9.23.00 LOS ANGELES DODGERS vs SAN DIEGO PADRES
Nearly a month since my last game. A month during which I traveled to Rochester with my wife and found a new house, one we’ll move into some time in October; football season started and actually managed to capture my interest; the Angels finally succumbed to the limitations of their inexperienced pitching staff and gave up the wild-card chase to their Oakland and Seattle division-mates; and the Dodgers—having rendered their season meaningless and all but handed Davey Johnson his pink slip—finally put together a streak of consistently impressive ball. Whaddaya know. It’d be ironic only if it weren’t so damned predictable.
My friend Jon was down from Montana, so he and San Diegans Marty and Blair
met me at Dodger Stadium for the kind of late-season match-up that just oozes
melancholy from its pores. The Padres, twenty or so games out. The Dodgers,
another $90 million disappointment nearly behind them. Two teams playing for
nothing but pride before a crowd that probably had other things in mind when
it bought these tickets back in April. Appropriately, lest anyone get the
idea that tonight was for anything other than rueful contemplation of a season
laid to waste, Chavez Ravine was cloaked in the kind of murky drizzle most
commonly associated with winsome girls leaping from bridges in French existential
novels.
It was remarkable, then, when Dodger Stadium announcer Mike Carlucci called
our attention to center field, where no less a figure than Carl Erskine would
perform the national anthem. Carl Erskine, the legendary pitcher who spent
twelve seasons in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, twelve years that featured two
no-hitters among his 122 victories and included six trips to the World Series.
A contemporary of Robinson, Snider, Hodges, Campanella. What could this man
possibly think of the bloated, aimless disaster now before him, stuffed into
the same uniform he had once worn so proudly? It would quickly become obvious.
Erskine, a slight grey figure amid a sea of green from where we watched,
brought something to his lips—a pitch-pipe, I guessed. I guessed wrong.
It was a harmonica. And out of it—well, out of it came a sound so mournful,
so forlorn, so impossibly, heart-rendingly despairing that it was all I could
do to keep from launching myself over the railing right there and then. It
was our national anthem, transfigured as the eternal, impenetrable ache of
Hank Williams; as the inexpressible restraint of Miles Davis, forsaking the
notes for the space in between them. It was, simply, one of the most extraordinary
things I have ever heard.
(Something of a long-shot, I know, but anybody out there bootlegging Dodger
games?)
After that, it would’ve been difficult for anything as mundane as a baseball game to register as but an afterthought—even one in which Kevin Brown held the Padres to two hits over a full nine innings, and Padres starter Woody Williams also went the distance, allowing only two runs, neither of which was earned. Brown made things interesting in the ninth when, with the Dodgers clinging to a one-run lead, he gave up a double to Damian Jackson, who waited only one pitch before stealing third. The crowd reluctantly brought to its feet, Brown then struck out Desi Relaford and Ryan Klesko to end the game.
FINAL SCORE: DODGERS 2, PADRES 1; CARL ERSKINE, FIFTY BILLION
MEMORABLE HECKLE: I told you, heckling season is over.
