6.19.01 LOS ANGELES DODGERS vs ARIZONA DIAMONDBACKS
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Now it’s my turn to play So-Cal pundit. Every other car from Santa Monica to San Bernardino currently sports one or more plastic Lakers flags sprouting from its fender, roof, or trunk. Whatever. I mean, I like the Lakers fine. It’s great that they won again. But I lived here last year, people, and none of y’all had flags sticking outta your cars. In fact, none of y’all even realized the Lakers were in the finals until it was over and you decided it’d make a good excuse for a riot. What a bunch of bandwagoners.
Four field-level seats tonight between third base and home plate about twenty rows up, compliments of my mom’s friend’s niece who works in the Dodgers front office and got the somewhat distorted idea that we were coming all the way from New York just to see the Dodgers. Nice, though. Very nice. Enjoying this unexpected bounty were myself, my wife, my brother, and our California hostess Alicia, who was attending her first-ever ballgame.
Now, my wife, see, she’s not big into sports. Back when I used to follow football obsessively, in fact, she pretty much unequivocally hated them. But then we started going to ballgames, and she found enough going on besides what actually transpired down on the field that pleased her—the hot dogs, the view, the people-watching, the hot dogs—that she discovered she didn’t mind coming. And eventually she even liked watching the game.
Still, I didn’t fully realize the extent to which she’d internalized it until Alicia started asking questions. Good questions, like, pointing to the third base coach in front of us, “Why’s that guy there?” I leaned over to deliver a nuanced explanation of the complex role of the base coach, but before I could even open my mouth my wife was off and running, explaining in her chit-chatty, girly-talk way—and understand, I don’t say that condescendingly; my wife is a physicist, the intellectual master of our household, the kind of person who does math problems with letters and Greek symbols for fun, but Alicia’s her best friend, and when they get together that’s what they do: chit-chat and have girly-talk—that, well, that guy used to be the manager but he didn’t do a good enough job so now they let him stand out there instead and dance around giving complicated signals to the guys on base about when to run and stuff. This went on all game long.
Leaving me to focus on yet another shaky outing by Darren Dreifort and a less-than-completely-dominating but for that reason perhaps all the more impressive performance by Randy Johnson. Because even when he’s less than completely dominating, well, he’s pretty much completely dominating. Seven innings, 125 pitches, a pair of solo homers by Eric Karros and Hiram Bocachica, and other than that, nothing doing. On the other side of the scorecard, Luis Gonzalez, a not-even-funny percentage of whose 30 home runs have come against his hapless Los Angeles division rivals, doubled in the third, homered in the fifth, and homered again in the eighth, to the tune of six RBIs.
What was most memorable about tonight however was not the game, nor the seats. No. Tonight I got to do something I have dreamed about my whole ballgame-going life. Tonight, I caught a beach ball. Not a foul ball. A beach ball.
I hadn’t completely forgotten about this particular scourge of southern California baseball, this indigenous pestilence. I had noted its remarkable absence throughout my three days of sold-out games at Wrigley Field, along with that of its odious viral cousin, The Wave. But here I was back at Dodger Stadium, back…home…as it were, sitting in these coveted, cherished seats in this gracefully aging cathedral of a ballpark, watching one of the most storied teams in baseball history attempting to find its way back to its former glory, and what is everyone around me interested in? A fucking beach ball. One after another, in fact.
And it’s not like you can ignore it down here, like you can upstairs. At field level there’s hardly any slope, so when the shitheads in front of you stand up to bat the ball around you can pretty much forget about any hope you had of watching the game. So I sat there, impotent, defeated by a thin quilt of cheap red, blue, and yellow plastic, silently wishing death upon my fellow citizens. Until….
The beach ball, perfectly framed in the night sky by my outstretched arms, falls toward me. It will not be blown off course, nor batted away. It is mine. I feel its feathery weight as it alights on my fingertips, the slight give as I secure it in my palms. The crowd eyes me expectantly, heads swiveled from every direction. Their eyes grow wide in astonishment as I slowly take the ball and shove it between my legs and underneath my seat, returning their uncomprehending gaze and shouting, “There’s a freaking ballgame going on here, you idiots!”
The jeering was immediate. These people were infuriated, infuriated, I tell you, that I had taken their toy away. I met their rage with my own. The one guy in front of me who was into it turned around and, egging me on, said, “Tell ’em if they wanna play with a beach ball, they should go to the beach!” “If you wanna play with a beach ball,” I hollered, “go to the freaking beach!” It was awesome. An usher came down to quell the uprising, gesturing for the ball. I pulled it out and handed it to him, a regular beach ball Benedict Arnold.
Of course, I was a marked man for the rest of the night. All these kids making snide beach ball jokes, which would’ve been fine if they’d been at all funny, but they weren’t. I wanted them to be funny. I rooted for them to be funny. They were lame, though. Painfully lame. So lame that I was embarrassed for them, embarrassed for myself, even, for these are the people among whom I count myself. Dodger fans. Angelenos. So-Cals. Or used to, anyway.
FINAL SCORE: DIAMONDBACKS 9, DODGERS 2
FOOD CONSUMED: My standard Dodger Stadium dinner: a Dodger Dog and an order of nachos, no salsa, extra cheese. A Coke, I think.