Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Team

Nancy Hefley looks like the meek lady behind you in the supermarket checkout line unloading a week's worth of groceries for the family. Tall and trim, her brown hair cut short and neat, butterfly-shaped glasses riding the bridge of her nose, Hefley hardly looks the part of a musician who gets standing ovations 80 nights a year from crowds that sometimes top 50,000.

"It's different, I know," Dodgers Manager Don Mattingly said of his unusual lineup Tuesday night against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Right fielder Andre Ethier made his first regular-season start in center field. Scott Van Slyke, in only his fourth big league game, batted third ahead of Ethier. Jerry Sands played left field on his first day up from triple-A Albuquerque. With slugger Matt Kemp and several others on the disabled list, Mattingly had cause to be creative. But despite the shuffling, the Dodgers struggled to score against starter Wade Miley and fell to the Diamondbacks, 5-1, at Dodger Stadium.

The Dodgers should stop waltzing around and make their marriage to Manny Ramirez a proper one. I'm talking here about a real contract, not the truncated one they extracted during the off-season, which covers two years but allows baseball's sweetest swinger to leave after the last out of 2009.

The National League's triple crown of pitching all but his after the Dodgers' 6-2 victory over the San Diego Padres on Sunday, Clayton Kershaw stood in front of his locker and publicly thanked his teammates as if he were an actor or singer at the podium of an awards show. Kershaw talked about the hitters who gifted him a couple of first-inning runs at Petco Park to send him on his way to his 21st win, which tied him with Ian Kennedy of the Arizona Diamondbacks for the most in the league.

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.

CHICAGO -- Takashi Saito is the Dodgers' closer again -- at least that's what Saito said he was told by pitching coach Rick Honeycutt at the start of the National League division series. Saito didn't fool the Cubs in the ninth inning of Game 2, giving up two runs on two doubles and a single, but for him to pitch at all is almost a medical miracle. "For me to be here with my teammates at this time of the year," Saito said, "I really can only think that I had luck on my side."

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.

The Dodgers made it official Friday: Broadcaster Ross Porter will not be back with the team next season. It had been rumored that they were not going to renew his contract and Porter, after 28 seasons, had said goodbye to the fans during the team's playoff series with the St. Louis Cardinals. Lon Rosen, Dodger executive vice president, said the decision not to renew Porter's contract was made Thursday and that Porter's agent, George Green, was told Friday morning.

It's a sticky, smothering heat, suffocating the senses. The crowd doesn't feel like sitting around and watching the game. The players don't feel like playing it. The game ends in a loss to the Houston Astros. Although it's only a meaningless spring training game, everyone seemingly is in a rotten mood. The Dodgers hastily shower and head home.

Police detained two suspects and were searching for another Saturday in the shooting death of a 25-year-old San Francisco Giant fan in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium, an incident that authorities said had been triggered by a decades-old baseball rivalry. Two families leaving the game during the eighth inning of the game won by the Giants Friday night apparently traded words about the teams, police said.

Saying he received assurances from the Dodgers' medical staff that Andre Ethier's knee wouldn't worsen, Manager Don Mattingly reinserted the All-Star right fielder into the lineup Monday. "We're not going to do any damage," Mattingly said. "We're not taking a shot at blowing an anterior cruciate ligament. " Ethier said on Saturday the Dodgers told him to play hurt, only to claim a day later that the decision to do so was his. Ethier declined to speak Monday, but agent Nez Balelo said his client was committed to playing out the remainder of the season, provided his discomfort doesn't increase.

James Loney triggered five Dodgers outs -- including a triple play -- in just two at-bats. Dodgers starting pitcher Ted Lilly gave up only two hits in seven innings to the Milwaukee Brewers, and left the game losing. And crafty veteran Randy Wolf, a former Dodger now pitching for Milwaukee, tied up Dodgers batters on 67-mph breaking balls while holding them scoreless for eight innings. Add it up and the red-hot Brewers shut out the Dodgers, 3-0, Monday night as the Dodgers opened their 10-game trip by wasting Lilly's strong outing at Miller Park.

Matt Kemp continued to hit like a most-valuable player candidate on Saturday. The Dodgers continued to perform like a fourth-place team, as they lost to the not-bankrupt Arizona Diamondbacks, 6-4, at Dodger Stadium. Kemp hit his 27th home run, a two-run blast in the third inning that drove in his league-leading 81st and 82nd runs. He stole his 28th base. But Chad Billingsley melted down in what turned out to be a five-run sixth inning for the Diamondbacks. Kemp had something to do with the Diamondbacks' comeback, as he let a hard-hit ball by Justin Upton get by him and turn and turn into a three-run triple.

Aaron Miles found himself backed into a corner last off-season. The teams interested in him -- and there were only three -- were offering him minor league contracts. At 33, he was in danger of becoming a major league washout. It prompted him to do something he had long considered, but feared: undergo laser eye surgery. Miles credits the operation for his resurgence. The same player who hit .185 in 2009 is batting .311 for the Dodgers. And he already has appeared in 80 games, something he didn't do in either of the previous two seasons.

After being rushed up from the minor leagues a month ago to help the Dodgers' offense, Jerry Sands is gradually finding his stride at the plate. But it wasn't until Saturday that the right-handed batter hit his first major league home run. Sands said the lack of a home run hadn't frustrated him but acknowledged it had weighed on his mind and he was glad to get the first one behind him. "You could say it was something off my back, more of a milestone for me," he said after belting a 1-0 pitch from left-hander Mark Buehrle into the left-field stands at U.S. Cellular Field, where the Dodgers lost to the Chicago White Sox, 9-2. "It was good to get one; wish it could have come in a win," said Sands, a 23-year-old North Carolina native.

Dodgers owner Frank McCourt has repudiated claims made by his vice chairman that the team could not get prompt authorization to increase stadium security after Osama bin Laden's death. Dodgers vice chairman Steve Soboroff told several media outlets Thursday that he could not locate Tom Schieffer, the trustee appointed by Commissioner Bud Selig to run the team, as news broke that Bin Laden was dead. The allegation outraged Major League Baseball officials, for whom Schieffer produced an email in which he approved the upgraded security two minutes after a request from Dodgers general counsel Sam Fernandez.

Since the Dodgers ended 10 years of relative stability at third base by trading Ron Cey to the Chicago Cubs before the 1983 season, 23 players have tried their hand there. Remember Rafael Landestoy and German Rivera? Tracy Woodson and Phil Garner? Eddie Murray logging two games there in 1989? Is the hot corner too hot for the Dodgers to handle?

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."

With everything that has happened in the last few days, was it nice for the Dodgers to get out of Los Angeles? Don Mattingly laughed. "Are you kidding me?" the manager said. Temperatures at Dodger Stadium were in the 60s and 70s during the Dodgers' recently completed home stand. When Casey Coleman of the Chicago Cubs threw the first pitch in what turned out to be a 12-2 victory for the Dodgers on Friday, the thermometer at Wrigley Field read 41 degrees. But what pleased Mattingly was that the team was taking shape the way he had hoped it would.

The Dodgers players say the management turmoil surrounding their club shouldn't be a distraction as they go about their business on the field. So far they're true to their word: Thanks to Matt Kemp's walk-off home run in the 12th inning Thursday afternoon against the Atlanta Braves, the Dodgers are 2-0 under league control, and the trustee that Major League Baseball is sending to oversee the team hasn't even arrived. Kemp's blast into Dodger Stadium's left-field pavilion against reliever Cristhian Martinez, which came after Andre Ethier had doubled, gave the Dodgers a 5-3 victory, their fourth win in five games.