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Nineteen-year-old Bryce Harper will make his Major League debut today against the Dodgers’ right-handed hurler, Chad Billingsley.

Billingsley enters the game with a 2-1 record, 3.04 ERA and 0.930 WHIP.

While there has been a lot of hype surrounding Bryce Harper and what he will mean to the Washington Nationals and the game of baseball in general, the fact of the matter is this: he is only batting .250 in AAA for the Syracuse Chiefs.

Is that any indicator of the type of player he will become? Of course not.

However, it should give a signal as to how he will fare in his first few major league at-bats.

Granted, in AAA this season facing right-handed pitchers, Harper posts a solid batting line of .275/.362/.431/.793 in 51 at-bats. I’m not prepared to classify that as crushing the opposition, but it is respectable.

Billingsley, on the other hand, performs adequately against left-handed batters. In his career, left-hand bats put up a .271/.360/.391/.751 batting line. For the sake of parity, that equates to 1,902 at bats.

This season in particular, Billingsley has been better against lefties. In 43 at-bats, lefties are posting a batting line of .182/.234/.409/.643.

The major concern being that when left handed batters get a hit, it appears they hit for extra bases off of him. Harper has not been an extra-base threat this season at all, having only four doubles, one triple and one home run out of his 18 hits.

At the end of the day, the Washington Nationals will be glad to have Harper on the big club; it’s just a shame for them that Billingsley will shut him down.

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Voting for the 2012 MLB All-Star Game is underway.  There is nobody more deserving of making the trip to Kansas City for the midsummer classic than Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Matt Kemp. 

Kemp has started this season right where he left off a year ago.  The Dodgers are off to a fabulous 11-3 start and there is no question that Kemp is the reason. 

Kemp entered the 2011 campaign as one of the most hated players in Los Angeles, and came out beloved.  People blamed his romance with singer Rihanna for his awful 2010 season, and fans wanted him out of Dodger blue.  He dedicated that offseason to perfecting all of his skills and came out a new man the next year. 

Kemp put together one of the most balanced seasons in baseball history, by finishing in the top-three in every single major offensive category in the National League.  He led the league in home runs, RBI’s and runs scored.  His 39 home runs and 40 stolen bases nearly put him in the exclusive 40-40 club, but they were enough to make him the first Senior Circuit player to end the year in the top-two in those two categories since Hank Aaron. 

He also played in every single one of the Dodgers 161 games (one was cancelled due to rain), which helped him extend his baseball leading streak to 365 (now 379).  As much as he scared pitchers, he frustrated opposing hitters with his defensive work, which helped him win his second Gold Glove Award. 

Kemp was completely robbed of the NL MVP Award, which went to Ryan Braun.  Braun might have finished ahead of Kemp in a few percentages, but he got help with those stats because he played in fewer games.  Furthermore, Braun had Rickie Weeks and Nyjer Morgan at the top of his lineup and another MVP candidate, Prince Fielder as his support the whole year.  Pitchers never needed to throw to him, as he had the likes of James Loney and Juan Rivera behind him for most of the year. 

Braun likely won the award because his team made the playoffs, but the MVP is an individual award and not a team honor.  There was also Braun’s failed steroid test, but I will ignore that for the sake of sanity.  Kemp congratulated Braun for winning the award and thought that he was more than deserving of the honor. 

Kemp used his second-place MVP finish as a piece of motivation for 2012.  During the offseason, he jokingly said that he had his eyes set on a “50-50” season.  After what he has done in the first few weeks of this season, Kemp might not have been joking. 

The Dodgers outfielder has put together one of the greatest starts to a season in Dodgers history.  Through the first 14 games, he has tied Wally Moon’s 51-year-old franchise record for the most home runs in that span, with eight.  It should also be noted that all of those homers have gone the other-way.  Kemp also leads the league with 20 runs batted in, 16 runs scored, and 26 hits.  His 1.000 slugging percentage and 1.525 OPS lead the league and are also tops in all of baseball.  While he sits just behind Davis Wright with a still stellar .481 batting average through 54 at-bats. 

It is far too early to really make any fair judgments about this season, but Kemp has sure got off to a great start and proven that he should have been last year’s NL MVP.   In 2010, Kemp was booed at Dodger Stadium, but this year he gets that same response on the road, which is a sign that he has reached the stardom. 

Even though the Dodgers have played 11 of their games this season against three of the worst teams in the league a year ago, Kemp has had to play most of those games in two of the toughest parks to hit in—Dodger Stadium and Petco Park.  He has been a monster fair and square, and nobody should make any claims that state otherwise.    

