Fans’ Expectations Not So Great

Jason Reid incessantly writes of teams and players failing to meet expectations. “The Dodgers hope to perform better in the second half . . . after failing to meet expectations in their first 81 games.” [July 6] He never refers to whose expectations.

Any knowledgeable baseball fan understands the futility of going to battle with a starting rotation composed of one star (Brown), one inconsistent (Park), one enigmatic (Dreifort), one unproven (Gagne), one known stiff (Perez) and one over-the-hill pitcher (Hershiser).

I, for one, expected the Dodgers to be a .500 team this season. Thank goodness the first half ends in an odd number of games or the Dodgers wouldn’t have exceeded my expectations with a 41-40 record.

ALAN AMITIN

Montrose

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Mr. Malone? Mr. Johnson? Can you hear that sucking sound? Stop trying to sell us on a team that is going down the drain for another year.

BOBBY HERBECK

Long Beach

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Darren Dreifort’s relationship with the Dodgers cracks me up. He had been a reliever but vehemently said that he wanted to be a starter, and the Dodgers capitulated. Fine, but saying you are a starting pitcher and actually performing like one are two different things.

What had Dreifort done to prove he is a starter? In more than five years on the major league staff, with more than 60 starts, he has three complete games. Three. He has great stuff, yet he can’t make it past the sixth inning. Darren Dreifort is a closer, not a starter.

MIKE MacDONALD

North Hills

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I stumbled across this discussion critiquing the Montreal Expos’ trade of ace closer John Wetteland to the Yankees for Fernando Seguignol while thumbing through the 1997 Scouting Report, a respected baseball publication:

“If you have a top-flight closer, you have to get more than this. . . . So far, thanks to former GM Kevin Malone, they have Seguignol, the 31-year-old Esteban Yan, Sherman Obando, Henry Rodriguez, Kirk Bullinger (Jim’s brother, only with less potential) and Darond Stovall (deep on the outfield depth chart) to show for Wetteland, Marquis Grissom, Ken Hill and Larry Walker.”

Looks like the “sports geniuses” at Fox researched their hiring of Malone in 1998 about as well as they researched the trade of Mike Piazza.

ROBERT ANTONOPLIS

La Canada