[Los Angeles]

MLB Vintage World Series Films - Los Angeles Dodgers 1959, 1963, 1965, 1981 & 1988
$24.95
This video contains all the World Series that the Dodgers won since moving to Los Angeles. This is great for Dodger fans. As a Yankee fan I was most interested in their two confrontations in 1963 and 1981. Both were very memorable to me. The Yankees also played the Dodgers in the 1977 and 1978 World Series but the Dodgers were on the short end of those series, so they are not included. In 1959 the Dodger won in only their second year in Los Angeles. They beat Al Lopez's White Sox in 6th games. This was the beginning of the Koufax and Drysdale Dodgers but the pitching hero was a reliever named Larry Sherry. Casey Stengel's Yankees only lost the American League pennant twice in the 1950s and both times it was to a team managed by Al Lopez. First the Cleveland Indians with the pitching of Feller, Wynn and Lemon in 1954 and then to the White Sox in 1959. In 1954 the Indians amassed an amazing total of more than 110 wins in a 154 game season and so a Yankee team that won as many games as any in the 1950s lost out. 1959 was the only bad year that the Yankees had under Stengel and they finished a distant third that year.

In 1963 the Yankees still had Mantle and Maris and Skowron, Howard and Berra. They were the defending World Champions but got swept by the Dodgers in the series due to phenomenal pitching. Mantle did hit his 15th World Se3ries home run off Koufax in game 4 to tie a record that Babe Ruth held at the time for most World Series home runs.

Three of the games were pitchers battles with Ford battling Koufax twice and Bouton against Drysdale. But the Dodgers were able to win each game. A young Al Downing picthed the other game.

1981 was another interesting year. It was a strike year with a split season where there was a playoff in each league between the teams that won each half season. I think Cincinnati had a better overall record than any team in the National League but because of the peculiar format they didn't even get into the playoff since their record in each half was not the tops in the league. It was Fernando Valenzuela's rookie season and the popular Mexican was the National League Rookie of the Year and Cy Young award winner. The excitement due in part to the large Mexican-American population in the Los Angeles area led the media to refer to this as Fernando mania. He was able to lead Lasorda's Dodgers to a victory over those Yankees that Tommy's team couldn't achieve in 1977 or 1978.

The 1988 Dodgers were the team led by Orel Hershiser and Kirk Gibson. They beat a strong Oakland As team. Gibson was unable to play in the Series but in the nonth inning of game 1 the Dodgers had the tying run on base with two outs. The As had brought their ace reliever Dennis Eckersley into the game. Lasorda decided to pinch hit with Kirk Gibson. Gibson hobbled up to the plate and if he hit a long "extra base" hit he would be lucky to make it just to first base.

Amazingly, Gibson made contact with a fast ball and somehow got the leverage to hit it into the right field seats at Dodger Stadium.

Jack Buck was calling the game for the national network on radio and was so stunned that he uttered the famous line "I don't believe what I just saw!"

New Era Los Angeles Dodgers Pinch Hitter Wool Replica Adjustable Cap (Royal)
$16.99
Nice hat, which I'll be wearing tonight at the Nats-Brewers game. Thanks for the prompt service.

Los Angeles, Portrait of a City
$70.00
To a life-long New Yorker, Los Angeles is a foreign country, filled with vivid impressions -- warm all the time, unseemly pink and tourqouise neon pillars at the airport, lush vegetation, endless freeways, glittering Disney Center, lovely bungalow neighborhoods, downtown that stretches to Santa Monica, Hollywood emblazoned on the hill, Century City sprouting from somewhere, the Getty Center gleaming from its perch, Wilshire Boulevard marching through time and linking it all together, mammouth city hall, nostalgic Union Station, pinata and flower markets, new rapid transit, cars, cars, cars.... Of course, we all have mental images of the place, products of the media -- cops, movie stars, immigrants, water wars -- that shape a superficial understanding of LA. But in many ways it's a hard-to-navigate place -- I am not talking about the famed transportation routes, but about its culture and history. For the discerning visitor, there are visual hints of the past, wonderful surprises in the canyons and a shadow of a long-gone community here and there, but its full imprint is gone. At least it was gone until Los Angeles, Portrait of a City appeared this fall.

Here, the city unfurls in word (Kevin Starr is simply brilliant) and in image (Jim Heimann's selections, extraordinary). We can see who made the city what it is today. We can sense the hopes, drive and ambition of its inhabitants over time and view its developing and ever-changing landscape. This book is a masterpiece.It makes the city no longer hard-to-navigate, no longer a foreign country but a beloved American icon.

Where The Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968
$64.98
While the 101 tracks and 265 minute run time are both improvements over the SF Nuggets box set Rhino put out a couple of years ago, there is still a 20-40 minutes shortage on run time in my mind. The choice of material was mixed at best. Sonny & Cher and the Monkees included on a "Nuggets" box set? Other choices are wonderful, such as the tracks by The Light and The Bush among others. The book is only 48 pages long leaving very little room for noted garage historian, Alec Palao to share his vast knowledge of pop/psych and other music of the late 1960s. What a shame! I also noticed the tape research on the project had been performed by Bill Inglot who was fired from Rhino more than 2 years ago making me wonder how long this box sat on the shelf. Inglot was reportedly axed for overusage of mono recordings versus stereo. Well, the more things change the more they remain the same. Nealy all of the LA Nuggets box is recorded in stereo. I'm not sure why Rhino has taken such a stance since the comparison of the recently issued Beatles box sets proved that the mono mixes where available were often much more interesting than their stereo counterparts. And its the mono version going for insanely high prices while the stereo box can be obtained rather inexpensively. There are many interesting, obscure songs and even bands to be found on the "Where The Action Is" box, that is not among my complaints. Neither is the wonderful sound quality, albeity often in mono rather than stereo. I have been disappointed by the Nuggets series after the second box covering British psychedelia. The Children of Nuggets was rather well done and actually rather impressiv e. However, the SF box had an extremely short run time, and while it had many wonderful table top sized photographs in the book, there was a shortage of information regarding the artists and their work. The last two Nuggets efforts rate about the same in my mind, 4 stars for having interesting bands and tracks, but lack in run time and the books containing the discs contain considerably less information about the artists, the song selections, and the historical context of the music in those electric days in American history. So, buy the box. Shop around for a deal, then buy it. You'll love the music in general, and Alec Palso does a wonderful job describing the music on the discs despite the sparse room allocated to Palao's prose. There's plenty of good music to be found here to offset the inclusion of such acts as the above mentioned Sonny & Cher and the Monkees. Give the set a good listen, and learn when to use the skip track button your remote control. Thankfully it won't be an issue often.