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Carnett: Everlasting love for Dodgers ran its course

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The Dodgers had hoped to make a deep run into postseason play this year.

I guess it wasn’t meant to be.

When the team moved to Los Angeles from Brooklyn in 1958, I was 13. An Orange County native, I adopted the Dodgers as My Team. I listened to Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett call every game on radio in ’58. I followed every pitch in 1959, when they beat the White Sox in the World Series.

For a time, the Dodgers became my identity. When they won I was ecstatic. When they lost I was inconsolable.

I became a Dodgers’ history and statistics freak. I memorized team won-loss percentages, National League pennants, World Series championships, batting averages, homerun records, Cy Young Awards, MVPs, et. al. I was a walking almanac.

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With a brain chock-full of Dodger trivia, I scarcely had room for algebra, English or biology. In Jimmy’s World, ERAs, RBIs and GBLs replaced GPAs, SATs and MBAs.

I had “Los Angelos (sic) Dodgers” proudly emblazoned in ballpoint pen across the cover of my eighth-grade notebook — handwritten in iconic Dodgers’ script. Most guys had the name of a girlfriend inscribed. Not me. I had the seventh-place team in the National League. (There were eight NL teams then, and the Dodgers finished 21 games behind the first-place Milwaukee Braves.)

I went to the L.A. Memorial Coliseum for the first time — with my dad, my uncle and my brother — on Sunday, June 8, 1958. The Dodgers hosted Henry Aaron and the Braves in their 50th game as the Los Angeles Dodgers. They’ve since played more than 9,000 contests under the L.A. banner.

More than 37,000 fans were in attendance, and my dad paid $2.50 per ticket to sit behind the infamous 40-foot-tall left field screen that prevented Punch and Judy hitters from reaching that ridiculously short 250-foot porch (it was a mammoth 440 feet to right-center).

The Dodgers won, 12-4.

Carl Furillo and Don Zimmer collected four hits apiece for the Dodgers, and southpaw Johnny Podres went the distance. I was in heaven. Aaron blasted a 5th inning solo homerun in our direction over the left-centerfield screen. Little did I realize that he would one day become the greatest homerun hitter of all time.

The ’58 season was the Dodgers’ 75th in their history. Their first season (as the Brooklyn Atlantics in the American Assn.) was 1884.

There will always be the Dodgers, I thought. How could there not? Soviet tyrant Nikita Khrushchev judged baseball to be a distraction for the proletariat, but he had as much chance of undermining the sport as he had of making contact with a Sandy Koufax fastball.

To my way of thinking, like North America’s glaciers, the Dodgers were immutable. It seemed they’d already lasted about as long as the Mesozoic Era (186 million years). The Dodgers were timeless — nay, eternal!

The rise and fall of civilizations and cultures would one day be measured against the permanence of the Dodgers. Baseball fans, I was certain, would venerate Duke Snider, Don Drysdale and Gil Hodges for at least the next millennium. The 2525 World Series would feature the Dodgers and Yankees, and would be reported on KMPC radio by Vin Scully — then approaching his 600th birthday and signing one-year contract extensions each year. Farmer John, Union 76 and Wallich’s Music City would sponsor the action.

In 1960 or ‘61, I came to the realization that I was seriously deluded. But I couldn’t accept the concept of a cosmos sans my Dodgers. The Roman Empire, the Han Dynasty and the Mongol Empire all collapsed. Not the Dodgers (except in the 1951 pennant race).

Say it ain’t so, Joe!

Au contraire Jimmy True Blue. Geoffrey Chaucer put it this way: “All good things must come to an end.” Even the Dodgers. And since becoming an Angels fan several decades ago, I now say: especially the Dodgers.

One day the sun will be a spent ember and no one will be around to explain the infield fly rule.

Enjoy baseball while you can.

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.

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