Everybody is REALLY tightlipped on this thing, but this is what I was able to gather today, and what I just filed for tomorrow’s paper

By Tony Jackson
Staff Writer
It now appears that there was at least some truth to an internet report earlier this week that the Dodgers are talking to former Florida manager Joe Girardi about a position with the club. But it doesn’t look like the Dodgers are trying to make Girardi their next manager.
Not yet, anyway.
According to multiple sources, Dodgers general manager Ned Colletti has been in contact with Girardi about what is expected to be an opening on the coaching staff. More specifically, Girardi potentially would become manager Grady Little’s bench coach if Girardi isn’t named manager of the New York Yankees. That would position Girardi as Little’s eventual successor, and the fact discussions with Girardi reportedly are taking place without Little’s involvement would seem to put Little in an awkward position if Girardi joins his staff.
For the second day in a row, Colletti didn’t respond to multiple phone messages left at his office. Steve Mandel, Girardi’s Chicago-based agent, also didn’t respond to a message left on his cell phone.
“The Dodgers won’t be making any news until after the World Series,” said Camille Johnston, the club’s senior vice president for communications, in adherence with commissioner Bud Selig’s edict that teams avoid upstaging the game’s premier event.
Girardi is one of three candidates, along with Don Mattingly and Tony Pena, to replace Joe Torre as Yankees manager. While Mattingly is the favorite because he is believed to be the top choice of owner George Steinbrenner and Steinbrenner’s sons, Hank and Hal, others in the Yankees front office are said to strongly prefer Girardi.
It isn’t clear whether the position with the Dodgers has reached the point of being a guaranteed fallback for Girardi if he doesn’t get the Yankees job.
On the surface, adding Girardi to the Dodgers staff would appear to instantly put Little on the hot seat next spring as he enters his third season at the helm. The Dodgers are coming off a disappointing 82-80 season and fourth-place finish in the National League West. Girardi and Colletti have known each other since at least 1989, when Girardi made his major-league debut as a catcher for Chicago while Colletti was the Cubs’ media-relations director.
Girardi was the N.L. Manager of the Year with the Marlins in 2006, his only previous season as a big-league manager, but he nevertheless was fired after that season because of a rift with owner Jeffrey Loria. Girardi, 43, is fiery and energetic. That is in stark contrast to the reserved Little, who didn’t seem to have a remedy for the clubhouse disharmony that bubbled to the surface late in the season and might have contributed to the team’s downfall.
Little, who is signed through next season with an option for 2009, went home to Pinehurst, N.C., shortly after the season to decide what changes he wanted to make on his staff. But almost a month into the offseason, there has been no word on those changes. Every member of the staff, whose contracts all expire on Dec. 31, was given permission after the season to seek jobs elsewhere, but that didn’t necessarily mean Colletti or Little wanted them to leave.
The Dodgers need a hitting coach to replace Bill Mueller, who is returning to the front office. Little also was believed to be strongly considering replacing bench coach Dave Jauss. Multiple sources said last week that Jauss was close to accepting a position with Pittsburgh, a claim Jauss later denied.

Roster moves: The Dodgers made a series of procedural moves on Friday that reduced their 40-man roster to 34 players. Right-hander Zach Hammes and catcher Chad Moeller cleared waivers and were outrighted to Triple-A Las Vegas. Lefty Tim Hamulack, who started the season at Las Vegas but made just seven appearances before undergoing season-ending elbow surgery, also was outrighted, but he refused the assignment and became a free agent.
Moeller, a six-year major-league veteran, also has the option of becoming a free agent.

