OC Register: Alexander: The power of positive thinking – OK, among other things – has Dodgers rolling

[AngelsWin.com]

LOS ANGELES — This seems to be the 21st century model of The Dodger Way To Play Baseball: No matter how dire things may seem, no matter how many of the faithful are breaking ankles jumping off the bandwagon early in a season, things will get better.

Just be positive.

Yeah, we know, the Dodgers were positively ugly in the first month and a half of the season, losing series to the game’s bottom feeders and creating panic throughout their fan base while dipping 10 games under the break-even point.

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Now they’re positively gorgeous. A 5-3 victory over the Angels on Sunday gave them two of three this weekend and a split of this year’s six-game Freeway Series. And, at 53-43, the Dodgers are back in first place, by a half-game over Arizona, heading into the All-Star break.

We may have panicked. They didn’t.

“Every team is different to some extent, but I think at the same time there is a calm because we’ve done it before around here,” Clayton Kershaw said Sunday afternoon. “We didn’t panic. Everybody uses that word, but we kind of knew that we were just playing bad, and it wasn’t an indicator of how good our team can be.”

History is a guide. The 2017 Dodgers kicked it into gear in June, going 56-11 in the heat of the summer. The 2016 Dodgers were 21-23 on May 21, 71-55 on August 24. The 2014 team was 32-31 on June 7 and 82-62 on Sept. 8, and in 2013 they were 30-42 on June 21 and 83-55 on Sept. 3.

This past May 16 they were 16-26 after losing the first two games against the tanking Miami Marlins. It was at that point that Manager Dave Roberts threw a little Winston Churchill at them, repeating the Churchillian quote: “When you’re going through hell, keep going.”

The next day, before the final game of the series, he had a team meeting that was a little more extensive, with a simple message: “Expect good things to happen.”

Positive thinking works! They won the final game of that series and are 38-17 since that point.

“I think that when you’re mired in things not going well you start to expect and see bad things happen,” Roberts explained. “So I always start thinking positively and seeing good things happen, and I think conversely good things happen.”

It’s what Roberts preached to Kenley Jansen early in the season when the big reliever was struggling.

“You gotta shut out the noise and visualize,” Jansen said. “That’s why he talked to me a lot when I was going through that rough April and you know I was worried about mechanics and this and that. Doc was like, ‘You know, the one thing that I don’t see you do is visualize. Visualize you’re getting out of the inning.’

“Once you just visualize, put positive thoughts in your mind, the next thing you know things are going to go your way and you know you don’t even think about mechanics and all that stuff. You’re throwing the ball where you want to.”

Jansen gave up home runs in three of his first seven outings and had an 8.10 ERA on April 17 when he blew a save against the Padres in San Diego. Since then he has an 0.73 ERA, notched his 27th save with a perfect inning Sunday, and is headed for the All-Star Game.

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“It’s a long season,” Jansen said. “You’re gonna run through struggles, and I learned from that. And I feel like it (positivity) makes you successful because once you keep failing it keeps motivating you to get better and better and better to be who you are.”

And it is easier to be positive when you’ve been through this before and come out of it successfully.

Of course, it’s also easier to be positive when Matt Kemp is having an All-Star season, when your team leads the National League in home runs, slugging percentage, team ERA, saves and strikeouts, when you’re getting stellar performances from unexpected sources, and when your ace continues his forward momentum, as Kershaw did Sunday in a 6-2/3 inning, 108-pitch stint in his fifth start since coming off the disabled list.

But stability at the helm helps.

“Doc is a calming presence throughout the season, and super-positive obviously,” Kershaw said. “We look athim and he’s not worried, and that kind of calms everybody else down.

“Now we’re playing like we should be.”

How to follow that act in the season’s final 66 games after the break?

“Just to continue to do we’ve done in the last couple months,” Roberts said. “Obviously you can’t control health, but with the depth that we do have, just continue to win baseball games … (If) we play the right way with the group that we have, we’ll be at the top of the division, as we’ve talked about from spring training. And from then you know we’ll deal with whatever happens.”

Of that, he’s positive.

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