Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Team

The Dodgers will celebrate their 100th anniversary season without the most celebrated pitcher in franchise history, as Sandy Koufax confirmed Tuesday that he has severed his ties with the organization. Koufax, a Hall of Fame member who served as a minor league pitching instructor since 1979, said he has resigned because he is weary of the job. Although Dodger officials called it a one-year sabbatical, Koufax said he has placed no time frame on the resignation.

One of the most difficult things to do in professional sports is to take a round bat, swing at a round ball and hit it square. Now imagine trying to do that after sitting out a full season at an age when most players are considering retirement. That's the challenge Chone Figgins is facing this spring in his longshot bid to make the Dodgers. Figgins is batting only .154 in 13 spring-training at-bats, but he says he's making progress. "The more and more you see pitching, the more comfortable you get," the former American League All-Star said.

On a June day in 2003, Paige Bilbrey was on the phone frantically trying to reach her boss, former Los Angeles Dodger great Steve Garvey, at Le Parc Hotel in Paris, where he was attending the French Open tennis tournament. The matter couldn't wait: Standing in the lobby of Garvey's hilltop mansion outside Park City, Utah, was an employee of the local power company. Pay the overdue bill, the man said, or he'd turn off the lights. The incident wasn't the result of an embarrassing oversight.

The Dodgers assured themselves of a playoff berth 10 days ago. They know they're going to open on the road, on Thursday, and they've even narrowed their possible opponent down to two teams: St. Louis or Atlanta. Now all they have to do is make sure they have enough healthy players for the trip. Moments before Saturday's game, a 1-0 loss to the Colorado Rockies, the banged-up Dodgers scratched center fielder Matt Kemp from the lineup because of left ankle soreness. "Before the game he was having trouble getting loose.

Bill Plaschke predicted doom for the Dodgers in 2001. . . . Plaschke criticized. . . . Plaschke forgot. . . . Plaschke compared unfairly. . . . The Dodgers need encouragement, not negativity. . . . * That was part of a 1,200-word screed e-mailed to me last December, a holiday package filled with colorful rips. It was not much different from other nasty letters I receive, with two exceptions. This note contained more details than the usual "You're an idiot."

I walked into chilly, wind-whipped Dodger Stadium Monday, past nameless uniforms taking batting practice, through seats scheduled to be torn out, down a freshly painted stairwell, around the office of a new manager, into a clubhouse soon to be filled with more strangers . . . And there sat Eric Karros. As comforting as blue and white. After spending two years saying he should be traded, I shook his hand, said something else. It was good to see him. "You know what's ironic?" he asked, shrugging.

It wasn't as though athletic superiority was a physical requirement in a marriage partner. It just happened to work out that way. Ann Meyers' athletic prowess in women's basketball is legendary. Don Drysdale is a legend. Nor was their betrothal part of a scientific experiment in the reproduction of herculean offspring--Drysdale is 6 feet 6 inches, Meyers 5-9. That just happens to be working out, too.

Eric Karros heard about it at 5 p.m., less than three hours before his first major league start. His father heard about it moments later. "I'm in my office in San Diego. I get this phone call from Eric in the clubhouse," George Karros recalled of last Sept. 4. "He says, 'Dad, Eddie Murray is hurt. I'm finally gonna get to play.' " George was nearly a three-hour drive from Dodger Stadium, considering traffic. The game against the St. Louis Cardinals was possibly a sellout, and he had no tickets.

The bell that signaled the end of Round One of the cruiserweight fight between the Dodgers' Gary Sheffield and the Pirates' Jason Kendall was also an alarm in the Pittsburgh dugout Sunday night. At the time, the Pirates had only two hits through a somnambulent six innings and had scored only one run in almost 48 hours. Then Kendall lit a fire under them with a couple of right hands to the Sheffield's head after bracing the Dodger baserunner in a World Championship Wrestling-approved headlock.

Pushing player salaries to yet another level, the Dodgers on Saturday made Kevin Brown baseball's first $100-million player, signing the free agent pitcher to a record seven-year, $105-million contract that stirred concern and anger throughout the industry. Brown's package surpassed the previous records for total value and average annual salary established in the last few months during this dizzying season of free agent signings.

Some of Andre Ethier's fondest childhood memories are of days when Ethier would be picked up early by his father from his middle school in Phoenix. They would head to the Seattle Mariners' spring-training complex, where he could spend hours studying every move of his favorite player, Ken Griffey Jr. "That's who I looked up to," Ethier said. "That's all I wanted to be. I always wanted to be a center fielder in the big leagues. " Eight years into his major league career, Ethier is finally living out his dream the way he envisioned it on those afternoons at the Peoria Sports Complex.