With voting for the 2012 MLB All-Star Game already underway, I would like to make sure that Matt Kemp is a part of every single voter’s ballot.  There is no saying what this unreal athlete can do now that he has let “beast mode” off of its leash.    

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Back in the 1940s and 50s, the Yankees and Dodgers played each other in the World Series so often it might have gotten boring for everyone involved, perhaps including fans in New York. The two clubs first met in 1941 and have played 11 times.

Since 1981, though, when the Dodgers beat the Yankees in a six-game World Series, their windows haven’t matched up. That might change now that the McCourt era has ended and the Dodgers, who won 95 games as recently as three years ago, can get back to spending money and putting a representative product on the field—not that this year’s 9-1 start suggests that they are suffering.

Not so fast, say the Yankees in this article by Bill Shaikin:

“This team is built to win,” Yankees catcher Russell Martin said. “If there’s a piece missing, they’ll  do anything they can to get that piece.”

 Yet there is more to winning than spending money.

 “Much more,” Martin said. “It is more about piecing the puzzle together than just buying players.”

Even before the McCourt ownership, the Dodgers should have been better in the 1990s and 2000s. Their players had great seasons—Mike Piazza, Adrian Beltre, Eric Gagne, Matt Kemp and Clayton Kershaw last year. Somehow the rest of the club could not live up to those performances.

The Dodgers threw away some excellent players in the 1990s, including Paul Konerko and the greatest peak-level pitcher of all time, Pedro Martinez. Amateur drafts have been a mixed bag. Matt Kemp came in the sixth round in 2003, an obvious steal, but the Dodgers have had a harder time finding lasting value in their other selections.

Some drafts, such as 2007, appear to have been complete swings and misses. Players developed through the international scouting process are also hard to spot on the current roster. Kenley Jansen came out of Curacao, but he’s about it.

Meanwhile, the Yankees have just gone on and on, outspending their mistakes whenever they had to and failing to win when they couldn’t. It remains to be seen if this is one of the seasons where they can get away with it.

They are very old. Their pitching staff is about to get older (though possibly better) with the arrival of Andy Pettitte. Ownership is on an admitted austerity kick, a problem given that players such as Alex Rodriguez and CC Sabathia are signed at high salaries through the end of time, limiting the team’s flexibility.

We tend to assume the Yankees will be able to bull through their weaknesses because they always have, or at least, they mostly have in the post-1993 period, but nothing lasts forever. If ownership is not going to tack on dollars to the budget when things get rough, the essential ingredient that has allowed them to do so will have vanished.

That’s a problem given how weak the Yankees’ system is in position players. There are no ready replacements should one of the starters become injured or decline.

The AL East looks a mess right now, with none of the teams doing quite what they’re supposed to as of yet. The Yankees should be in line for a postseason berth when it all shakes out, but perhaps with a weaker claim than we thought during the offseason.

Despite their fast start, the Dodgers may not be along for the ride. Yes, they are 9-1, but they have also played seven games against a very poor Padres team and three more against a Pirates club that can pitch a bit but can’t hit at all.

They have five one-run victories in those 10 games, and a team’s luck in close games can change very quickly. Beyond Kemp and Andre Ethier, the lineup is thin. The starting rotation drops off quickly after Kershaw, with the one hope for more quality being that Billingsley’s revival is for real.

The bullpen is strong and should stay strong, but that’s not a whole team. And like the Yankees, there is no depth in position players. Let’s face it: when you can’t kill off James Loney five years after he last hit like a first baseman, you have problems.

So, the Dodgers will now have money. The Yankees have had it, and even with a little less of it to spread around, will continue to have one of the highest, if not the highest budget in baseball. But the Yankees players are right.

It takes more than a blank check to win, as George Steinbrenner demonstrated throughout the 1980s—a period in which the Dodgers won two championships and the Yankees couldn’t get out of the AL East.

Baseball doesn’t need to return to the days when the World Series was contained in two boroughs, but it has been too long since the two great franchises representing two great cities have clashed in October. The time may come again, but it is not necessarily going to be soon, as both teams have work to do first. 

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The Dodgers ended the Cactus League with a 14-14 record but enter the 2012 season on a high note.

The offseason started with securing Kemp and Kershaw with long-term contracts and ended with finally having a reputable group of owners who will sign those paychecks.

While predicted by almost nobody to win the NL West, Dodgers fans still have a lot to smile about and not just because Friday fireworks nights are back. 

