Dodgers-Angels: The Run-Up to a Rivalry, 1990 to Now

(Photo by Lisa Blumenfeld/Getty Images)

You can hear it, even from the Bay Area.

You can hear the trash talk, the snide remarks, the fans' shouts of support for their winning team. You can hear the calls of this year being different, this one meaning more than the ones before... and none of it about the Lakers.

The Freeway Series has split SoCal again.

As the Angels and Dodgers prepare for the second half of the yearly Freeway Series, the Dodgers, as usual, seem to be scrambling to find a way to knock off their persistent AL rivals.

Good season or bad, no matter who's pitching, no matter who's injured, suspended, batting third or batting eighth, or even who's managing the Dodgers, the one constant for the last ten years or so is simply that the Angels have had the Dodgers' number.

Oh, one more constant: Angels fans never let Dodger fans forget about the domination—or that their World Series series title was exactly 14 years more recent than the Dodgers' last one.

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It wasn't always this way.

I grew up in SoCal. The Angels and Dodgers? They were family. If you rooted for one, you rooted for the other. They were in different leagues, after all, and it was all SoCal.  They even used to play in the same stadium. We called it Dodger Stadium, they called it Chavez Ravine. No big deal.

The Freeway Series was the annual final set of exhibition games, the last weekend before the season kicked off. It was a time to gather as baseball fans, crack a few jokes, and enjoy the only time our teams would play each other.

Things began to shift a little as the 90s moved on. Bud Selig instituted interleague play, beginning in 1997. The same year, the all-good-feelings name California Angels suddenly changed, to the much more regional Anaheim Angels. Now they weren't the state team--they were Orange County's team.

And suddenly, the games counted.

You could still root for both. You'd pick one over the other when they played, sure, but it never stung all that much. After all, you still got to see both teams play simultaneously! It was only four games a year; might as well enjoy them, right?

This was actually a fruitful period for the Dodgers, as far as winning went. In the first three years of interleague play, the Dodgers were 9-5 against their Orange County Rivals, who opened up by struggling against the senior circuit.

That didn't last long.

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In 1999, the Dodgers had a problem they were most unfamiliar with: They needed a manager. The club had spent 44 years with two managers; now they'd gone through two more in two years. What were they supposed to do?

They went out-of-house, of course. And they got a man with a loose tie to Dodger history: Davey Johnson, who collected the last hit Sandy Koufax ever surrendered during the 1966 World Series.

But in doing so, they snubbed a relatively young manager and former Dodger catcher who was running the show in Triple-A Albuquerque. Groomed by Tommy Lasorda himself, he seemed like the ideal replacement, but the Dodgers wanted a big name, so they went and hired one.

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