It's About Time: Dodgers Hire Jon Weisman

There are hires that make sense, and then hires that totally make sense. The Los Angeles Dodgers have finally hired Jon Weisman in a key role as director of digital and print content. The move means Jon is putting his long-running blog Dodger Thoughts back into hibernation, but as he shares on his site, it's for a pretty good reason:

I will be writing plenty over there, as part of an overall series of duties that involves managing and producing content for the Dodgers’ publications and website.

As you can imagine, it’s an opportunity that was too intriguing and exciting for me to pass up, which is why I’m willing to give up the longest job I’ve ever held, a position at Variety that has brought me more great memories than I can begin to mention and placed me among a group of colleagues that have been such a pleasure to be with.



It’s also why I’m willing to put Dodger Thoughts in storage – though again, this isn’t exactly as newsworthy as it might have been, before I essentially took a vacation during the 2012-13 offseason, to focus on an extremely busy awards season for Variety. I did find a rebirth on Dodger Thoughts during the 2013 baseball season, but it was always in competition with the other directions I’ve been pulled in.

So while it would be premature to get into specifics about my new duties with the Dodgers, I can say that one of the greatest appeals for me is that for the first time, writing about the Dodgers will move from avocation to vocation, from hobby to primary activity.

I’ll feel safe using Vin Scully (my new colleague!) as my role model. I’ll consider it my job, as an employee of the Dodgers, to inform and to entertain, in service of the organization. You can be sure I’ll be taking that responsibility very seriously. But don’t worry – we’ll have plenty of fun along the way. There’ll be no shortage of insights or stories, great and small.

Congrats to Jon! I know Variety's going to miss him and all the hard work he's done over there through the years. But I'm truly excited for him.

Farewell (for now) to Dodger Thoughts

Is blogging still relevant in 2012? Is it really worth putting much energy into a site when important life and job matters keep you from doing the kind of blog you really want to do? It's questions I often ask myself as I barely keep Franklin Avenue going -- I used to pride myself on posting at least three times a day; now it's one, if I'm lucky.

But because Franklin Avenue is a small site to begin with, I can keep this place quietly chugging. My friend Jon Weisman had to make a really tough decision recently with his famed site Dodger Thoughts, long one of the premiere blogs for all things Dodgers -- and at one time, housed at the L.A. Times and ESPN. With kids getting older and a more taxing schedule at Variety (include a time-intensive awards blog), and having gone back to his independent blog roots, Jon recently decided to put Dodger Thoughts on hiatus:

Anyone reading this site knows how hard it has been for me to maintain a pretense that the site is still useful in 2012. There have been some decent moments, but mostly, it’s been painful. And it’s not getting any easier. My family and my day job demand bigger and bigger shares of my energy and my sanity. So let’s cut to the chase: I’m designating myself for assignment.

That doesn’t mean I’m never going to post here again – in fact, I can almost promise that I will at some point – but it does mean I’m releasing myself from the daily task of writing about the Dodgers, as well as creating chat threads for every game. Dodger Thoughts has become a burden – the opposite of what it was intended to be – and there are too many other sites that now do what I set out to do more productively. The fact that I’m cutting and running with only two weeks left in the regular season (and a Dodger playoff appearance still very much a possibility) indicates just how much of a burden it has been. For all their problems, I believe in the Dodgers much more right now than I believe in my capacity to write about them. That about says it all.

Go check out Variety's The Vote blog, where Jon is now blogging up a storm.

Remembering the Dodgers' Glory Years

Franklin Avenue reader Paul Haddad tips us off to a new book about the Dodgers that he has just written and released through Santa Monica Press. "High Fives, Pennant Drives, and Fernandomania: A Fan's History of the Los Angeles Dodgers' Glory Years, 1977-1981" is a look back at the team's late 70s heyday.

"It's an ode to the Dodgers of our youth, and Vin Scully," Paul tells us in his note. "Much of my narrative includes transcripts from Vinny, taken from my childhood collection of recordings, that really take the reader back. You can hear a lot of these old radio calls on my website for the book: DodgerGlory.com.

Our pal Jon Weisman wrote the Foreword. Read more about it in a recent Los Feliz Ledger here. Haddad will be on Larry Mantle's Airtalk on KPCC 89.3 FM *today* from 11:40 am to noon.

