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Column:  Finally, Dodgers telecasts for all of L.A. — but what about next year?

Time Warner Cable will allow KDOC to televise the Dodgers' final six game of the season.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
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I’m nothing if not an optimist. If there were a Pollyanna Hall of Fame, I’d be a first-ballot inductee. In my induction speech, I’d thank all gods (actual and imagined), my parents and Miss America.

It was a Miss America contestant who once warbled, “Your attitude determines your altitude,” or some such nonsense, but I fully bought into it, and now I have all this success to show for it. I own my own watch, not to mention an aging German sedan that starts almost every time. The bill collectors call only every other day now. Taken as a whole, I am living the new American dream.

I was thinking of my vast good fortune the other day when Time Warner Cable announced that it is televising the last six or so Dodgers games to the entire Los Angeles market. Executives there dubbed it a “goodwill gesture,” which is exactly what it is. Many scoffed at that description, but not me.

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Say, for example, you lost your power for a week, then the power company sent out a crew to restore it. Wouldn’t that be a “goodwill gesture”? Of course it would. That same principle is at work here on the Dodgers TV standoff.

Goodwill apparently has run amok here in Los Angeles; the other day someone actually held a door for me. I will admit that the bar for goodwill may have drooped slightly in the summer heat. As someone noted, nice manners are so rare these days that they are often misconstrued as flirting.

Look, this isn’t the kind of town where you can sit back and wait for things to happen; you need to be the aggressor. That’s why I’ve been on the trail of these Dodgers for months and months, hoping that one day they might appear back on television.

Rallies, T-shirts, telethons — nothing worked. All year, I turn on the TV, no Dodgers. Now, as it turns out, they’re showing up for the last games of the season. I think that’s a sign that unbridled optimism eventually pays off.

Unfortunately, not everyone is so upbeat. “Disgust” is the word I hear most from fans when they talk about the corporate standoff. For a while, I was furious too. I fired Dodgers President Stan Kasten three or four times already, but like that crazy dude in “Office Space,” he keeps showing up for work.

Wouldn’t you?

The turnstiles spin like wind turbines, attendance up over last year. And, presumably, TWC keeps writing checks, per the $8-billion deal. Kasten’s Krazy Kids appear headed to the playoffs, featuring a roster full of goofs and greats capable of humiliating whoever the opposition might be.

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Like Kasten, I see nothing but good times ahead.

Just in case, I’m preparing a class-action suit on behalf of Dodgers fans. Should this standoff continue into next season, we’ll pull the trigger on a breathtaking piece of legal literature, assembled by me and some other misfit friends.

“Let’s be proactive,” I tell them. “Your attitude can determine your altitude!”

Here’s the gist of our class-action suit: “Deprivation of services and mental anguish for Dodgers fans deprived of a civic institution, namely Dodgers baseball over the course of the 2014 season. As a publicly supported business that relies on the largesse of the city of Los Angeles, including emergency services and police, Guggenheim has violated a civic obligation that dates to the team’s relocation here in 1958. As such, Guggenheim and Time Warner Cable are the responsible parties for this deprivation and mental anguish. We seek $1 billion, reinstatement of televised games, and free Dodger Dogs for the first week of next season.”

We’ll also cite California Business and Professions code 17200, which essentially prohibits any unlawful, unfair or fraudulent business act or practice.

As one lawyer friend noted, the way this pans out is everyone gets a coupon for a discount on team merchandise, 20% off if they switch to TWC, “and all the lawyers will walk away with $10 million.”

In that sense, consider the whole class-action thing a goodwill gesture of our own.

Meanwhile, reader Tim Crescenti reports that while he was in South Korea recently, he found the place saturated with Dodgers telecasts, all the way to a convenience store on the remote island of Deokjeokdo.

“Way to go, Time Warner Cable!” Crescenti says. “You have found your audience.”

Try to be more respectful, Tim. Ridicule never solved anything.

chris.erskine@latimes.com

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Twitter: @erskinetimes

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