LA Observed on KCRW, every Tuesday at 4:44 p.m.Bob Timmermann used to blog about baseball at The Griddle. He has contributed pieces to Dodger Thoughts and Baseball Analysts. He is one of the vice presidents of the Allan Roth Chapter of the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) and has given two presentations at SABR's national convention. He grew up in Granada Hills and later earned a history degree at UCLA back in the day when the Bruins were good in football and bad in basketball. He will be happy to explain the catcher interference rule to you. Bob also wrote the blog One Through Forty-Two or Forty-Three, "a more or less random look back at the Presidents of the U.S." Bob lives in South Pasadena. Email
The FIFA World Cup has now been winnowed down to just eight teams. There are just seven matches left that...
Four years ago, I was writing an overly long World Cup preview on this site. And I included this passage:...
There was the solar eclipse, and there's the Dodgers having the most fun season since 1974.
Just who are those guys playing baseball just north of Downtown Los Angeles?
Johnson won the batting title with the Angels in 1970, but baseball did not know how to handle his mental illness.
A Freeway Series. It could happen.
The World Cup is down to its Final Four, all of them powerhouses. The finale could be an All-American affair.
The favorites the rest of the way appear to be Brazil, Germany, Argentina, and the Netherlands. The Americans may get their chance to play against more of those soccer powers on the sport's biggest stage soon.
The World Cup starts in Brazil on Thursday, June 12. Amid social turmoil and construction problems, the world will be taking much of the next four weeks off to follow their favorite team.
Andy McCue's new biography of Walter O'Malley was 20 years in the making. It's another look at one of the most controversial owners in the history of the game.
Once I was a big UCLA basketball fan. I'm still big, but the whole sport of college basketball has gotten small.
The Dodgers are losing to the Cardinals in the NLCS in both games and storylines.
A quick look at the upcoming National League Championship Series. (Little known secret: neither side is morally superior.)
Football comes to Chavez Ravine, but it's not the NFL. It's something better and it made someone unexpectedly happy.
UCLA's baseball team is in Omaha for the College World Series for the third time in the last four years.
LACMA's James Turrell retrospective will likely be very popular. If you ever have the patience to wait out the crowds to see most of it.
Be it a team that plays beisbol, yakyu, or honkbal, the World Baseball Classic will have a champion on Tuesday night.
UCLA wins the Pac-12 regular season basketball championship. Although, you might not have thought that was possible earlier in the season.
The failure of the BBWAA to elect anyone to the Baseball Hall of Fame is a case of journalists choosing to be moralists rather than reporters.
After UCLA's win over USC on Saturday, it's possible that the Bruins next game against Stanford could be just be the opening act of a two-part series to decide who goes to the Rose Bowl.
Is it time for fans of the Dodgers to just give up and surrender to the Giants? History advises otherwise.
Why do Dodgers fans leave Dodger Stadium early? It turns out that it's always been that way. From Day One. Literally.
Whenever you find the pay TV service that carries every channel that you think you will need, please tell the author. Because he doubts that you will ever find one.
The World Wide Web had an inventor? Who knew? Not NBC's Olympics hosts.
The recent run of hockey success by the Kings has made one person think back to a street hockey game from 35 years ago that taught him that sometimes you really cannot win no matter what you do.
The traffic forecast for people coming Downtown this weekend is "crowded" — although fans of the Kings, Lakers, Clippers, and Dodgers may not mind all that much.
The Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, opened in 1959, has been the temporary home of UCLA basketball this season. Despite its age and lack of use, the Sports Arena still remains.
One of the greatest basketball coaches ever to come out of Los Angeles is little remembered here because he succeeded in the wrong places at the wrong time.
Novelty tortilla chips tell the tale of the UCLA and USC football teams this year.
The World Series starts Wednesday night in St. Louis. If you think it doesn't matter because it matches up St. Louis and Texas, guess again. It should be an exciting series and expect a lot of runs.
It's another season where lowered expectations are best for UCLA fans.
The passing of a parent can make you reevaluate just how much time has passed.
The Society for American Baseball Research will be holding its annual convention in Long Beach July 6-10. It's the first time that the group will be meeting in Southern California since 1993.
One photo from 1985 encapsulates a day when Dodgers fans were incredibly unhappy, but perhaps still much happier than they are today.
Los Angeles Times sports columnist T.J. Simers, or as he prefers to refer to himself "Page Two", has made a...
The second weekend of America's three week obsession with looking at names of universities written in brackets that are normally...
With the official Opening Day/Night for the Dodgers still a couple weeks away on March 31, local baseball fans got...
For the LA Kings, "in front of" means something entirely different than most other people.
