Mike Celizic

You’d think the Dodgers would be treated a little more like baseball royalty. They’re in the playoffs for the second straight year, which makes it three postseason trips in four years and four in six years.

Any team not named the Yankees would consider that a darned good run. At the very least, a team would expect to be reading and hearing itself talked about as a favorite to get to the World Series, if not win it.

But I’m not hearing a lot of that kind of talk, nor am I about to start encouraging it. And I don’t give a moldy Cheez-It about Dodger fans accusing me of disrespecting one of the flagship franchises of Major League Baseball.

I’ve got a rule about these things: If you want the analysts to dub you the next great team, you’ve got to at least have the decency to win a playoff series. And for all the Dodgers’ success in the frequently inept NL West over the past six seasons, they haven’t won a playoff series since 1988, the last year L.A. won the World Series.

Before you start firing off angry e-mails to remind me that I’m an idiot because the Dodgers did win a playoff series just last year, take a look at which team was on the short end of the 2008 NLDS. It was the Cubs. And bragging about beating the Cubs is like bragging about beating the tic-tac-toe-playing chicken at the county fair.

Eliminate that Cubs series, and here’s the Dodgers’ record in five playoff appearances since ’88: 2-16. Even the Clippers, the worst team in the NBA, are 11-13 in the playoffs in the same period. The Ducks have won a Stanley Cup more recently than the Dodgers have won the World Series. And the Lakers have been harvesting NBA championships.

All of this makes the Dodgers the least successful team in the Los Angeles area. If you count the Angels, who insist that Anaheim is in Los Angeles, the Dodgers are running fifth in L.A.-area professional sports — sixth if you count USC.

It’s not as if Angelinos are going to go into a depression if the Dodgers fail once again to get back to the Series. Los Angeles isn’t like Philadelphia or Cleveland, starving for a title of any kind. And if the team doesn’t win, it’s not as if there’s a lack of excitement, not when you can always go down to Spago’s and pretend not to ogle the celebrities, or do a quick drive-by of the Octomom compound.

Just the same, the Dodgers are special, even in Los Angeles. They were the team that brought big-time professional sports to the Left Coast, and the first of the city’s teams to win a championship way back in 1963. They repeated in 1965, lost the Series in ’66, ’77 and ’78, then won it again in ’81 and ’88. That made it four championships and seven trips to the World Series in 26 seasons.

But since then, it’s four first-round exits and that one playoff series win over the Cubs in 21 seasons. Even Cleveland has been to the World Series twice in that time, and the Marlins have won it twice.

It’s supposed to be different this year. Joe Torre was brought in to be the genius manager and Manny Ramirez is anchoring the offense. And making it all work is a pitching staff that somehow leads the league in ERA despite having only two starters with double-digit wins, none of them with more than 12 victories. (Vicente Padilla and Jon Garland, both late-season acquisitions, each have 11 wins, but just three each with Los Angeles.)

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They have, in fact, a superfluity of pitching — six legitimate starters. That’s a luxury any team would like to have. On the other hand, it’s yet another reason it’s completely fair to expect better than another one-and-done this year.

The Cubs aren’t in the mix. But, fortunately for the Dodgers, the Phillies are. If the Rockies can hold off the surging Braves for the NL wild card, Philadelphia will be the first-round opponent. As the defending world champions, they should be a formidable opponent, but the absence of a functioning closer other than Brad “Blown Save” Lidge makes the Phillies look like easy pickings.

Get past the Phillies — or the Braves — and the Dodgers can start asking for some respect. It doesn’t mean they’ll get it, but at least they can ask. But they have to know by now that the only way the critics will start taking them seriously is when — and if — they get back to the World Series.

The team and its fans think this is their year. The rest of us have just two words: Prove it.

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