LA Times: Contrite Beimel wants to mend shattered hearts

Check out this sad story in the LA Times, courtesy of Bill Plaschke: “Contrite Beimel wants to mend shattered hearts”.

Any day now, the tattoo will be carefully needled into his upper right arm.

Don’t tell Joe Beimel he’s crazy, because he’s not changing his mind. Of all the strange things that have happened to him in the last couple of months, nothing makes more sense.

That tattoo will be there if he’s ever again tempted to use that arm to pick up a glass filled with beer.

The tattoo will be there if he’s ever again tempted to use that arm to open a barroom door at 2 a.m. on the day before a playoff game.

What happened to him in New York in the early morning of Oct. 3, he hopes everyone will eventually forget. But he knows he can never forget.

“It’s a tattoo of a heart,” Beimel said in a recent phone interview. “The heart is broken in two.”

I would tell Joe to have the heart tattooed in Dodger blue. But, as Colletti says later in the story:

“He’s contrite, he’s accepted responsibility, he’s making changes, so what happened with him is not going to change any of our off-season plans,” Colletti said. “The world is full of people getting second chances.”

Speaking of broken hearts, there’s also this TJ Simers story on Ross Porter, former Dodger announcer. Former Dodger fan. “Porter is having his say and making a difference”

The voice remains unmistakable, and even comforting in such a familiar way.

And yet it has been two years since most of us have heard from Ross Porter, 28 years a Dodgers broadcaster, the irrepressible statistician who sometimes sounded as if he were purposely challenging himself by speaking with a mouthful of marbles.

Right now, Porter is flanked by two of his 14 grandchildren, each wearing an Angels cap, and is waiting for friends like Vin Scully, Don Sutton, Rafer Johnson and others to arrive at the Calabasas Country Club for a tournament to raise money for Stillpoint Resources, an organization that helps families of special-need children.

The voice was there to embrace each arriving golfer, as it had been for so many years for anyone who included the Dodgers as a part of their lives. All those wonderful nights, but not once in the last two years, Porter said, has he returned to Dodger Stadium.

And never again, he continued, “as long as the current ownership is in place.”