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What do 40 Gulf Stream jets, a lifetime supply of Donald Trump’s hair products and the Los Angeles Dodgers have in common?

They all cost $2 billion.  

On Tuesday, a group called Guggenheim Baseball Management LLC ponied up just over two billion greenbacks to lay claim to the Dodger franchise after a nasty divorce between the previous owners, Frank and Jamie McCourt, forced the team onto the market. 

The $2.15 billion purchase, led by Laker legend Magic Johnson and über film producer Peter Gruber, not only set the record for the most expensive acquisition of a sports franchise, it obliterated it. 

Previously, the record amount paid for a sports team was the 2005 procurement of Manchester United for $1.47 billion. Add a half billion dollars more to that figure, and you come up with what a top-three market baseball team goes for these days. 

For a perspective on the astronomical nature of the Dodgers deal, let’s take a look at the top 10 most expensive sports franchise purchases of all-time. 

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Coming into the 2012 season, the Los Angeles Dodgers are looking to pitch their way back into relevance. Behind the dominance of Cy Young winner Clayton Kershaw, the consistency of Ted Lilly and the hopeful reemergence of Chad Billingsley, the Dodgers added two quality free agent starting pitchers this offseason.

GM Ned Colletti diverged from the expected route of re-signing fan favorite Hiroki Kuroda, while letting a young pitcher fill the role of fifth starter. Instead, Colletti signed Aaron Harang and Chris Capuano to two-year deals. Although both Harang and Capuano have had numerous successful seasons in the major leagues, Colletti essentially blocked the arrival of Nathan Eovaldi, one of the few bright spots from 2011.

Eovaldi was unknown to most Dodger fans coming into 2011, ranking behind highly touted pitchers such as John Ely, Chris Withrow and Allan Webster. However, Eovaldi came into 2011 Spring Training and impressed with his stuff and his grittiness, fighting his way through innings while showing great command. By the end of March, the right-handed power pitcher was one of the few prospects getting considerable looks in Major League games.

Nathan, a 22 year old from Texas, went to Double-A Chattanooga after 2011 Spring Training camp broke. Showing great consistency in the minors, Eovaldi earned a call up in August after fellow prospect Rubby De La Rosa went down with a year-ending elbow injury that required Tommy John surgery.

Colletti was cautious with Eovaldi, communicating with the Double-A pitching coach dozens of times to make sure Eovaldi’s emotional makeup was strong enough to deal with potential failure. Many others were worried because Eovaldi had failed to truly dominate any level of the minor leagues, finding some success but never blowing away hitters.

Eovaldi’s Dodger debut went smoothly, he won his first start and proceeded to have five solid starts in his first six chances.  Eovaldi did not dominate hitters, striking out just 23 batters in 34 innings. But he was able to limit the damage when faced with trouble, appearing unfazed in any situation.

As the 2011 season closed, most expected Nathan to have a spot in the 2012 rotation since he had done nothing but impress.

However, with the addition of Capuano and Harang, Eovaldi seems to be the odd man out. Although everyone from Don Mattingly to Ned Colletti continue to praise Eovaldi, even comparing him to the likes of Kershaw, they have not allotted him a slot in the opening day rotation.

With the Dodgers’ history of pitching injuries, Eovaldi’s depth is a necessity and he will likely get quality innings on the Major League roster this year. My question, however, is why did Colletti go out and sign Capuano and Harang, which will only limit Eovaldi’s 2012 impact?

Is it better for Eovaldi to be on the Major League roster, assuming the role of spot starter and bullpen swingman? Eovaldi’s durability is not in question because of his athleticism and age.  His velocity (92-95 mph) and repertoire of a power fastball, solid curveball and changeup also make him a candidate to be a valuable bullpen arm.

On the other hand, Eovaldi could continue to pitch every fifth day and provide leadership in Triple- A Albuquerque.  He could stay on track to replace any starter that goes down with an injury, or the Dodgers could even go to a six-man rotation during the dog days of the summer. The six-man rotation is a hopeless dream that I have had for years, but it could really provide a little extra relief for the fragile arms of Harang and Capuano.

The Dodgers might not be convinced just yet to hand Nathan a true impact role, as his numbers reflect a more mediocre starting pitcher. His 1.38 WHIP, 20 walks and high pitch counts are all reasons to suggest Eovaldi could benefit from more time in the minors or in the bullpen. His inability to go deep into games (six innings was his longest outing) could tax the bullpen and over time, the Dodgers might want to put a cap on his pitches in hopes of protecting his arm.

