6.17.01 ANAHEIM ANGELS vs LOS ANGELES DODGERS
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The thing about the Rally Monkey is that if you didn’t know any better you’d assume it’s just another cloying Disney marketing tie-in, the kind of thing that results in hockey teams named after insipid cartoon characters and miniature golf courses out in left center field. It’s not, though. In fact, it could not be more un-Disney. Anti-Disney, even. With its junior college–level production values, its apparent disregard for the vagaries of copyright clearance, and an irrepressibly genuine delight in non sequitur, the Rally Monkey suggests to me not Disney, but another venerable Orange County institution—that’s right, friends, I’m talking about good old Channel 56, KDOC. Back when the letters UHF actually meant something, Channel 56 was home to amateurishly produced music video shows, the unapologetically abrasive and frequently downright mean televangelist Dr. Gene Scott, and, of course, the inimitable Wally George. Although I guess if he were really inimitable then it wouldn’t have been possible for Morton Downey, Jr., Jerry Springer, and every other confrontational jackass talk-show host in the world to rip him off so completely.
Did I ever tell you about the time that me and a bunch of the guys in my dorm pissed off Wally so bad by relentlessly bombarding him with bogus phone calls that he basically had a nervous breakdown on the air and stopped doing his daily call-in show forever? No? Goddamn that was funny. What would happen is you’d hear the beginning of a call, then it would go quiet and you’d see Wally’s face turn red and his lips get real tight and then you’d hear an explosion, which was supposed to represent the sound of the caller being jettisoned into space but really, I think, was just the sound effects guys mocking Wally’s apoplectic self-seriousness. It would surprise me not at all to learn that those old Channel 56 engineers are now working the scoreboard three blocks away from their old studio.
Damore’s buddy Arturo scored us some club-level seats just past first base for the game this afternoon. Club level, meaning cushioned. And equipped with annoying waitresses who circulate throughout the game trying to get you to buy overpriced hot dogs that you have to tip them for and still put the condiments on yourself, from crappy little plastic packets no less. And populated not by the brawling working-class rabble we sat with last night, but by the dignified season-ticket holding O.C. gentry, several of whom—and this has happened here before—were less than amused by the level of Angel disparagement being directed Damore’s way by myself, my brother, and our new Dodger-fan friend Arturo.
Still, the seats were free, and they provided an excellent view of Pat Rapp getting slapped around in the second by Jeff Branson, Alex Cora, and—with his second home run in as many games—Paul Lo Duca. That staked the Dodgers to a 4–1 lead that they would maintain for the better part of another pretty dull afternoon, punctuated only by an RBI single off the bat of Darin Erstad in the seventh.
Come the bottom of the ninth, though, the Angels down by a pair of runs, it was time again for the KDOC castaways to go to work. Last night’s installment had been Batman themed; today it was Lucas’s turn to be mugged. The climactic scene from Star Wars flashed on the Diamondvision, young Skywalker fending off TIE fighters, struggling to keep his target in the digital crosshairs before him. The eerily disembodied voice: “Luke. Use the power of the Rally Monkey.” The crudely clipped image of the monkey’s head superimposed over R2-D2 riding shotgun. Skywalker sweeping the targeting device aside, closing his eyes, and squeezing the trigger; the laser torpedoes finding their mark; the quick cutaway to the Death Star from space, only here the word Dodgers has been applied in script across the sphere, seen only for an instant before the flash and the former space station’s constituent parts radiating outward like so many glowing bicycle spokes. How do they get away with this?
The way the Angels got away with it was this: Jeff Shaw issued a one-out walk to David Eckstein, and was touched up for a single by the next batter, second baseman Adam Kennedy. Darin Erstad, sans Chattahoochee song this year, then doubled them both in to tie the game at 4. That brought up Troy Glaus, who hadn’t done a thing all day and was visibly pissed about it. He flailed at the first pitch from Shaw. He then deposited the next one right about where we’d been sitting the night before. Damore nearly got into two fights taunting Dodger fans in the parking lot on the way out.
FINAL SCORE: ANGELS 6, DODGERS 4
FOOD CONSUMED: A corn syrup loaf masquerading as an ice cream sandwich. Again with the pregame nachos and tequila, so I wasn’t very hungry.