It has now been almost two weeks since I was warned in advance about this possible glitch, and I apologize profusely to all of you. I’m still being told this is allegedly going to be fixed in the very near future, so I appreciate your continued patience, but I also understand that patience isn’t infinite. This is a great blog because of YOU, and it isn’t a great blog when there is no input from YOU. In the meantime, I’ll keep posting my thoughts and hope that is enough to keep you coming back. … For those who were wondering, and who might not have found this blog yet when I explained it last year, this little scheduling quirk the Dodgers and every other National League team are going through this week, is called “squeeze week.” It’s a necessary evil for making the schedule actually fit into a 27-week template. Each team must play 54 series during the year (three games times 54 equals 162, even though some series are four games and others are two). But it is the All-Star break that screws it all up. Each week has two windows for series, mid-week and weekend. Sometimes the two overlap, with some series going Mon-Thurs, some going Thurs-Sun and occasionally one going Fri-Mon. What the All-Star break does is wipe out one of those mid-week windows, so to make up for that, each team has to cram TWO series into the four-day window of Mon-Thurs once a year, and this is that week. When I was covering the Reds, a Midwestern team that was no more than an hour or so flight from most N.L. cities, they seemed to always get the whole thing at home, just as they are this year with the Dodgers and Astros coming in. Now that I am covering a West Coast team that has a lot of long trips, ironically, the Dodgers NEVER got the entire four games at home, and it usually involves weird, sleep-deprivation kind of travel. One year, it was at Milwaukee/at San Diego, Last year, it was at Arizona/at Colorado. This year, it’s at Cincinnati/home, but that home series is a big one for the Dodgers, two games with Arizona that are as close to must-win as games get in late April, and the Dodgers get to play them after a crosscountry flight while the Diamondbacks come in fresh off a two-game series at home with the Giants and a 45-minute jaunt to Los Angeles. Yeah, that seems fair.