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I don’t mind Interleague Play. Never have. It hasn’t sullied the sanctity of the World Series, and generally speaking, fans (or at least I) enjoy the opportunity to see players they otherwise wouldn’t.

The system isn’t perfect, complaints about how it creates an unbalanced schedule certainly have some weight, and some of MLB’s “natural rivalries” are anything but. (Unless I missed something, a San Diegan can walk the streets of Seattle without fear of reprisal.) Still, I’ve never been able to work myself into a lather over it. That said, when you get outside of a few true games of interest, I’m thinking Yankees/Mets, White Sox/Cubs, and maybe Giants/A’s, it’s a stretch to call any of the matchups a true rivalry, a grudge match of the kind that fire fans up in ways that lead to fights outside the men’s room. In this, I’m absolutely including the Dodgers against the Angels, who kick off the first three games of their now-annual dust ups tonight at the Big A.

Having been around these games for a while now through my work with the LA Times, I can tell you the players don’t get any more jacked for this game than they would any other, and I don’t get the sense that the fans do, either. Both teams tend to draw well on weekends, and every other day of the week for that matter, so that the Angels will have a packed house tonight, tomorrow, and Sunday doesn’t necessarily mean fans are there because of the Interleague draw, and most will leave their vitriol in the car.

LA and LAAoA may (kind of) share a city, but the relationship is different than other crosstown rivalries. My New Yorker wife grew up in a house full of Mets fans. They hate the Yankees. I have friends from Chicago who grew up torturing themselves on Cubs baseball. They hate the White Sox. Upstate, there are A’s fans who harbor plenty of resentment as they pack their mausoleum of a stadium to watch their perpetually cash strapped team while across the bay the other guys strapped play in a jewel of a facility while those fans check their Blackberrys and eat garlic fries. These are situations in which allegiances are used to help define a person. It means something to choose, or be part of a family where that the decision is already predetermined. In LA, there are no such constructs. Both teams have a history of success. There’s a natural geographical relationship between fans and the team they pull for, a reasonably clear Mason Dixon line of local baseball.

Maybe I’m missing something, but does anyone really hate LA’s “other” team, whatever team that might be? I’ve never had that sense. If anything, the rivalry is off the field, where the media loves to measure one franchise to the other (usually to the benefit of the Angels). The good news is that as local fans we’re treated to six games a season between teams committed to winning, despite various degrees of success. That’s six games a year that should be competitive. That’s more than baseball loyalists in St. Louis can say. They get the Royals.

Brian Kamenetzky hosts the Lakers Blog and Blue Notes: A Dodgers Blog for the LA Times.com. He’s a contributing writer to ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com, and can be heard regularly on the Steve Mason Show, on 710 ESPN radio in LA. Write him at bk@sportshubla.com.

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