THE FRONT ROW WITH MARK NELKE: Sunday, June 26, 2016
Good for Domantas Sabonis to wind up on a good team in Oklahoma City. In Orlando, the options were a) put up good numbers on a bad team; or b) rot on the bench for a bad team that doesn’t know how to use you.
At OKC, his minutes will be on a team that matters ... as long as the Thunder, too, figures out how to use him.
As for his sidekick at Gonzaga, Kyle Wiltjer, sometimes it’s better to go undrafted — you might have your choice of teams, rather than be saddled on a bad one.
• Maybe I root for the Dodgers because they’re a west coast team.
Maybe it’s because of Vin Scully ... Don Drysdale ... Sandy Koufax ... the Garvey-Lopes-Russell-Cey Dodgers of the 1970s, many of whom played for the Spokane Indians before moving up to the bigs.
Maybe because I went to a Salem Dodgers minor league game in the 1960s at Waters Field, which has since burned down.
So it bums me a bit to see someone other than them win the World Series for the last nearly three decades.
Is it fair to ask: Are the Dodgers going to continue to waste season after season with Clayton Kershaw as their ace?
Now, “waste” is a relative term. The sad-sack Mariners would be thrilled to have made the playoffs five times in the last eight years.
But for the Dodgers, who have won six World Series, the bar is a wee bit higher. Since its last World Series title in 1988, L.A. has won just three playoff series. Now, all have come since Kershaw joined the club in 2008, but the Dodgers went on to lose in the NLCS each time. The last two seasons, L.A. was bounced in the division series.
Kershaw, in his ninth season with L.A., is 125-57, with three Cy Young Awards and a league MVP. This year, he’s 11-1 with a 1.57 ERA, with a strikeout-to-walk ratio of 20.14/1. His ERA has been below 3 every season since his rookie year, and this is the third year it has been below 2.
He’s had a certain amount of help in the pitching rotation (Zack Greinke, in particular), but never enough when it matters — in the playoffs, when Kershaw has to come back on short rest. And the Dodgers have not exactly been known for their clutch hitting.
It appears L.A. has gotten away from renting veterans who are aging, injured or just don’t want to be there, and is trying to rely more on developing its own players.
Kinda like how the Giants do it. Seems to have worked out well for them this decade.
• As for the aforementioned sad-sack Mariners, is it really a surprise that they have gone into such a free-fall this month ...
Other than their “stars” — Cano, Cruz, Seager — the rest of the roster is mostly a bunch of spare parts acquired from other teams. There’s a reason their old teams were willing to let them go.
Dae-Ho Lee, one of the newbies, has been a pleasant surprise when they’ve bothered to put him in the lineup, and Leonys Martin has been somewhat useful. But most of the others are so unproductive that when they actually do get a hit, M’s announcers go crazy to the point where it appears those players are more productive than they actually are.
Sure, it hurts not having Felix of late, but the M’s have shown they can still find ways to lose — no matter how well he pitches.
Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.