… but the time has come for the National League to adopt the designated hitter. There. I said it. May burning sulfur rain down on me from Heaven. And yes, being a lifelong N.L. fan, the whole notion does turn my stomach a bit. But if the N.L. remains true to tradition and continues to play “real” baseball, it is also going to continue to get its derriere handed to it on the second Tuesday of every July and at least four times over a five- to nine-day period every October. (Yes, I know, the Cardinals won the World Series last year, but if the Tigers hadn’t had a six-day layoff, and if the Tigers pitchers hadn’t forgotten how to throw a ball from the mound to third base, the result would have been different). The fact is, there are several reasons why the A.L. is so far ahead of the N.L., but every one of them stems either directly or indirectly from the presence of the DH. From the moment it was introduced some 35 years ago, this was always bound to eventually happen. Take this World Series, for instance. The Red Sox have Big Papi, who has become one of the game’s most feared hitters while playing almost exclusively as a DH. In Games 1 and 2, he is 3 for 8 with two doubles, two RBI and three runs scored while hitting in the three hole, ahead of Manny. The Rockies have countered with Ryan Spilborghs, a part-time center fielder who is batting in their lineup and is 0 for 5 with a walk, five strikeouts, no runs and no RBI. Hmmm. David Ortiz? Or Ryan Spilborghs? Yeah, that’s a pretty even matchup. The key to all this was that a few years into the DH, teams started recognizing the value of having a full-time DH (Ortiz, Frank Thomas, etc). There was a time when there was a stigma attached to that, when a guy who did nothing but DH was viewed as half a player who could only play half the game, and most players wanted nothing to do with such a role. But that has changed dramatically. Now, that role is filled by some of the most feared hitters around, and the result is that a lot of A.L. lineups (like Boston’s) are almost impossible to pitch to because there isn’t a weak spot anywhere, even at the bottom. As a result, the pitching in the A.L. has had to improve — to the point that it, too, is far superior to N.L. pitching — just because pitchers have to elevate their games just to survive in that league. And PLEASE don’t tell me this A.L. dominance is cyclical, because it isn’t. Look it up. It began a quarter of a century ago, and since then, has gotten steadily more pronounced. The N.L. went into the 1983 season on an unprecedented run of success, having won the previous 11 All-Star Games and the previous four World Series. Since then, the A.L. is 18-6-1 in the All-Star Game, with none of those losses having come since 1996, and 15-8 (soon to be 16-8) in the World Series. That sound cyclical to you?
Of course, simply adopting the DH isn’t going to instantly bring the N.L. back to respectability. That’s just the first, and most vital, step. After that, N.L. managers have to completely overhaul the way they do things, and that will take time (at least a year or two). They will have to overcome their addiction to that ridiculous sacrifice bunt, the most counterproductive tactic the game has ever known, and for many of them, that could require a 30-day stint in rehab. And then, they will have to get over the notion of manufacturing runs and playing for a run here and a run there. N.L. managers go to sleep at night dreaming of their leadoff man drawing a walk, stealing second, taking third on a sac bunt and scoring on a sac fly, all without benefit of a hit. A.L. managers go to sleep at night dreaming about the inning Terry Francona got to watch his team have on Wed. night, a seven-run outburst in which 13 men go to the plate and nine in a row reach base. Hmmm. A one-run inning? Or a seven-run inning? Which do YOU think is better.
Finally, there is one other adjustment that will have to be made, and this one will come on the part of the players — and it can be argued that this has NOTHING to do with the DH. N.L. players HAVE to learn to work counts the way A.L. clubs do. Ask two or three of the veterans in the Dodgers clubhouse about working counts, and they look at your like you’re nuts. The idea of taking two strikes and falling into an 0-2 hole is mortifying to them. But watch what the top A.L. clubs, like the Red Sox, do. They grind away relentlessly at the other team’s starting pitcher, making him sweat for every out he records. It amazes me every year, when the World Series rolls around, that N.L. pitchers are completely baffled by this, that the whole concept is something that never occurred to them. And they can’t understand why they get ahead of a guy 0-2, then he takes a couple of pitches, fouls off a couple of pitches, takes ball three, fouls off three or four more, then finally gets a hit on the eighth or ninth pitch of the at-bat, and this pitcher has just wasted all those pitches for an out he couldn’t get and a hitter he couldn’t put away. Jeff Francis threw 103 pitches in four innings in Game 1. That’s 103 pitches to record 12 outs. And then he was gone. And Hurdle had to go to his middle relief, in this cas a rookie (Franklin Morales) who had never made a relief appearance in the majors, and the Sox scored seven runs off him the next inning.
That, my friends, is how you win a World Series. That, my friends, is how it is done in the vastly superior American League — and how it will have to be done in the sad-sack National League if the so-called Senior Circuit has any hope of EVER closing the gap.
Long live the DH. I still don’t like it. But it’s time has come.

The Rockies are a great story, but the nine-day layoff, the fact the Red Sox have Beckett and Schilling ready for the first two games on regular rest and, of course, the whole A.L.-N.L. thing, and there isn’t much reason to think Colorado has a chance. I read where Ryan Spilborghs is their likely DH for the Fenway Park games. Boston’s DH will be David Ortiz. Hmmmm, what a matchup that is. The point is, A.L. teams ALWAYS have a huge advantage over N.L. teams in A.L. parks because A.L. teams have a full-time DH who plays every day, where N.L. teams usually have to insert somebody off their bench (read: somebody who isn’t good enough to play every day). The irony is that after all those years of being built around the long ball in their longball-happy ballpark, the Rockies are now built around pitching and defense — just in time to play in a World Series in a ballpark similar to Coors Field, another yard that seems perfectly tailored to having a bunch of bashers in your lineup. Problem is, the Rockies don’t really have that anymore.

