The best team in baseball isn't even the biggest story in its own city. Right now, Los Angeles is all caught up in the Dodgers' magic number and only casually interested in the Angels' magic team.
The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim adopted a city, and the city it adopted mostly shrugs in return.
We are all Dodgers, all the time, 24/7 Blue Heaven. What if they were a really good team? What if they win another playoff game? Will we offer our firstborn in celebration?
If Kirk Gibson limped onto a theater stage in Los Angeles, clenched his fist and pumped his right arm backward, 97% of the people in the room would quickly tell you where they were that night. If Torii Hunter did the same thing, 97% would ask who he was and why was he limping.
Gibson was 1988 and, for all intents and purposes, so are the Dodgers. Since Gibson and Orel Hershiser, there has been Jose Lima on Oct. 9, 2004, and nothing else. One playoff win in 20 years and we wrap ourselves into little bundles of daily anticipation waiting for the next one.
But the years of masterful fan-base building by the O'Malleys, the years of Tommy Lasorda constantly equating the prospects of our afterlife to our loyalty for his baseball team, and the branding and marketing recovery Frank McCourt has made after Fox screwed everything up for several years have kept the Dodgers in our frontal lobes.
The media sense this, research it and respond.
Local TV sportscasts find time for the Angels as a last-gasp sentence just before time expires. Newspapers put Angels' results well back in the sports section, as this one did Sunday morning, when the Angels clinched home-field advantage for the first round of the playoffs and Francisco Rodriguez saved his 60th game.
It is worth noting that there are two teams in the majors that don't even have 60 wins.
Sports-talk radio survives on ratings, and for it, the summertime version of all Kobe all the time, has become Manny Ramirez. Manny departed the Boston Red Sox under a cloud, brought his famous hair and booming bat to the Dodgers, went on a spree that has him hitting .399, and sports radio had manna from heaven.
About the same time the Dodgers got Manny, the Angels traded for a star first baseman. Mark Teixeira is hitting .351 here and has done, quietly, much of what Ramirez has done for the Dodgers.
