Remembering Dodger Blues

NOTE FROM MARK TIMMONS: Evan Bladh wrote this several days ago, but asked that I hold it out of respect to Kobe Bryant and his family. Now, life goes on, even though we are all deeply saddened. Maybe LeBron and the Lakers will use his memory to fuel another title run. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Does anyone remember DodgerBlues.com?  It was a website, now defunct, that poked fun at the foibles of our favorite team.  Its logo was a Blue DB with the silhouette of a defensive player misplaying a fly ball as it bounced off his head.  It used to have a clock at the top that showed how much “time since the last meaningful Dodger moment,” which was identified as the ’88 World Series Kirk Gibson home run.

The satire and irreverence at Dodgerblues.com was not for everybody, but it should have been.  If you could laugh at yourself, it was a good place to be.  For some, the site was somewhat therapeutic as a place to vent and rant about the team’s failures.  Some were offended by the profane nature of a number of posts, but the site actually became very popular with some Dodger fans and even players who didn’t take life too seriously.  In 2012, the site owner shut it down and many lost that one place they could go to release their frustrations about Dodger failures through humor.

Let’s face it, it wasn’t like the Dodgers didn’t provide the site owner material.  There was plenty of that.  If you think about it, the site was a natural evolution of events.  The growth of the world wide web, the failures of the Dodgers during a lean period.  The disfunction of the ownership groups after the O’Malley departure.  The creativity of a smart, intellectual and creative fan base pool.  It was a convergence of events that forged the site’s emergence.

Created in the midst of the Fox ownership debacle.  Piazza had just been traded away without the Dodger General Manager’s knowledge by a Yankee fan working for the Fox ownership group, (Chase Carey).  The Dodger organization was falling apart.  Lasorda was a disastrous interim G.M. who didn’t understand the nuances and complexities of contracts.  There was the musical-chair game of managerial changes following a period of stability that saw the organization have two managers over 42 seasons.  The Dodgers were a disorganized rudderless ship and it showed on the field. Dodgerblues.com flourished as a satirical site as we languished as fans through those years.

The message board was the equivalent of “a night at the improv” for Dodger followers.  Fans would post their rants with a level of creativity that outdid most comedians of the day. Periodically a non-Dodger fan would appear and he’d be escorted out.  This was a place for us only.  As Danny Kaye so eloquently put it years before, “They may be bums, but they’re OUR bums!”  Outsiders weren’t invited to poke fun of our guys, only we could do that.

Just to give you a snippet of the typical person that posted on Dodgerblues.com: when it was announced in 2011 that a dodgerblues Twitter account was created, here is some of the responses from readers:

“C’mon man no Twitter!  We’re already pushing it with FB.  Whatever u post on Twitter make sure u copy and paste it on FB,  I’m not bleeping budging!”

“Don’t you have to be under 13 years old or under to get a twitter account?  What’s next, Dodger Blues party at Chuck E Cheese?”

“Hate twitter but now you’re forcing me to go there!!  If the Dodgers do suck this year, at least I know Dodger Blues can put a smile on my face!”

And then it all died.

In 2012, the site creator and operator announced that he was shutting it down.  As unceremoniously as Dodgerblues.com surfaced, it disappeared into the night.  We didn’t even know who had created it.  He was gone.  The site domain remained for about five years and the clock kept ticking away, reminding us how much time had passed since 1988, but there was no more humor.  It was the end of an era.  We had to endure the failures alone and watch San Francisco win two more titles.  Then in 2017, out of the blue, (or should I say Dodger blues?) the Dodgerblues.com creator was identified.

Unknown to many of us, after the 2017 World Series loss, Tom Hoffarth of the L.A.Daily News sought out the site creator.  For the years that the site ran, he had remained anonymous, which probably was a good thing.  MLB had attempted to file suit against him, mainly over copyright infringement complaints.  The creator didn’t shut it down because of those threats, it was just too time-consuming to keep the page up.  He was just a regular guy with a regular job and family.  There was no money in it, just a lot of time, so he closed shop and moved on with life.

