Off to a good start with the Dodgers

From Phoenix —  The way the Lakers are playing these days, we might be paying attention to the Dodgers a lot sooner than we normally do.

So I’m here, and when I arrive I notice General Manager Ned Colletti outside trying to get a team official to move cars because his spot has already been taken.

Interestingly enough, he seems relatively confident he’s still employed.

In the future when he acquires players he’ll undoubtedly check to see if they can read as well as throw.

They label each spot here in the Dodgers’ spring training parking lot. Tommy Lasorda’s car was sitting in its assigned place, but from a distance it was obvious the name across the adjacent spot had been covered in black paint.

My heart skipped a beat. I had to hand it to the Parking Lot Attendant, what a way to go — just blotting out his own name where he was probably known best during his time here. A poetic farewell.

Unfortunately, upon closer examination it was not his name, or that of Jamie McCourt. I wasn’t surprised by that. If she were being eliminated, the name would have been sandblasted off the asphalt rather than just painted over.

It’s the Dodgers’ former “President” who no longer has a parking spot, the team going to great lengths to make sure Dennis Mannion doesn’t reappear. When you get the boot here, you really get it.

Inside the Dodgers’ clubhouse, I asked Rafael Furcal about the locker next to his own. “No Manny … “ I said.

“Who?” replied Furcal, and like I said, they come and they go around here.

When it came time for new manager Don Mattingly to meet with the media, the first question had to do with Dana Eveland.

It was so much easier when it was Cey, Russell, Lopes and Garvey.

Mattingly said Eveland would be sidelined because of an injury for weeks. Can you miss someone you didn’t even know was here?

The next question had to do with catcher A.J. Ellis and his future with the Dodgers. Mattingly explained to everyone Ellis is a “winner,” and “definitely a big leaguer.”

So why are the Dodgers planning to play a pair of reclamation projects like 35-year-old Rod Barajas and Dioner Navarro, who hit .194 last season, ahead of such a winner?

Didn’t take long to learn you can’t put much stock in anything Donnie Baseball has to say.

The subject turned to Jonathan Broxton and his woes. Mattingly began describing a snowball that rolls down a hill. “That snowball gets a little big,” says Mattingly, and I never thought of Broxton in terms of being a humongous snowman, but it makes sense.

After all, it looks as if he has a tendency to melt when the heat’s turned up or Matt Stairs picks up a bat.

By the way, in high school Broxton played football, as you might expect. But he was a punter, quitting the team when they tried to push him into being a lineman. So the Dodgers have a punter as their closer, and it makes sense.

And Mattingly insists, based on all his experience as a manager, Broxton is the right guy still to be his closer.

I wanted to see how this set with Broxton. But instead of sitting inside the Dodgers’ clubhouse, he wanted to go outside to talk where it was freezing cold. Just what you’d expect from a snowman.

Broxton remains as unaffected now as he was last September when fans were booing him. “I don’t listen to the fans whether they are booing or cheering,” he says, and so much for fan participation.

Too early to say whether there will be any fans in attendance this year, but as good as Broxton has been as a closer, it feels as if he’s starting all over with everyone.

“Guys can’t have bad years, or a bad second half?” he asks. “The first half of the season I was fine. The two, three years before that, I was fine. You can’t be perfect your whole career.”

He’s already demonstrated that, compiling 77 career saves but also blowing 32. This season, he has the incentive of becoming a free agent when it is over.

“If you have one bad game the fans shouldn’t get on you and try to drive you into the dirt,” he says. “It’s almost like they’re saying that we’re not out there caring. We care about every move we make out there. We hate to fail.”

Last season, Manager Joe Torre suggested the problem with his closer was between Broxton’s ears. But when Broxton is asked about being a head case, he laughs and says, “never heard anyone say that.”

We corrected that situation and moved on.

He says as a closer he’s trained himself to forget yesterday, and for that matter last year. It explains why he walks around like a dead man, head down, obviously a chore to say hello to anyone.

“My dad has always told me to never show any emotion,” he says. “You start showing too much emotion, it’s going to bite you in the butt. You get too low, you show it and the other team has got you.”

No surprise, then, that he says he did nothing extraordinary to prepare for this season other than let last season go.

How about letting a few pounds go as well?

“I lost 25 pounds in the minors and my fastball topped out at 90,” he says.

At most, he’ll concede he walked too many hitters, and needs to do a better job hitting his spots. He dismisses any notion he has lost velocity off his fastball, explaining radar guns throughout the league are different.

How about the one the Dodgers use?

“The Dodgers didn’t have one in the stands last year,” he says, Jamie presumably taking it with her when she left.

Whatever, the job is Broxton’s again, so now we can get back to worrying about Dana Eveland.

t.j.simers@latimes.com