TEMPE, ARIZ. — For the Dodgers, this is a spring training unlike any other.
For every other team in baseball, spring is about hope and faith, about those few weeks when every team can dream of the World Series.
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Dodgers' feud with Manny Ramirez goes very public
It's spring training, but all eyes are on the player who isn't there -- and the owner and agent who are feuding publicly. Given the economy, fans may have no stomach for the high-stakes battle.
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For the Dodgers, this spring is about Manny Ramirez, with the team losing faith in his agent and vice versa, where the one player not there overshadows the dozens who are, where tempers flare not only in person but via e-mail for all the fans to read.
Frank McCourt, the Dodgers' owner, exploded in anger late Thursday night at Scott Boras, the agent for Ramirez. Boras shot back, engaging McCourt in an unusually public battle for the hearts and minds of Dodgers fans, the owner and the agent pointing a finger at each other in trying to explain why the player that electrified Los Angeles last summer is absent this spring.
"It's hard to be sympathetic to either side," David Carter, the executive director of the USC Sports Business Institute, said Friday.
On message boards and talk shows, in offices and in sports bars, a generation of fans informed as never before can passionately take sides in the Ramirez drama.
"I don't recall a more public negotiation with an athlete in recent Los Angeles sports history, not one that's caused this much of a reaction," said Jeff Fellenzer, who teaches sports business and media at USC.
When Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale staged a joint holdout from the Dodgers' training camp in 1966, ESPN and the Internet didn't exist, so fans neither expected nor received breathless updates and wild rumors around the clock.
Kobe Bryant dominated headlines five years ago as he decided whether to stay with the Lakers, but fans did not debate the financial commitment of the team owner or the negotiating tactics of Bryant's agent.
But, between sunset Thursday and sunrise Friday, McCourt called out Boras for his tactics, with Boras retaliating by raising anew the lingering suspicion that McCourt might be short on cash.
As the rebuttals flew, the tension grew, to the point where Dodgers General Manager Ned Colletti snapped at a reporter from Major League Baseball's website and Manager Joe Torre declared he would no longer entertain questions about Ramirez as long as the player remains unsigned.
