Even though our ThinkBlueLA.com blog site is relatively new, most of our loyal readers and followers know that our TBLA interactive forum has been around for several years. As we go through the anticipated growing pains with our new blog site (which I assume most new blog sites go through), we are well established and quite comfortable over on our forum side of things.

Those of us who frequent the TBLA forum have endured (and survived) a number of Dodger struggles in the past, including lengthy losing streaks (remember that 12-game losing streak in 2008 – uggh!), absolutely horrible free agent signings by Colletti and McCourt (why do visions of Andruw Jones and Jason Schmidt always pop in my mind when I mention this?), the ugly ‘Dodger Divorce’ and, of course, the even uglier bankruptcy trial and related mess. These painful, unpleasant, and in some cases seemingly endless Dodger debacles generated some pretty ugly and negative posts and replies on our normally warm and friendly TBLA forum.

Just a small patch of ice in the road... I hope

Over the past week (beginning on May 30th to be exact – when Matt Kemp re-injured his left hamstring and returned to the DL after having played only 10 innings since returning from same), the Dodgers have hit a patch of ice in the road by losing 6 of their last 7 games and falling to within 3 games of the Hated Ones. And while such patches of ice are to be expected during every MLB season for every MLB team (heck, even the 1927 Yankees had a 4-game losing streak during their historic season), the current Dodgers spin-out has the entire world wide web in a frenzy.

Like most Dodger fans, I have my daily ritual of surfing the various Dodger blog sites and forums, and almost without exception, every one of them has had an element of panic or negativity to them over the past few days. Granted, this is to be expected because, after all, it is the Dodgers… OUR Dodgers that we’re talking about here, but it always seems that tough times such as these tend to bring out the worst in us… all of us, including those of us who author blog articles and/or forum posts or replies. Go ahead, pick your favorite cliché – It’s the nature of the beast; It comes with the territory; It is what it is; yada yada yada. I’m no exception, this ice patch has me in a cranky negative mood, too. It even got to the point where one of our most loyal forum followers and I got into a little spitting contest (or something like that) over semantics. It happens; it’s human nature when things aren’t going well or like we want them to.

The bottom line is that there is very little that we as fans can do about these things. Sure, we try posting things that we pretend are going to be read by Don Mattingly, Ned Colletti, Magic Johnson or Stan Kasten, but of course they never will be, and even if they were, would they really do any good? Would spreading our negativity or our ‘doom and gloom’ really help matters any? Of course not. But what we can do… what we must do (as difficult as it can be) is stand behind our beloved Dodgers and support them through this patch of ice… just as we did when the road was ice-free.