Asked to describe the Dodgers' season up to the All-Star break, Manager Don Mattingly didn't know what to say. "Well . . . " he started. He leaned his head to one side, then the other. "It's been obviously unscripted," Mattingly said. "It ended up OK. We survived it. " Even after a 3-1 defeat by the Colorado Rockies on Sunday at Dodger Stadium, the Dodgers went into the All-Star break only 21/2 games behind first-place Arizona in the National League West. Winners in 17 of their last 22 games, they are 47-47.

The Dodgers played their 90th game of the season Wednesday, and Kenley Jansen still felt fresh. This might not sound significant, but Jansen thinks it is. Around this time last year, he was gassed. "I felt exhausted," Jansen said. The Dodgers closer was told that an off-season heart operation, which would prevent the organ from beating irregularly, would improve his endurance. He didn't think it would help this much. "I've been throwing more," he said. Of the Dodgers' first 89 games, Jansen appeared in 43. He pitched in 41 of the team's first 89 games last year.

Matt Kemp's nightmare season took another unfortunate turn Wednesday night, as the slumping center fielder strained his right hamstring in the Dodgers' 4-3 defeat to the Angels at Angel Stadium. Kemp is scheduled to undergo a MRI exam Thursday to examine the strain, which was described as "mild" by Manager Don Mattingly. Asked how much time he expected to miss, Kemp replied somberly, "I don't know. I don't know. " Mattingly was hopeful Kemp would be sidelined for only a few days.

The latest round of the Dee Gordon Experiment came to an end Monday, as the Dodgers sent the athletic but unpolished shortstop to triple-A Albuquerque. The move was made to open a place on the roster for often-injured utility man Jerry Hairston Jr., who was sidelined for nearly three weeks because of groin and hamstring strains. Hanley Ramirez ran the bases for the first time since going on the disabled list May 4 because of a strained left hamstring and could start a minor league rehabilitation stint after the Dodgers play in Anaheim on Wednesday and Thursday.

The last time most of the players at Chase Field had the kind of game that Hyun-Jin Ryu had Saturday, they probably were still in high school. For Ryu, it was even before that. "Even in high school, I don't think I got three hits in one game," the Dodgers rookie said through an interpreter. As a hitter, Ryu was three for three with a double and a run in the Dodgers' 7-5 victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks. On the mound, he struck out nine and limited the Diamondbacks to a solitary run over the first six innings Midway through the game, the husky South Korean left-hander was being called "Babe Ryuth" by Diamondbacks television broadcasters Steve Berthiaume and Bob Brenly.

He's built like a minivan with the power of a Mack truck. Just ask Delino DeShields, who had the unfortunate experience of colliding with Raul Mondesi one night. It knocked DeShields cold. Mondesi's arm is rated by scouts as one of the top three in the National League, and for confirmation of that, ask first baseman Eric Karros, who practices self-preservation by keeping an eye on right field. "If I'm not looking all the time, I'm liable to get a ball in the back of my head," Karros says.

Dressed impeccably in tie and sport coat, the Panama hat on his head, a cigar in his mouth and the Stalker radar gun raised in his right hand and pointed at the mound from a position directly behind the home-plate screen, Mike Brito was as much a part of the Dodger Stadium landscape as palm trees and congested concession lines. He provided radar readings for 20 years before yielding to the redesigned luxury seats and an automatic radar system.

With the Dodgers' offense stuck in neutral through the first five games of the season, Manager Don Mattingly thought his team could use a little pick-me-up Sunday. So he held four regulars out of the starting lineup, replacing them with four guys who had combined for one hit this year. So guess what happened next. The Dodgers collected season highs for runs and hits in a 6-2 victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates in front of a sun-splashed sellout crowd of 52,053 at Dodger Stadium. "You ask for energy from those guys," Mattingly said.

The most expensive team in baseball history will start to assemble Tuesday, when pitchers and catchers report to the Dodgers' Arizona spring-training complex. The Dodgers have a projected opening-day payroll of $230 million and a roster that includes a dozen former All-Stars. Several of these players were acquired in the middle of last season, which ended with a shocking collapse that left them eight games back of their division rival, the San Francisco Giants. General Manager Ned Colletti thinks that spending the spring together could allow these Dodgers to meet the incredibly high expectations of their ambitious and free-spending owners.