Freeway Series

Facts Opponents--Angels and Dodgers. Site--Anaheim Stadium today and Sunday. Radio--KTZN (710), KABC (790), KWKW (1330). Series record--Angels lead, 42-37-1. Pitching matchups--Ismael Valdes vs. Jason Dickson today at 7 (Channel 9); Chan Ho Park vs. Allen Watson on Sunday at 1.

The smiles should be wide and plentiful. The Dodgers' new owners should take over this week, meeting the media and greeting fans and officially liberating the team from its dysfunctional era. What could possibly wipe the smiles off the faces of Magic Johnson, Stan Kasten and Mark Walter? How about the Angels moving into a new ballpark in downtown Los Angeles, three miles from Dodger Stadium? As the Dodgers emerge from bankruptcy, the most compelling baseball story in town might well involve how the Dodgers and Angels handle their aging ballparks.

Before a new dawn breaks for the Dodgers under changed ownership, there was this year's first night of baseball at Dodger Stadium. After all the news of a record sales price, investment groups, Magic Johnson and the Dodgers' uncertain future, the ballpark at Chavez Ravine — celebrating its 50th anniversary — reopened its doors for 2012. With an announced 20,009 looking on, the Dodgers defeated the Angels, 4-1, in the second game of their three-game exhibition Freeway Series.

Before a new dawn breaks for the Dodgers under changed ownership, there was this year's first night of baseball at Dodger Stadium. After all the news of a record sales price, investment groups, Magic Johnson and the Dodgers' uncertain future, the ballpark at Chavez Ravine — celebrating its 50th anniversary — reopened its doors for 2012. With an announced 20,009 looking on, the Dodgers defeated the Angels, 4-1, in the second game of their three-game exhibition Freeway Series.

The baseball season had been over for two months. The next one was four months away. Vin Scully needed to make a few extra bucks for the Christmas season, so he took a temporary job sorting mail. This was more than half a century ago, when humans still did all the sorting. The snow was falling, the carolers were singing, the chestnuts were roasting. The goodwill on Earth did not extend to the back room of the post office, where Scully's co-workers were arguing bitterly about whether the Brooklyn Dodgers or the New York Yankees had the better center fielder.

Garret Anderson is heading home and he doesn't know what to think. When the Dodgers visit the Angels for the start of the Freeway Series on Friday night, Anderson will be returning to Angel Stadium for the first time since he parted ways with the club with which he spent the first 14 years of his major league career. The Angels declined Anderson's $12-million option after the 2008 season, starting a sequence of events that led him to the Atlanta Braves last year and the Dodgers this spring.

Could this be a preview of the Freeway Series Southland fans have always dreamed of? Maybe that's asking too much, but seldom, if ever, have expectations for both the Angels and Dodgers been as high as they are right now. It will be Hideo Nomo against Mark Langston when the teams play at 7 tonight at Anaheim Stadium in the opener of their annual preseason series. Doesn't that sound like a nice pitching matchup for the first game of a World Series?

Think of where we were, just days ago, a huge metropolitan area of baseball fans on edge, uncertain. We were waiting to exhale. It was postseason time in a city that loves its baseball. But the Dodgers were playing like cadavers and the Angels were playing ghosts. Fans with some level of longevity here remembered the good times and didn't take them for granted: -- In 1988, Kirk Gibson pumping his fist as he rounded the Dodger Stadium bases. -- In 2002, wingless Angels flying toward relief pitcher Troy Percival to celebrate near the mound, moments after Darin Erstad squeezed the last fly ball.

The annual Freeway Series between the Angels and Dodgers, which begins tonight at Dodger Stadium, will be without Pedro Guerrero, but not without intrigue. Guerrero, who injured his left knee during an exhibition game Thursday, will miss at least the first three months of the season. The Dodgers must decide who will take Guerrero's place both in left field and as a hitter. There are other interesting sidelights, including the status of Angel pitcher John Candelaria and his fickle left elbow.

The Dodgers and Angels begin their final dress rehearsals for the regular season when they meet in the first game of the annual Freeway Series at 7 tonight in Dodger Stadium. The series, which starts a day earlier this year because the Dodgers open the season Monday in Cincinnati, concludes with games at Anaheim Stadium on Friday and Saturday nights. The Angels will close out their exhibition season Sunday against their triple-A farm team, the Edmonton Trappers, at Anaheim.