Moving Day for Dodger Thoughts

Our pal Jon Weisman is moving his popular Dodger Thoughts blog off of ESPN LA's platform, where he's been based for the past 2 years, and back to indie status. Jon talks about the move in his first post at his reclaimed www.dodgerthoughts.com address (and how his move to the L.A. Times website cost him some commenters in 2009):

By the time I moved two years ago to ESPN Los Angeles, I was left to focus on doing the best work I could, hoping to at least retain readers if not commenters. As far as my professional life, I dreamed big again.

Well, now I’m back on my own. For now, anyway. The reasons, I think I can say without being indecorous, relate to shifting priorities over there in the big city. So what are you gonna do?

Start over. Reboot. So here we are. I could be here for 10 days or 10,000. Still figuring that out. Still figuring a lot of things out. There’s still so much I dream of accomplishing, but my path is still around a bend or two. I’m eager to see what happens.

So, if you’ve made it this far, here to home No. 6 (four more to catch Tommy Davis), thanks for stopping by. I’ll do my best to provide informative, meaningful and fun posts as much as or more than ever before. Hope you hang out a while.

Good luck, Jon! Having sat next to him at Variety for years, I know Jon is normally sporting his pre-opening day Dodgers Beard right about now.

Dodger Thoughts on the McCourt Sale: 'Deliverance'

Tuesday night's big Dodgers news -- that villain Frank McCourt has agreed to sell the team -- quickly set L.A. abuzz, and over at my pal Jon Weisman's Dodger Thoughts, he summed the news up quite nicely:

We have worried, we have raged, we have sulked, we have sworn, we have screamed, we have sighed, we have yearned, we have cried. Outside we have tried to fight, and inside, more than a little, we have died.

But now, deliverance. Deliverance to what, we don't know. But deliverance nonetheless.

[snip]

My friends, it's time to have some fun.

Jon notes that the folks behind Save the Dodgers will hold a celebratory rally tomorrow at 6 p.m. at Dodger Stadium.

Dodger Thoughts On the 'McCourt Mall of Horrors'

Whenever there's big news on the Dodgers front, I immediately click over to Dodger Thoughts -- where I know Franklin Avenue pal Jon Weisman will have a thoughtful, eloquent take on whatever's going on. And in the case of Wednesday's bombshell announcement -- Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig's decision to take control of the Dodgers operation -- Jon indeed had a lot to say.

An excerpt:

As I walked through all the different stories about today's news, as if I were a shopper in a McCourt Mall of Horrors, I found myself thinking about the person whose name has been in the news, top of mind, every day this month until today: Bryan Stow.

The Giants fan whose horrifying beating in the gloaming of Opening Day in the Dodger Stadium parking lot March 31 will not be found on any McCourt spreadsheet. The severity of the event, sadly enough, wasn't even unprecedented in Dodger Stadium history.

But in the days after it occurred, as you felt the groundswell of horror and shame sweep through the world of the Dodgers - an emotional wave that only gained momentum with McCourt's initial public declaration that nothing could have been done to prevent it - I began to feel that Stow's beating, more than any rising parking fees, inconsistent spending on players or appalling revelations of greed in court documents related to McCourt's divorce from wife Jamie, was the baseball world's "Network" moment.

It was just too ugly, and people weren't going to take it anymore.

Read the whole thing here.

A Century Well-Lived

My colleague Jon Weisman has a great post over at Dodger Thoughts, commemorating his grandmother's 100th birthday.

Yep -- you read that right. 100. Imagine the advances she saw in her lifetime. The TV networks didn't even begin regular programming until 1948, when she was 38 -- 38! (Yes, everything relates back to TV for me. Sorry.) And yet she's still here to witness the birth of modern items like the iPad.

Jon writes about her colorful life:

My favorite story about her is from her New York/Lower East Side childhood, when in between ice skating and baseball and football with her friends of both genders, this little Jewish girl was dressed as if she were being driven to church, all so that he could be a decoy for liquor to be smuggled undetected during Prohibition. Married and moving to Chicago at age 20, her next decade brought her a husband, Aaron, who found work during the Depression working as an accountant for Ralph Capone, Al's brother – years living in terror underscored by Aaron's uncle Sol being "taken for a ride" and never returning.

Plenty more about his Grandma Sue over at Dodger Thoughts.