At the end of the day, Eovaldi’s versatility, youthfulness and willingness to accept any role are huge assets that will serve him well as the season moves forward. I believe he deserves a shot to win a spot in the starting rotation, as his talent and excellence have only begun to be tapped into.

If Nathan fails to make the starting rotation out of Spring Training, as expected, I personally think he should stay with the big league team due to the fact that he has nothing left to prove in the minors. Learning from the best while seeing time out of the bullpen has helped many young pitchers hone their skills.  No matter what transpires in Spring Training, Eovaldi will see quality Major League innings due to injury.

With the Dodgers being in the tenuous state they are in, Eovaldi could be another season rescuer along the lines fellow Texan Clayton Kershaw was in his breakout 2009 campaign. Dodger fans can only hope for a miracle season that would foster another trip to the NLCS, but with the solid foundation of the Dodgers’ pitching rotation, anything is possible if the team can find ways to score some runs.

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Last year, among all the messes that the Dodgers organization was dealing with, one of them was their closer. 

The Dodgers opened the season with Broxton, who failed badly.  Then they tried several replacements like Kenley Jansen and others.  When Jansen hit the DL, they brought up Javy Guerra, and the rest is history. 

While I feel that Kenley Jansen is the future closer for the Dodgers, right now he is unreliable because of injury issues related to an irregular heart beat.  Jansen will be the setup man opening day.  In fact, the Dodgers bullpen is deep with veteran relief pitchers who should do well and keep Guerra in line for plenty of saves. 

Javy Guerra has limited experience as a closer. Last season, he notched 21 saves in 23 opportunities. He pitched in 47 games for the Dodgers in 2011, and that is the total for his career. 

Jumping on Javy Guerra from a fantasy perspective could be a bit dangerous, since he has yet to face normal closer adversary or close for an entire season.  That being said, the kid has good stuff. 

While Guerra did close in the minors, he has starter stuff.  He comes at hitters with a 95 MPH fastball, slider, changeup and curveball.  His out pitches are the changeup and curveball. 

While all of his pitches are average, he got enough to get three outs in the ninth.  His main problems will be control (3.47 BB/9) and being tested in stressful situations. 

Guerra walked 18 batters in less than 47 innings in 2011.  While that isn’t horrible, it’s not good either.  Also, he isn’t battle-tested, and 2012 will be another crazy year for the Dodgers, with the sale of the team yet to be completed.

The positives on Guerra are very good.  He did a great job closing in 2011 and has secured the job for 2012.  At 26, he is young and healthy and shouldn’t have any injury issues for the coming season.  He’s got a great track record through the minors and into the majors. 

If Guerra can stay focused and healthy, he will have a great season.  If not, Mattingly can put Jansen in at any time. 

Guerra will be a bargain no matter where he is drafted, so if you decide to draft him, make him a tier-three closer for your team and have two suitable closers already drafted.

The Closer Report 2012 Projections

35 Saves, 6 Wins, 2.78 ERA, 1.11 WHIP, 62 Ks

2012 Fantasy Draft Analysis

Javy Guerra’s ADP is a staggering 283 (24th round).  He is a steal at that point. 

I would start targeting Guerra around Round 19 or 20.  If he is the best player available that meets your needs, draft him. 

Beware that with the craziness of the Dodgers, he might not be the closer come season’s end—either he will get traded or lose the job outright.

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So after all is said and done, the sale of the Los Angeles Dodgers is held hostage by that greedy little carpetbagger Frank McCourt, who wants to have his cake and eat it too.

McCourt wants to sell the Dodgers while keeping ownership of the parking lot so he can torture Dodger fans by increasing parking fees on a captive audience.

In Los Angeles, McCourt will live in infamy along with such figures as Charles Manson and the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez.

Rarely have I seen a person buy a sports franchise and make a bigger mess of it except for Leonard Tose, who effectively lost the Philadelphia Eagles gambling in Atlantic City, and Ted Stepien who trashed the Cleveland Cavaliers in the early 1980s.

Even a casual sports fan can see the difficulties of a sports team not owning its own parking lot, particularly with a stadium as unique as Dodger Stadium. It is not unrealistic to imagine a greedy interloper like McCourt raising parking fees because he needs a bigger mansion while Dodger fans living on low incomes must underwrite his latest whim by paying exorbitant parking fees.

As Mitt Romney would say, “I am not worried about the poor.”

