In Milwaukee, 49 years and 11 months ago, Joe Torre singled in his major-league debut.
Dodgers at Brewers, 5:10 p.m.

  • Ryan Theriot, 2B
  • Andre Ethier, RF
  • Manny Ramirez, LF
  • James Loney, 1B
  • Matt Kemp, CF
  • Ronnie Belliard, 3B
  • Jamey Carroll, SS
  • Rod Barajas, C
  • Ted Lilly, P

The Dodgers are a team in need of a winning streak, to say the least. If only for their self-esteem.

Los Angeles has played 65 games since its last four-game winning streak, June 6-9. That’s exactly as long as the team went between streaks of that length last year, if you include the 2009 postseason.

By my research on Baseball-Reference.com, the last time the Dodgers went this long between four-game winning streaks in the regular season was in 2005. They had an eight-game winning streak though April 20 (giving them that 12-2 start), then never won more than three in a row the rest of the year.

* * *

Joe Torre told reporters today that Carlos Monasterios will start Thursday to give Chad Billingsley two more days to rest his tender calf.

Torre also said that “I know for sure I want to do something next year, whether it’s managing or something else. I’m not retiring.”

* * *

Josh Wilker has a great Cardboard Gods post about Tommy Lasorda’s role in an episode of Silver Spoons:

… However, possibly because underage drinking and other mind-altering substances swooped in to spirit me slightly away from television for a while, I missed the episode a few seasons into the show’s five-year run that featured Ricky (Ricky Schroeder) and his grandfather (Academy Award-winner John Houseman a couple roles away from The Final Curtain) scheming to make a killing with baseball cards.

The mention of baseball cards is what stopped me on my tour through the channels. Though the scheme the robber baron grandfather hatched was pretty ludicrous (noticing that his grandson has cornered the market on Tommy Lasorda cards, he drives up the value of the cards by starting a rumor that Tommy Lasorda is about to be voted into the Hall of Fame), it’s interesting to me that the episode aired when the baseball card industry was reaching its peak, and the skyrocketing value of cards was making kids into savvy, merciless businessmen. I had stopped collecting cards by then, so I missed out on being inside the bubble of card prices that seemed for a while as if it would expand forever. It must have been exciting, but I think it would have made baseball card collecting a little nerve-wracking for me. With my cards, I wanted to dissolve away from the world and enter another world. If I was constantly worried about whether to “invest” in, say, Pat Listach or Gregg Jefferies, I think I might not have enjoyed it as much, or found as much comfort in it, because I’d still be present, capable of losing, instead of disappearing altogether into the world of the cards. …

At the end of the Silver Spoons episode, Tommy Lasorda makes an appearance. He has a whole bunch of cards of himself, which will “flood the market” and drive prices back down and make official the restoration of innocence that Ricky already started moving toward when he gave back the money he’d fleeced from his friend. I believe the last line of the episode is Lasorda’s, saying something like, “Hey, did you hear? I’m a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame!” He actually did make the Hall, but it was twelve years after the episode aired. I don’t think he thanked John Houseman in his acceptance speech for getting the ball rolling. I also have to think he refrained from the colorful language that, in this day and age of the ever-present recording device, has given Tommy Lasorda two lives, one being the sunny, wholesome Dodger Great shown on the front of the 1978 card at the top of this page (and in the 1985 episode of Silver Spoons), the other being an incredibly foul-mouthed accidental entertainer of the YouTube generation. I have to admit that the latter is by far my more favorite of his two incarnations, in part because he is clearly one of those people blessed with the ability to use obscenities with operatic gravitas and gusto, and also because the latter Tommy Lasorda persona seems to be the one connected with its vitriol and bitterness and also its vivid life and its unadorned humor to that more interesting personal life story, the one present on the back of his 1978 card, the life of the marginal itinerant far from sunshine and Cooperstown.