And tonight is the first one since, well, last year, when the Cardinals and Mets went the distance in the NLCS. The tension, the pressure, the drama. I have to say going in that I can’t imagine the Red Sox losing this one. They are almost impossible to beat at home, and they have dealt with this pressure before. The Indians simply didn’t get the performances they were expecting this postseason from C.C. Sabathia or Fausto Carmona. … It’s also hard for me to imagine the Rockies continuing their historic surge and winning the World Series after this nine-day layoff. Major League Baseball had its heart in the right place when it added all these extra off-days into the playoff schedule. The thought was to reduce taxing on the players’ bodies and to have built-in fallbacks in the event of rainouts. But this is a little ridiculous. No other team in the history of baseball has had more than a six-day layoff during the postseason. I agree with the addition of a travel day between Games 4 and 5 of the division series — last year, if the Dodgers and Mets had split the first four games of their division series, they would have had to fly back to New York after a Sunday game at Dodger Stadium and played on Monday at Shea, which would have been a little ridiculous. But an off-day between Games 4 and 5 of the League Championship Series, when the series isn’t even changing cities? Not sure I understand that one. And why do they need TWO off-days between Game 7 of the ALCS tonight and Game 1 of the World Series on Wednesday? The most ridiculous result of all this isn’t that Game 7 of the World Series would happen in November. It’s that one World Series team will be coming off a two-day break, while the other will be coming off a nine-day break. … Was driving on the 10 Freeway a couple of weeks ago and had one of the early playoff games on the radio. Joe Morgan made a good point during that broadcast. One of the teams had runners on the corners with nobody out, and Morgan mentioned Reggie Smith, the former Dodgers RF. Reggie once told Joe that in that situation, if the infield was playing back, he always tried to hit the ball on the ground. As wrong as that sounds, it actually makes sense. Reggie’s thinking was that if he GIDP’d, it meant the run would score, and he figured his job in that at-bat was to get the run home any way he possibly could. To me, this is the ultimate in being a team player. Try to hit a sac fly, which would give you an RBI and save you an at-bat if you succeed, and you might pop up instead. But in a GIDP, the batter gets nothing — no RBI, no sacrifice, nothing, he just gets charged with an at-bat and a GIDP. But HE GETS THE RUN HOME AND HELPS THE TEAM. Now, contrast that against the thinking of many (most) modern players, who would look at you like you had a second head if you suggested something like this to them. Reggie Smith was no Hall of Famer, to be sure. But there is no denying that he represents an era in Dodgers history that was considerably more successful than the present one.

Took in bits and pieces of Game 2 of the ALCS tonight. It was American League baseball at its finest. I realize the A.L. is the superior league — and yes, there is an unmistakable “junior varsity” feel to the N.L. playoffs, right down to the fact they have been relegated to TBS while the A.L. is on Fox (by the way, that Frank TV show looks like it’s going to be pretty good, but I refuse to watch a single episode, ever, just because I am so sick of those incessant promos, but I digress). Anyway, this game tonight between the Indians and the Red Sox made me wonder how anybody can stand to watch A.L. ball on a regular basis. It took them 4 1/2 hours to play nine innings, and then they had to play extra innings on top of that. They went to the 10th inning at just before 1 a.m. Boston time. With the winning run on second base and two outs in the bottom of the ninth, Kevin Youkilis fell into a two-strike count, then proceeded to foul off pitch after pitch after pitch until he finally flied out to send the game to extra innings on something like the 13th pitch of the at-bat. This is like watching paint dry. Gives me a new respect for my colleague Doug Padilla, who covers the Angels for us, because he has to watch this stuff on a nightly basis. … One storyline from the N.L. playoffs that keeps striking a chord with me is Troy Tulowitzki and the leadership role he has taken on in the Rockies clubhouse — and the fact the Rockies’ veterans have fallen in line behind him. Contrast that against Jeff Kent’s rant back on Sept. 20 about how the Dodgers’ young players “don’t get it.” I have to wonder what would have happened if Tulo played for the Dodgers, and if he tried to take on a similar leadership role with them — and how it would have been received by Kent/Gonzo/Nomar et al. Would it have been effective? Would others have fallen in line? Or would Tulo have been shamed into submission by the ages-old clubhouse heirarchy that at times this season seemed to be more important in the Dodgers clubhouse than winning was on the field. All I know is this: with the exception of a few pitchers, the Rockies are basically the same bunch of guys who never came close to contention in the NL West in recent seasons. The only thing that has changed is the addition of Tulo, the former Long Beach State standout who singlehanded — and as a rookie, no less — has transformed the culture on a team that gave no hint that it was capable of this until he got there. Wonder if the Dodgers’ veterans — the ones who are coming back, anyway — are paying attention?