I wanna write

Now that I've let drift away what few readers I may have had, I return, ready to again add my small portion to the great mass of internet babble. Often called the tubes or the interwebs in joking fashion, I think rather to call the internet the babbles. There is no threshold of competence or lucidness required to make your own popping noises in the babbles. Sometimes, if you strain hard enough, you can hear a symphony amidst the cacophony of opinions and profiles and gossip and vitriol and McCain and Obama and porn. But it's mostly babbles, and I'm back to add to the noise.

I have occasionally received some words of encouragement about this nearly defunct blog, and they do mean a lot of me. Today my wife suggested I make another post here, and I opined that it was likely too late for that, and she said, "But I wanna read!" I can't argue with that. I was even moved to create the inartful title of this post from her concise demand.

We took a trip to the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains recently. It was a four day vacation only, barely long enough for the body to get used to clear air and unstressed silence before being plugged back into the working city. Er, or maybe town instead of city: that is a question of definition. I don't live in LA --- where? --- that will come later. Our own trip coincided with the Dodgers' trip to Florida. We had a lot more fun than the Dodgers did. There were no TVs or telephones or wireless babbles to distract, but I did bring a transistor --- windup! --- radio. The radio will take batteries, but I find it amusing to crank the dynamo every once in a while instead to keep it powered. This is perhaps the same kind of thinking that leads Joe Torre to start Blake DeWitt ahead of Andrew LaRoche most of the time. I get a vague feeling of grit, of doing things the right way when I crank that radio, which is what I imagine Joe Torre feels when he writes down DeWitt on the lineup card. I think in the cases of both the radio and the lineup a little more juice would be in order.

On this radio I could pick up Dodger games if I tilted the antenna and rotated the dial exactly right. The station we picked up was our hometown Dodger station, something I found astonishing given how far away it was. Our home station is 1560 KNZR Bakersfield, and we were in the mountains north of Mammoth Lakes. Sometimes the game would just drift away, replaced by mariachi music. It required an active effort to listen to the games, both in cranking the dynamo and tending to the antenna and amplitude. I'm surprised I went to the effort, given how weary I have grown of this season. I was relieved to not have to see the Dodgers on TV for more than a week, with the long four day All-Star break following our vacation. Between that break and the Dodgers recent flirtations with decent play and first place, I feel ready to commit again to the season. And to Dodgerama, I guess.

I guess the Dodgers are looking hard at trading LaRoche. That's what the babbles say, anyway. I keep thinking about that trade of Paul Konerko for Jeff Shaw during Lasorda's brief tenure as general manager. Don't give up on a stud young prospect too quickly, or Shaw enough you will get burned. Maybe twice: first for having given up too soon, and second because you have to live with the ineptitude of the player you got back in return. Jeff Shaw, I suppose, wasn't too awful, but my primary memory of him, besides Vinny always saying "Shaw enough" when he came in to pitch was that he always made me nervous, almost as nervous as "Hot Toddy" Worrell made me feel.

I think Colletti must know that LaRoche is a better choice at third than DeWitt moving forward. I figure he has to know this since LaRoche clearly has more trade value than DeWitt. Maybe I figure on too much. I can't imagine the Dodgers trading Andy for a relief pitcher, since what the team really needs is offense on the left side of the infield, and again I figure Colletti knows this. I say just plug Andy in at third the rest of the year and see what he's got.

I'm going to do the same, in a manner of speaking. I'm going to plug back into the Dodger season and see what they've got. And see what I've got, see what I can do with this decrepit, nearly defunct blog. The babbles is my oyster!