcast games, so millions of Southern California households are left off the roster.
The Dodgers still lead the league in ticket sales, but that\u2019s largely because a billion people live here, and tens of thousands of seats were sold before the season even began. Many of those seats now sit empty.
Once upon a time, the Dodgers were owned by the O\u2019Malley family, which knew how to earn loyalty and patience in Los Angeles, in good seasons and bad.
But the team ended up in the hands of Boston export Frank McCourt and on the verge of bankruptcy. He dished it off to Guggenheim Baseball Management, whose founder is based in Chicago, whose parent company\u2019s asset management unit is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and whose L.A. point person, Magic Johnson, is far more interested in the local team that uses the bigger ball.
The Guggenheim gougers dumped some of that $8.3 billion into the roster and fielded a contender, at least for a while. But the owners\u2019 good fortune was a bum deal for the millions of working folks who got left in the dark, and the Dodger management attitude is that the media and the fans need to take it up with the cable companies, not them.
\u201cGuggenheim is basically a finance company whose interest is not the fans, it\u2019s the bottom line,\u201d said Tom Wilson, a Dodger fanatic who made a documentary about the Dodgers called \u201cMoneyball Too,\u201d which you can see on YouTube.
Wilson said he thinks the business model will fail, because the Dodgers stand to lose future fans unable to follow the team on TV. But if the owners run into trouble, he said, they\u2019ll probably just sell. At a huge profit.
\u201cIt\u2019s a microcosm of what happens in a society where greed leaves people behind,\u201d Wilson said.
In Yucaipa, Peter Bond said the absence of the Dodgers gives him more time to devote to his work as a Catholic deacon.
In Mar Vista, Anne Goldfarb said the fact that the Dodgers can\u2019t get out of their own way \u201cdoesn\u2019t bother me at all,\u201d and she\u2019s tuning in to the Angels this season.
In Encino, Josh Weisel said he\u2019s got plenty of entertainment options, and the Dodgers are no longer one of them.
But most of the disappointed fans I spoke to said they\u2019ll never give up on their team, even if they can\u2019t watch on television.
\u201cI bleed blue,\u201d Sheila Boyd said.
Tom Wilson still goes to the ballpark, but only beecause his brother-in-law gives him tickets. He refuses to buy any food or drink, or support the owners in any way.
But those are still the Dodgers on the field, he said, and he refuses to let Guggenheim or anyone else \u201crun me off the game I love.\u201d
\u201cI\u2019m still here,\u201d he said, and Dodgers are his. \u201cMe and the fans.\u201d
Get more of Steve Lopez’s work and follow him on Twitter @LATstevelopez<\/p>\n

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