Weekend in Review: Rivals' name least of Dodgers' woes

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- You have your Mets-Yankees and you have your White Sox-Cubs. But only the Angels-Dodgers rivalry comes with more delicious catfights than you'd see during an entire week with Paris Hilton and geography lessons.

The Dodgers' backs are up against the wall in the city rivalry. (Getty Images)

Rrrrrow!

One team remains the proud, historic, timeless Los Angeles Dodgers. The other now is officially the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.

Or, as the Dodgers like to call them, the Angels of Anaheim (Who Are So Far Away from L.A. That They're In, Like, Mexico Or Something).

Yes, that's right, the Dodgers refuse to acknowledge that the giant thing in the middle of the living room is not an elephant, but the Rally Monkey.

Draft day, three weeks ago. All 30 clubs are on the conference call. One by one, scouting directors come onto the line to announce their club's pick. Except the Dodgers, where mascot Tommy Lasorda gets the honors.

Come the Dodgers' turn to pick, Tommy booms over Ma Bell's lines and 30 speakerphones, "On behalf of the LOS ANGELES DODGERS, the ONLY major-league team in LOS ANGELES ..."

"I don't know why they're so worried about what we think," Angels scouting director Eddie Bane says. "Everybody makes their picks, but we don't need team fight songs."

Shortly after the draft concluded, Bane confirmed that he received a call from a general manager of another major-league team -- he won't say who -- who told him, "You guys should have introduced yourselves as the only major-league team in Los Angeles in first place."

Touche.

After the Angels waxed the Dodgers in three games this weekend, the Angels are running away with the AL West, leading Texas by a cushy 6½ games. The Dodgers, meanwhile, are running third in the NL West, 6½ games behind San Diego.

At 35-40, Los Angeles (the Dodgers, that is) is five games under .500 -- most since the club finished the 1999 season eight under. The Dodgers are offensively challenged, physically beat up ... and dying to somehow get the best of the Angels, whose last World Series victory (2002) was far more recent than that of the Dodgers (1988).

Here in the land of casting calls, Michael Jackson and Botox, it was relatively smooth sailing between the two until Angels owner Arte Moreno decided to change the club name to the snappy Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim of Southern California of North America of the Western Hemisphere.