LOS ANGELES – Bad baseball, bad management and bad luck, maladies that can sneak up and stick to an organization over a couple decades, maybe – just maybe – have been chased from Dodger Stadium.

Admittedly, there lies a risky (and so entirely couched) premise.

These are still the Dodgers, a once august and now wonderfully mercurial franchise that started taking on water a generation ago and hasn’t stopped bailing since.

It still has a front office that continuously treadmills from the mistakes – real and perceived – of whatever regime preceded it, and so they're patching and not creating, sighing and not singing.

But, hey, the air over Chavez Ravine is clearing. You know, figuratively speaking. There’s life here.

How else to explain the slightly puffy man who showed up Tuesday night, wearing No. 36, carrying 353 wins, scheduled to pitch Friday, having arrived earlier in the day from the division rival down south?

How else to describe the bearded man at third base, playing a thoroughly

LOS ANGELES – Still maneuvering nearly three weeks after the trading deadline, the Los Angeles Dodgers, who’d acquired Manny Ramirez and Casey Blake to lend heft to a thin batting order, acquired Greg Maddux from the San Diego Padres on Monday night for a player or two to be named, according to two baseball sources.

A San Diego Padres official said he expected the trade to be announced Tuesday.

If the Dodgers maintain a starting rotation that this week lost Brad Penny again to a sore shoulder, Maddux would pitch Saturday in Philadelphia.

According to a source familiar with the trade, the Dodgers will pay “a small portion” of the approximately $2.25 million owed Maddux over the season’s final month-and-a-half. In return, the Padres will choose at least one player from a list of five or six, none on the Dodgers’ major-league roster.

Maddux, who has 353 career wins, six for the Dodgers after the 2006 trading deadline, waived his no-trade clause to return to Los Angeles. In fact, the

So Manny Ramirez is out in L.A., raking, making something of the Los Angeles Dodgers' offense, altering team grooming policies, honeymooning an entirely different nation, and someone doesn't like it.

I certainly hope it's not anyone with the Boston Red Sox, for it was the Red Sox who raised Manny to be what he is: self-entitled, self-centered, and prone to random idiocy, bullying and unenthusiastic strolls to first base.

The cost was incidental when the Red Sox won a couple World Series. Because Manny hit. And he helped the rest of the lineup hit. And long before he was a distraction, he was "colorful." It sounded so much better that way, which is just the way they sold him.

They were OK with him being Manny as long as he was their Manny.

Now he's not. And a little more than a week later, Manny has 13 hits in 23 at-bats. He looks happy. He runs hard some of the time, and not just when he smells a hit. Weird, I know.

Not only that, but Andruw Jones is smiling again and – who knows –

Fifteen years ago, when he was barely 17, Vladimir Guerrero left the family farm in Bani, Dominican Republic, for the long road to the major leagues.

His decision, of course, was simple.

The Montreal Expos would pay him $201,000, he said, to sign with them. And Guerrero would leave behind the steer and the chores and the poverty.

The Expos paid him by check and made him rich, certainly by Bani standards. Only he didn't have a bank account and neither did his parents.

In fact, he laughed at the very idea of it. Bank accounts, after all, were for people with money.

So, assuming he didn't walk into a bank and walk out with a couple hundred thousand dollars cash, he was asked, who received and banked that check?

"Buscone," he said, referring to the man who trained him as a youngster and presented him to major league scouts for evaluation.

The system is undergoing change because of the recent bonus-skimming scandal in the Dominican. Six weeks ago, Major League Baseball established a working

ANAHEIM, Calif. – It all has come fast in Joe Saunders' 28th summer, the baby girl and the Yankee Stadium All-Star game separated by just a few days, the rest spread over most of a season now.

He had pitched six innings and allowed a run to the Baltimore Orioles the night before, the bullpen pitching him out of the win, which would have been his 15th in 20 decisions. But, hey, Joe Saunders had stood and offered his hand to the men who had tried, his Angels had won anyway, and for the 70th time already.

He has ridden those muffled changeups and darting fastballs, lived on that persuasive arm speed and every once in a while something in the vicinity of 94 mph, and then what one big-league scout called "thinkability," which is how Saunders knows when to throw what. And where to throw it.

Maybe you haven't heard much about Joe Saunders, this left-hander who 4½ months ago was auditioning for the last job in the Angels' starting rotation, who heading into mid-August stands in the company of

Sitting on a dugout bench in mid-July, Clint Hurdle was talking about hope.

When it was suggested to him there might be two kinds of hope – legitimate and unfounded – the manager who 10 months before led the Colorado Rockies from a seven-game division deficit to the World Series shook his head.

"Isn't hope hope?" he asked.

And then the Rockies lost again.

But that really wasn't the point.

July is gone, and hope thins in places, thickens in others, but survives almost everywhere. Almost.

To that, we bid farewell to ballclubs from Washington to Seattle, from San Diego to Baltimore. That still leaves a lot of teams, including in Hurdle's NL West, where hope never dies.

Almost.

Teams of July

Los Angeles Angels (19-6): The Angels had their biggest offensive month, production coming from Howie Kendrick, Garret Anderson and Torii Hunter. Their starting pitching wasn't as strong as it had been, but the bullpen became consistent again, and now they've all but buried the rest of the AL West.

So Manny goes to Hollywood and the Boston Red Sox get themselves a new left fielder, Jason Bay, who doesn't hit quite like Manny Ramirez but doesn't make a big spectacle of himself, either.

Ramirez is the middle-of-the-order hitter the Dodgers have needed since, oh, the Mike Piazza trade.

And Bay's numbers, at the moment, are similar enough to Ramirez's to satisfy the Red Sox.

And the Pittsburgh Pirates continued along the theme of their summer, meaning they dumped more salary and took on a few more young guys, on this occasion Adam LaRoche's brother Andy along with Bryan Morris from the Dodgers and Brandon Moss and Craig Hansen from the Red Sox.

As we set off on the final two months of the regular season, the Dodgers became much better offensively, assuming they'll essentially bench Andruw Jones, a .167 hitting strikeout machine, for the still-productive Ramirez. And they'll be much worse defensively, for the same reason. The reason they've hung around the .500 mark – and therefore

At about the same time a Boston Red Sox official described a proposed three-way trade that would send Manny Ramirez to the Florida Marlins and also involve the Pittsburgh Pirates as "50-50 at this point," Ken Griffey Jr. agreed to waive his no-trade rights and will leave the Cincinnati Reds for the Chicago White Sox, a source said Thursday.

The Reds, who also are taking calls on left fielder Adam Dunn, are expected to receive right-hander Nick Masset and second baseman Danny Richar in the trade. It is unclear how the White Sox will use Griffey, who hasn't played center field in two years and hardly hits left-handers anymore. They are set at the corner outfield spots with Carlos Quentin and Jermaine Dye.

But he's had a decent July, batting .271 with five home runs and 17 RBI, his best month of the season. He ranks sixth on the all-time run list with 608.

Griffey, 38, is in the final guaranteed year of a nine-year, $116.5-million contract. The club holds an option for next season for