The L.A. Times' T.J. Simers tries to bludgeon in us to believing that the AEG proposal for a Downtown L.A. football stadium is the greatest thing ever.
USC and UCLA play the last football game ever in the Pac-10 Saturday night. And the season will come to a merciful end for fans of both teams. The last game of the Pac-8 was much more exciting affair.
If there is no NFL franchise in Los Angeles soon, the Times sports section will just get really sad. Other than that, I can't figure out what the reason for attracting a team is needed or building a new stadium in Downtown.
UCLA's football renaissance this season proved to be nothing more than another in a series of optical illusions conjured up by Rick Neuheisel.
A 1973 letter to the L.A. Times sports section shows that few things have ever changed about making the trek to Dodger Stadium
UCLA got itself a big win in Texas last Saturday, but don't expect much more in the way of highlights from the Bruins. The Pac-10 is loaded and the Bruins offense is still a work in progress.
A trip to Dodger Stadium in the post-Manny Era turned out to be more of a night to witness a rare event in baseball combined with a quest to find a pen.
The Los Angeles Dodgers 2010 season has been careening downhill rapidly since the All-Star Game as the team has gone...
There are a lot of people who analyze the Dodgers on a daily basis. I really shouldn't be trying to do their jobs. But all I know is, people are certainly crabby about the Dodgers this year. And they weren't this crabby in 1992 and that team was twice as worse.
On Tuesday night, Dodgers hitting coach (and manager heir apparent) Don Mattingly committed a gaffe that forced the Dodgers to remove closer Jonathan Broxton from the game. Mattingly was pilloried throughout the blogosphere, but he was not the first manager to run afoul of baseball's arcane rule about making trips to the mound during an inning.
Spain and the Netherlands face off Sunday in Johannesburg for the World Cup. For the first time since 1998, there will be a first time winner of the Cup. Just who will it be? It's hard to say, but Spain is a slight favorite.
The World Cup semifinals start Tuesday at 11:30 am PT with a match between the Netherlands and Uruguay. Germany and Spain play the other one on Wednesday. All four teams have a fighting chance, although the Germany-Spain winner will be favored.
The quarterfinals of the World Cup are usually where the pretenders are finally found out. Expect the big boys of international soccer to move on to the semifinals. Or ask an octopus.
The United States and Mexico both left the World Cup after losing their second round matches. But, the tournament will still move on with some of its brightest stars and biggest matches to come.
The United States qualified for the second round of the World Cup in a dramatic and nerve-wracking fashion. Next up for the Americans will be Ghana on Saturday. Mexico will take on Argentina on Sunday.
UCLA's baseball team has often been a monument to under achievement, but the 2010 squad has won a record 49 games and picked up the school's first ever win in the College World Series.
The United States scratched back from an early deficit to tie Slovenia in an important World Cup match. Meanwhile, Mexico looks primed to move on to the second round. Even South Korea is in good shape after a big loss to Argentina.
The World Cup has opened up in South Africa with an overabundance of cautious play. But, both the American and Mexican teams have a good chance of making it to the second round.
Soccer's World Cup gets underway in South Africa on June 11. Here's a very quick and extraordinarily unsophisticated preview written by a guy is only related to a soccer expert.
Former major leaguer Morgan Ensberg is trying to help people understand the game of the baseball, as well as serve as a media critic.
Josh Wilker, author of Cardboard Gods, talks about his new book based on his blog about his life and baseball cards. Wilker will give a reading of his book at the South Pasadena Public Library on June 10.
Today (April 12) marks what would be the 106th birthday of my maternal grandmother, Ella Kimberling. She passed away in 2001, a few weeks shy of her 97th birthday.
I tend to start looking at old photos of her around this time. One photo, which I had ignored for years, seems to represent her importance to my family.
The Dodgers left their spring training home in Glendale, Arizona on Wednesday to play a game in Las Vegas. On Thursday night, they came back home to Los Angeles to play an exhibition game against Cleveland. And both the Dodgers and this one fan still do not seem ready for the regular season to start on Monday.
The Dodgers got back minor league outfielder Jamie Hoffmann from the New York Yankees. But they did get back ALL of him?
Twenty years after the death of star player Hank Gathers, the Loyola Marymount basketball team finally looks like it might be able to return to respectability. A winning record and a berth in a postseason tournament gives some hope to a small school that commanded the spotlight in Los Angeles basketball for the briefest of times.
If one word had to be picked to sum up the 2009-10 season in Pac-10 men's basketball, it might not be a word. It would likely be more of a groan or a sigh. The conference, which has won the championship 15 times (11 of them by UCLA), has not had a year to remember.