The new Dodger owners will be powerless to stop his actions left only to apologize to fans for parking increases. It is difficult to find a scenario where the new owner of the team, McCourt and the fans can live in harmony based upon McCourt’s history as the Dodger owner.

Any harmony would be immediately destroyed by McCourt’s desire to build a shopping center on the property which would further clog the limited entrances and exits to Chavez Ravine where the stadium is located. Chaos will ensue and only the fans will ultimately suffer.

There are already threats to boycott games that would only get worse if McCourt either raises parking prices or builds the shopping center he has so long desired. Where would that leave the new owner? In the middle of a strike by fans, the new owner would not have any power to solve the fans’ issues. A veritable death sentence for this baseball franchise.

As award-winning writer Bill Dwyre of the Los Angeles Times proffered, “Any McCourt development projects in his parking lots would be difficult, at best, because they would need the nod of city fathers, who need the nod of city voters, many of whom have long ago shaken their heads on anything to do with McCourt. Still, the thought of McCourt ending up with a piece of the Dodgers action, even though it is just a parking lot, is frightening.”

This problem is the fault of the Commissioner of Baseball who, after allowing McCourt to buy the franchise with a few nickels, permitted the parking lot to be separated from the team into two different legal entities.

A first-year law student would quickly recognize that this was an asset protection scheme that would permit McCourt to do exactly what he is doing today—bifurcating assets to paralyze any challenges to his ownership of the Dodgers.

Now it will take a bevy of lawyers to try and correct this flagrant error by the commissioner. The question, like the proverbial light bulb, is how many lawyers will it take to make McCourt do the right thing. But the real question is whether all the lawyers in the world can make McCourt do the right thing.

The right thing is for McCourt to sell all his interests in the Dodgers and Chavez Ravine and go back under the rock he came out from under. But that is not going to happen while McCourt is blinded by greed and offered easy pickings like those put on a platter by Bud Selig.

The sale is in phase two and already two approved buyers have withdrawn from the bidding process. McCourt wants $1.5 billion for a team that does not even own its own parking lot.

Either McCourt is a fool or he has played his cards better than Major League Baseball. Since the entity owning the parking lot is not in bankruptcy court, the judge may be powerless to change the course of this sale.

So what happens if no one is willing to pay $1.5 billion for a baseball team with nowhere for fans to park? What will the bankruptcy judge’s solution to this problem be? Does he have the authority to make rulings outside the assets before him?

And what happens when McCourt cannot meet the April 30, 2012 deadline to pay his former spouse from the proceeds of the Dodger sale? Those issues remain in a Los Angeles courtroom before the family law judge.

This is going to be an interesting phase of the Dodger sale. The commissioner is already huddling with a room full of lawyers trying to determine his next move. The next chess move in their complicated divorce/bankruptcy/sale of the McCourt Dodgers may end up in a higher court with the distinct possibility of making new law at the United States Supreme Court.

Whatever happens will be bad for Dodger fans and tarnish the City of L.A., which has bent over backwards to accommodate Dodger owners since 1957.

Stay tuned as Frank McCourt seeks to alienate every fan and citizen in the Greater Los Angeles Area. Something he already excels at.

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Are you aware that by using the name Frank McCourt you can come up with dozens upon dozens of other words?  Most notably (and, well, PG enough to post) include “crock, amok and mock.”

Fitting, wouldn’t you agree?

Most people living around LA think of McCourt as a crock who has run amok all over this team and turned the franchise into a mockery.

As it stands today, he is still the owner of the Dodgers. There are nine prospective buyers left on the market for the team, any of whom would be foolish to agree with McCourt’s latest shenanigans.

In case you haven’t heard, McCourt insists upon selling the team and the stadium, but keeping all of the surrounding parking lots. Really? I understand there are a lot of wealthy potential buyers (I’m looking at you, Steve Cohen) but the idea of letting McCourt have his finger in anything associated with the Dodgers whatsoever at this point is asinine.

It really is hard to imagine a more hated man in greater Los Angeles than Frank McCourt. In a piece by Steve Dilbeck in the Los Angeles Times, Dilbeck points out the fact that if McCourt muddies up this deal any more than he already has, the fans will boycott the team once again in large numbers.

More power to them.

Is it a bad situation for the players? Certainly.

Is it worse for the fans? You bet it is.  

Dodgers fans are diehards and passionate about their ballclub. They don’t deserve an owner like Frank McCourt, a man that is so wrapped up in himself he can’t see the forest for the trees.

Believe it or not, this ordeal will come to an end sooner or later. It has to. The question is, how much more can Dodgers fans take?