Albert Pujols has entered a season with a team defending its World Series victory. That team of great expectations finished with a losing record. The season before Pujols led the St. Louis Cardinals to the 2011 World Series, the team failed to make the playoffs. So do big expectations like those confronting the Angels and $240-million addition Pujols help or hurt? "You guys are the ones picking us to win," Pujols said Monday before making his Angel Stadium debut against the Dodgers in the opener of the three-game Freeway Series that moves to Dodger Stadium on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Dodgers owner Frank McCourt on Monday met with the team's employees for the first time since he agreed to sell the club for a record $2.15 billion, according to people who were at the meeting. McCourt had been in New York overseeing the sale and, upon returning to Los Angeles, met with the employees in the Stadium Club at Dodger Stadium, according to multiple people who attended the meeting but were not authorized to discuss it. "I'm going to miss you all," McCourt told the group during the 45-minute meeting, one of the people said.

By dedicating more than $300 million to the best hitter and top pitcher on the free-agent market, the Angels launched an aggressive campaign to become a World Series champion — and also to win over the Southland. The buzz created by those deals carried the off-season, and the Angels unveiled dozens of billboards starring new additions Albert Pujols and C.J. Wilson that targeted historically true-blue Dodgers neighborhoods. The timing was perfect. The Dodgers were down, having sunk in the standings while racked by the controversy of owner Frank McCourt's bitter divorce and personal struggles that ultimately landed the team in U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

The Dodgers are in last place and bankrupt. The Angels are barely above .500. Looks as if that real Freeway Series will remain only a fantasy. With their final interleague game this evening in Anaheim, the wistful Dodgers' and Angels' faithful can dream about happier times. As Hemingway's Jake Barnes said, "Isn't it pretty to think so?" Here's a woulda-coulda-shoulda team -- a 25-man roster -- of players the Angels and Dodgers had on the hook but couldn't keep. With them, oh what might have been ... well, except for that starting rotation: -- Infielders Adrian Beltre [ THEN: DODGERS ]

Freeway Series? What happened Friday night at Dodger Stadium looked more like a Sig Alert. Three players were thrown out at the plate. Two were picked off at first base. Two others were caught stealing. "This is the most bizarre base-running game I think we've seen," Angels Manager Mike Scioscia said. So this is what it has come to in Los Angeles: the city's two former World Series champions playing out the baseball equivalent of a 10-car pileup in a half-empty ballpark.

Mickey Hatcher did not produce the signature moment from Game 1 of the 1988 World Series — that honor belongs to a certain gimpy pinch-hitter who pumped his fist as he hobbled around the bases after his stunning game-winning home run. But there was a humorous bookend to Kirk Gibson's dramatic ninth-inning two-run shot off Oakland closer Dennis Eckersley, which gave the Dodgers a 5-4 win and propelled them toward the World Series championship....

Details of the Angels' preseason schedule began to emerge today after settlement of the major-league baseball lockout. (Details, P10.) Angel players are to report to Gene Autry Park in Mesa, Ariz., by 9 a.m. Tuesday, the club announced, for the team's first full-squad workout. The team will practice in Mesa until Sunday, then go to Palm Springs to play the last three games of its exhibition schedule, beginning next Monday. An Angels spokesman said a fourth game might be added on March 29.

I always loved opening day, the transistor radio earpiece running down the length of my shirt to avoid teacher detection, or later parental accomplices allowing me to skip school. But here I am at Dodger Stadium on Monday night for the Freeway Series in preparation for the season starting Thursday, never before caring so little about baseball. The Dodgers lineup is uninspiring, second place considered a lofty goal, while much of the attention here centers on the owners who bought something like eight expensive homes only to reside now in the poorhouse.

Officially, the two-game Freeway Series between the Dodgers and Angels, which begins Monday night at Dodger Stadium, is an exhibition series. So officially, the games don't count. Don't believe it. Because for a handful of players still fighting for roster spots on both teams, the next two days could be the most important ones of their seasons, if not their careers. On the Dodgers' side, backup catcher Dioner Navarro will start the season on the disabled list, opening a roster spot for Hector Gimenez or A.J. Ellis, and Casey Blake's back injury has forced an infield shift that sent Juan Uribe to third base.