In case you missed it because I did too: the Disney Anaheim Angels of Southern Orange County Los Angeles sweep the Los Angeles Dodgers over the weekend
Unsurprising, this is what happens when a team gets good, succeeds, spends boatloads of money, signs all the notable free agents and becomes the internal darlings of the league they’re in – they mostly become reviled by fanbases that are not supporters of them in the first place.
I mean, I wasn’t really ever a Dodgers fan at any point of my life with the closest thing to support being when Chan Ho Park was there, but for the most part, I just never really cared about them. They were a fringe team that played in a weak division and never seemed like they were any threat to actually succeed, especially when the Phillies bounced them every time they ran into each other in the playoffs.
But then they eventually got their shit together, started making the playoffs every single year, basically bounced the Braves from them every time they encountered each other except for 2021, and had been enjoying a renaissance of sorts. I started to dislike them.
Then, they poached Freddie Freeman from the Braves, which wasn’t entirely their fault as much as the Braves being the Braves, meaning the cheapskate fucks that absolutely will not spend money on a free agent that isn’t at their peak, but for all intents and purposes, the Dodgers took the heart out of Atlanta, and I really disliked them.
And then their organization deployed a pelican strike on the league by exploiting deferred money deals to avoid luxury tax penalties while at the same time securing massive money deals on just about every notable free agent on the market, most notably getting Shohei Ohtani for $700 million dollars, en route to committing over a billion dollars on free agents.
By this point, if baseball fans that weren’t Dodger fans already didn’t dislike the Dodgers, this is where they really began to.
It’s not that they’re cheating or doing anything at all that’s not legal, it’s just that they’re really driving home the reality of the importance of spending money, and there’s a lot of misguided frustration and hatred for their own teams, being directed at the Dodgers, but the bottom line is that the Dodgers have basically become the most hated team in the league, even more than the Yankees depending on whom you ask.
So that’s why it’s so satisfying to see when the Dodgers perform like anything other than the team that outspent the rest of the league to construct an uber-roster, and not just get swept at home, but get swept at home to their in-city archnemeses, in the Angels. And not just the Angels, but the lowly Angels who have 2/3 the payroll of the Dodgers, as well as have a living leech on the squad in Anthony Rendon who is getting paid $38M to not play at all.
And to top it off, the Angels were without superstar Mike Trout, who is also on the disabled list, and they still took the Dodgers behind the toolshed to shellack them, in their own house no less.
I didn’t catch a single game, much less even know about it after the fact, but I just fucking love it all the same, and it does bring me great joy to see the Dodgers fuck up in such a monumental manner. It’s just so hilarious because the TL;DR of the whole thing is that the Angels suck and the Dodgers don’t, but the Angels still swept them.
It’s as big of an upset as the Pistons beating the Lakers in 2003, whenever Tom Brady had a brainfart and lost to the Dolphins, or when the Honda Civic beat the Ferrari in a drag race in that one video clip that was ever only available on fucking RealPlayer.
When the season is over, the Dodgers will still most likely be in World Series contention, while the Angels probably won’t even be close to even the play-in series, but for one weekend in May, the Dodger-hating contingent of baseball fans can all collectively point and laugh at the Dodgers and all their shitty soft-ass fairweather fans.
Nobody feels bad for the Dodgers when they don’t succeed, and it is always joyous to see them lose, but getting swept at home by the rival Angels, is probably going to be the lowest point for the squad this season. And I love to see it.