Baseball Teams

There is a good chance professional baseball at the Hangar will continue beyond the JetHawks' season into the fall months that normally bring mild weather to the Antelope Valley. The Class-A California League is close to announcing a four-team professional fall league of top minor league prospects will play this year at Lancaster, Lake Elsinore, Rancho Cucamonga and San Bernardino.

THERE ARE SPRING BASEBALL STORIES AND THERE ARE FALL baseball stories. Spring baseball stories are documents of hope, lilting odes to the rituals of renewal, the freshly cut grass, the first cracks of the bat, the hot prospects for the season ahead. Fall baseball stories are different, cast in the tempered light and long shadows of October. Fall baseball stories are about the end of something, about what could have been.

The road slips between soft hills striped by cornfields as neat as cemeteries and not much noisier, rolling 20 and 30 miles at a stretch into the deep green August quiet without a town in sight. The government men in Des Moines, in what is regarded here as not-so-perfect wisdom, have decided commerce would be better served if the steady stream of long-haul Peterbilts and Kenworths didn't have to downshift, much less stop, when they lumbered through here en route to bigger, more important places.

On the day Frank McCourt surrendered the keys to Dodger Stadium and cashed out, the Dodgers had the best record in the National League. In the year since Mark Walter flashed his cash and Magic Johnson flashed his smile - from May 1 of last year through May 1 of this year - the Dodgers were 83-83. Money can't buy you love, at least in the standings. The Dodgers might be looking up at three teams in the National League West, but "looking up" just might be the best way to describe the state of the franchise.

So here's Peter Ueberroth, L.A.'s Olympic champion, chairman of the Newport Beach investor company the Contrarian Group, sharing his office with someone else -- his border collie, Koot, for Kootenai, the Idaho county where Ueberroth found him abandoned. Koot can be regarded as a small-scale version of the rescues that Ueberroth has been called on to make in his career. Besides formidably managing the 1984 Games, he has ridden to the help of South Los Angeles after the 1992 riots, run Major League Baseball and arranged the buyback of the Pebble Beach golf course from the Japanese.

An old coach named Fred "The Fog" Shero once described the relationship between Canadians and their national pastime this way: "Hockey is where we live. … Life is just a place where we spend time between games. " It could feel like that in Southern California over the next few weeks. This is hockey's time to shine with two local teams in the hunt for the Stanley Cup, the Kings fighting to repeat as champions and the Ducks riding one of the better records in the league. The way things have gone for the Lakers and Clippers, and with our baseball teams struggling, the sport from up north could win some new fans.