Hoffarth identified the creator as Josh Segal, a now 44-year old landscape architect based in the San Fernando Valley.  He wasn’t a stand-up comedian, he wasn’t a writer of sitcoms in Hollywood.  No, this guy was a person who one day started the site after spending time ranting on Dodger related sites and figured he had something.  He registered the domain name and started his satirical posts about the team.  He never imagined it would grow in popularity as it did.

 Segal identified himself as a frustrated Dodger fan who had allowed the team to torture him since childhood.  He’s also one of the funniest guys I’ve ever read, and after all these years following the discontinuation of the site, he hasn’t lost his edge. He purposefully had distanced himself from his Dodger fandom, and following the Dodgers 2017 game 7 loss, Hoffarth quoted him saying the following:

“They beckoned me back in and kept saying, ‘Come, come closer…and I knew better, I wasn’t going to do it.  But I was suckered in and, the next thing I knew, they were kicking me in the nuts, slapping me in the face, turning me around and, ‘saying go away, come back next year.’’He continued, ”Despite the skepticism, the team trained me to have, and how I protected myself over the years, going into Game 7, I thought they were going to win…at least for about a minute and a half.”  Which was about the amount of time that Darvish pitched well in the series finale.

In fact, Segal, who still owned the Dodgerblues.com domain, was so convinced that the Dodgers were going to defeat Houston, that had prepared a clock stoppage for the site, with a superimposed “GAME OVER” over the clock count image.  Of course, we know that didn’t happen.  Now the site is completely down.  You can’t visit it, the Gibson clock is gone.

Segal originally registered the domain name in 1999 and by 2002, (according to Google stats), it was the third most popular site visited related to the Dodgers after Dodgers.com and the ESPN site.  This was a time when Bonds was at his steroid peak, Jim Tracy was stumbling over his words and lineups, Kevin Malone had been, uh… Kevin Malone.  There wasn’t a lot of positivity going on.  The Giants were winning the pennant, the D-Backs a World Series and we laid our hopes that unhappy, wanna be Brave, Brian Jordan. would somehow make us forget about losing Piazza and then Sheffield.  The Dodgers provided Dodgerblues.com with plenty of material and Segal obliged in providing it.

I recall a request made by the site to have readers submit photos of Dodger players that had been taken by fans because he had been threatened with that lawsuit if he used any licensed Dodger photos.  I didn’t have much but had been at a game at San Francisco recently and I had snapped a photo of my son attempting to get a ball signed by the only Dodger that approached the stands, Terry Mulholland.  Yes, that Terry Mulholland.  The guy that sported an ERA of 5.83 and 7.31 in his two seasons with the team. If you think about, Mulholland was a perfect submission for the site.

I sent the picture which had my kid’s head blocking some of the player’s face.  It took about 7 seconds for Segal to respond back to me.  “Thanks…I think, and by the way, if your kid was really trying to get an autograph from Mulholland, you might want to get him into some counseling real soon.”

There still continues to be a periodic contribution from Josh Segal at present on his twitter account under the name @dodgerblues.  He has his streaks of posts, which usually ramp up during the playoffs.  The humor is still cutting edge.

There was a tweet that showed a photo of a car sporting a license plate in a San Francisco frame that read “3WS5YRS.”  Segal’s tweet read: @dodgerblues “Too bad ‘0WS30YRS” exceeds DMV’s character limit.”

Another was a Halloween tweet showing a photo of an unripe pumpkin sporting a Dodger cap:  @dodgerblues “Just like Rich Hill, pulled off the field too early.”

His latest one referencing the Astros cheating scandal shows he hasn’t lost his touch:

@dodgerblues 1/13/20 “I say the Dodgers and Astros re-play the 2017 World Series. Same players, borrowed from other teams or retirement or wherever they happen to be now.  Do it during Spring Training.  And Astros players don’t get to wear cups, cleats or use bats. (censored expletive) Bleepers!”

Same old Dodgerblues.com.  Twenty plus years later, he’s still got it.