This is from si.com’s Jon Heyman, and if you believe it, it paints a bleak picture of the way this organization is being run from the top down.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/jon_heyman/07/24/scoop.dodgers/index.html

Anyway, as the headline says, Ethier becomes the first odd-man out. But Torre emphasized that he hasn’t yet made up his mind how this four-outfielders-for-three-spots scenario is going to shake out — although he expects to make it up fairly quickly.
“We’re at a point in the season where we can’t take a month to make up our minds for anything,” he said.
Torre did say he recognizes the dramatic improvement on the part of Ethier over the course of the season. From what I can deduce, the mentality on the part of club officials seems to be that Andruw Jones was signed to give the Dodgers the one thing they were missing last year, so without him in the lineup, they’re still missing it. Which is true to a point. But if having Jones in there actually makes the club WORSE, then you’re not really giving yourself the best shot of winning, are you?

Here’s the lineup

LF Pierre
RF Kemp
C Martin
2B Kent
SS Garciaparra
1B Loney
CF Jones
3B LaRoche
RH Billingsley

Apparently, he has a right oblique strain that he suffered during his ninth-inning pinch-hitting appearance on Wednesday at Colorado. I’m assuming Pierre will be in the lineup tonight, possibly with Andruw Jones sitting, but we’ll see.

Well, six games into the second half, the offense has officially returned to its first-half form. Proving once again that you can never hide a player when he is struggling, the game found Andruw Jones in the eighth inning, when the Dodgers had the tying runs on second and third and one out. If you didn’t see it, I’ll give you one guess as to what the result was. Put it this way, it was the same result that Andruw has now gotten 29 times in 51 at-bats this season with runners in scoring position — and it wasn’t a hit, because that has only happened four times in those 51 ABs. Meanwhile, the Dodgers are still waiting for one of their starting pitchers to give them a quality start, something that didn’t happen once on this trip. Kuroda became the first one to go six, but he gave up five earned runs on nine hits. … Dodgers fall to 49-52. Snakes play later, but does it really even matter anymore?

Joe Torre said this morning that Jeff Pentland, who was hired as a “roving minor-league hitting instructor,” is going to stick around with the big club for a while, and Torre didn’t rule out him staying for the rest of the year. A big part of his job is helping Don Mattingly get acclimated to the full-time hitting coach’s role and providing an additional set of eyes and an additional perspective. There is a limit on how many coaches you can have in the dugout in uniform, so Pentland stays in the clubhouse during games.
“He is basically doing what Donnie was doing when Donnie would visit while Mike (Easler, former hitting coach) was on the bench,” Torre said. “He will be watching on TV. If a player goes up (to the clubhouse) to look at an at-bat, Jeff will be there for tha player to talk to about it.”
Torre said special instructor Manny Mota also will continue to travel with the team as an extra hitting coach, although Mota isn’t on this trip for personal reasons.

Here’s today’s lineup
RF Kemp
LF Ethier
SS Garciaparra
2B Kent
1B Loney
CF Jones
3B LaRoche
C Ardoin
RH Kuroda

The fact Ubaldo Jimenez was so pitch-efficient — he threw 114 in a complete game and got through the first seven innings on just 75 — would seem to suggest that the Dodgers have fallen back into their old habits. And as you know, I am the first one to jump on the boys when they make it too easy on an opposing pitcher. But in this case, that doesn’t appear to be what happened. Jimenez threw an inordinate (especially for him) number of strikes, and the Dodgers had little choice but to swing at them. When you’re a beat writer, you try to write every story from the perspective of the team you cover, and when that team gets taken to school by a pitcher, you try to figure out why. This time, there wasn’t a why — other than the fact Jimenez was just GOOD. I mean, really, really good. If he had pitched like this last October, the Rockies might have won a game in that World Series. … Dodgers fall to 49-51 and one game behind the Snakes. The boys are now 0-3 this month, having been outscored 24-8, in games in which they had a chance to reach .500 for the first time since May 30.