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On Friday the Los Angeles Dodgers asked the U.S. bankruptcy judge to disallow claims against them filed by Bryan Stow. As you may remember, Stow is the San Francisco Giants fan that was nearly beaten to death outside Dodger Stadium after the Dodgers’ Opening Day victory over the Giants last March.

Stow and his children filed a suit against the Dodgers, owner Frank McCourt and over a dozen defendants after the incident. Then after the Dodgers went into bankruptcy Stow and his family filed a claim with the Delaware court that is overseeing the team’s bankruptcy.

In a story on ESPN.com the Dodgers say,

“The Stow claim is, when stripped to its core, based on the faulty premise that a landowner is an insurer of the safety of persons on its property.”

The Dodgers also say that Stow cannot prove that the additional security steps he said should have been taken by the team would have prevented his injuries. The team also contends that they didn’t have any knowledge of inappropriate conduct by Stow’s assailants prior to the attack, and they cannot be held liable for failure to anticipate a criminal act.

I understand the reluctance by the Dodgers to just go ahead and take responsibility for what happened that day, and perhaps even if security had been doubled the incident may have still occurred. By admitting responsibility the Dodgers would open themselves up to a lawsuit every time someone got hurt during a fight in the parking lot after a game—and that wouldn’t be right either.

I don’t care how much security they have at Dodger games—or any other sporting event—things like this are going to happen no matter how much security there is. When you put over-zealous fans from opposing teams together in one place—and add in the fact them many of them will overindulge in alcoholic beverages—disagreements and fights are going to happen.

However in this case witness accounts seem to show that Bryan Stow was not in the blame here. It doesn’t appear that he had been in any verbal argument with his attackers prior to the beating; in fact all accounts seem to suggest he was trying to avoid any conflict with others.

The ESPN.com article mentioned above says:

“The Dodgers said there were 442 security personnel in the ballpark and parking lots that day, including police. The team said that was an increase from 398 for the 2010 opener and 308 for the first home game in 2009.” Stow cannot show that anything about the security personnel staffing on opening day caused his injuries and, furthermore, the security staffing at the game greatly exceeded all requirements of California state law.”

Let’s be honest here, while the security staffing at Dodger Stadium that day may have exceeded all requirements of state law, it probably wasn’t enough. I work with many people who will not go to a Dodger game because they say they don’t feel safe. Most of them are from the east and midwest, and say they never have had a feeling of being unsafe at other stadiums like they do at Dodger Stadium.

I personally don’t attend as many Dodger games now as I did 30 years ago, and the rowdy conduct of many fans inside, and outside the stadium is one reason for that. I just don’t feel as safe at a night game at Dodger Stadium as I did even 10 years ago. Many times I have felt that more security was needed before, during and after games at Dodger Stadium, especially in the parking lot.

While more security at games may help, I also think the team needs to train its ushers and security personnel better. They need to be more proactive, rather than reactive when it comes to rowdy fans.

Many times from my seat I have observed groups of fans getting into it with other fans who were sitting rows away from each other. As the game went on, and the beers flowed in most cases, the verbal attacks grew worse and worse until an actual fight would break out. If I could see that coming, why couldn’t the ushers? Many times I think a nice friendly visit by an armed security officer who could explain that they were all going to be asked to leave would have quieted the situation down.

Yes, the Dodgers should have had more security personnel at games for years, and training ushers and other stadium personnel on what to look out for when it comes to misbehaving fans would also help. But on the other hand, sometimes incidents will happen no matter how much security there is. And that is why I can kind of see the team’s reluctance to admit guilt in this, or any other case.

However one big difference between the Stow case, and the many other incidents of fighting at Dodger Stadium each year is that Mr. Stow almost was killed, and will most likely be impaired for the rest of his life because of what happened that day.

In my opinion the Dodgers organization needs to man up, and take responsibility for this incident. They need to show that by making sure Stow and his family never have to pay one penny towards his medical bills, and they need to realize that because of his injuries Bryan Stow will most likely never be able to provide for his family like he would have if the incident never happened.

The Los Angeles Dodgers should settle this case as soon as possible out of court. I’m sure they could do it in a way that the legal language would not make them responsible for every cut and scratch that future brawling fans might incur.

The team also needs to realize that stadium security needs to be higher from now on, not just for the rest of last season after the Stow incident.

Dodger fans—and fans from the opposing teams—should feel safe going to Dodger Stadium and cheering their team on while wearing their team’s jersey, no matter what that team is.

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