by Paul Teetor
June Gloom has been worse than usual in the Beach Cities this year. But it’s been a bright sunny day compared to what’s been hanging over Dodgers Stadium lately – both on and off the field.
There the June gloom is more like June Doom. To put it mildly, June has been a month to forget for the Dodgers.
In this month alone they plummeted from first place in the National League West to third place in the five-team division, behind both the Arizona Diamondbacks and hated arch-rival San Francisco, who swept the Dodgers 3-0 a couple of weeks ago.
The primary problem: their pitching has been the worst in the entire major leagues, especially their bullpen.
With staff ace Walker Buehler out for the year after Tommy John surgery, and secondary ace Jose Urias shuttling between the injured list and the pitcher’s mound, only old reliable Clayton Kershaw has been anything resembling a steady starter.
Statistically, the Dodgers pitching staff has posted the team’s worst numbers since 1958, the year they moved here from Brooklyn, New York. For the math-challenged, that’s a mere 65 years ago.
The only bright spots on the pitching staff: rookies Bobby Miller and Emmet Sheehan are both big, strong flame-throwing fast ballers who look like they may be able to translate their minor league success in the Dodgers farm system into major league achievements with the big club.
But the real problem is their bullpen, which can’t seem to hold a lead. Alex Vesia, Victor Gonzalez, Phil Bickford, Yence Almontte and even once-reliable Bruadar Graterol have all been hit like a pinata at a kids birthday party. Only Evan Phillips has been trustworthy in terms of protecting a lead, and even he gave up a walk-off homer in Cincinnati last week that really hurt.
If only Kenley Jansen was still in town, he could have been racking up saves almost every night. That’s because the offense – led by Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman and rookie outfielder James Outman — has been among the league’s best in generating hits and runs.
But a lead in the modern – just give us five effective innings — game is only as good as the relief pitcher called upon to preserve it.
But at least there’s hope that whatever pitching problems they have will surely be addressed when it comes time for Dodgers President of Baseball Operations Andrew Friedman to make his usual mid-season trades to plug the holes the team has displayed before the August 1 trade deadline.
So, on the field, the problems are fixable with some clever deal making and plenty of Dodger cash to spread around.
But off the field, the biggest problem the Dodgers have had is an unforced error that alienated a core group of their fans and may not be so easily fixable.
Last week the Dodgers honored a group of male drag queens who call themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence with a Community Hero Award at the team’s tenth annual Pride Night.
“Together, we’ll continue to knock down barriers and foster an atmosphere of acceptance for all,” Dodgers executive Eric Braverman said in a prepared statement.
But not everyone was ready to accept a group that describe themselves as “a leading-edge Order of queer and trans nuns” with no connection to any genuine Christian denomination.
Members of the group go by names like Sister Jezabelle of the Enraptured Sling and Sister Shalita Corndog. At Easter they host “Foxy Mary” and “Hunky Jesus” contests.
In other words, their main shtick – while preaching a message of inclusion — is mocking the Catholic Church and its rituals and beliefs.
There are a lot of Catholics living in LA, by one unofficial count at least four million. And a lot of them are tradition-minded Hispanics who don’t like their religion being used for laughs.
Many of them also happen to be rabid Dodgers fans. Indeed, anyone who has been to a game at Chavez Ravine in recent years couldn’t help but notice that a majority of the fans are Hispanics.
When those fans made it clear that they were not happy with inviting the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to parade around the bases and do their cosplay thing at their beloved ballpark, the Dodgers rescinded the invitation.
That quickly prompted LGBT+ groups to accuse the Dodgers of surrendering to a campaign to silence queer voices and erase trans identities.
Like a runner caught between bases, the Dodgers were caught in the middle of a culture war and didn’t know which way to turn.
The situation got more complicated for Dodgers management when Kershaw, their most beloved player, weighed in on the growing controversy.
“I don’t agree with making fun of other people’s religions,” Kershaw said. “It has nothing to do with anything other than that. I just don’t think that, no matter what religion you are, you should make fun of somebody else’s religion. So that’s something that I definitely don’t agree with.”
Eventually the Dodgers rescinded the rescindment and invited the Sisters back. But when Pride Night finally rolled around, the Dodgers pushed it back so it was held more than an hour before the game actually started – much earlier than usual for these kinds of ceremonial pre-game events.
And the ceremony itself took 30 seconds, as two Sisters accepted the award to a mixture of cheers and jeers from the early arrivals in the stands.
Meanwhile a group of protestors, estimated at somewhere between 500 and 1,000 angry folks, gathered outside the stadium.
Some local Catholics like Tony Capozzola, a prominent Redondo Beach defense attorney, protested directly in an email to Friedman, saying that Dodgers Stadium was not the proper venue for such a display.
“Politics and the culture wars should stop at the gates of Dodgers Stadium,” he said. “You should be able to go to a game, sit opposite someone with totally different values and viewpoints, and not have to worry about getting into some kind of argument.”
Capozzola was the personal attorney for former Dodgers Manager Tommy Lasorda, as well as being a good friend of former Dodgers announcer Vin Scully, who has achieved Dodger sainthood since his death last summer.
“The Dodgers have basically betrayed the legacy of both those highly respected men,” Capozzola said. “Most people don’t know this, but Tommy sometimes brought priests in to say Mass for some of the Catholic players, and Vinny was a devout Catholic. They named a street after him and then a year later they betrayed him.”
Capozzola insisted he is not anti-gay, anti-trans, or anti-anything else. What he objects to is something more basic: bringing politics and religion into an athletic contest.
“Dodgers Stadium has always been a place where people of different beliefs, different politics, different philosophies could sit next to each other and cheer for their team without anyone making a political or cultural statement,” he said. “The Dodgers have betrayed that sacred tradition.”
The way All Ball sees it, the Dodgers original sin was inviting the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence the first time. Of course it was going to turn fan against fan. Anyone could have seen trouble coming right around the corner.
So that was strike one.
Strike two was rescinding the invitation once it was made public, and strike three was re-inviting the Sisters and then acting like they were ashamed to even have the ceremony.
Even little kids know you can’t have it both ways. They would have been better off to take a stand and stick to it.
All Ball can only hope the Dodgers have learned their lesson with this fiasco and keep the culture wars out of the ballpark. Americans are sick to death of being caught in the ever-louder buzzsaw of the culture wars all day long, every day of the week.
The ballpark should be a refuge from all that outside noise. Much better to cheer a Freddie Freeman homerun, a Mookie Betts miracle catch, or a Clayton Kershaw no-hitter.
Now that’s baseball noise the way it should be.
Contact: teetor.paul@gmail.com. Follow:@paulteetor
