An Introduction:
As the July 4th holiday rolled around again, it was time to set out to more ballparks. After the Midwest in 2007, the only remaining coherent geographic group was the West Coast. And with the exception of Oakland, I was able to put together a semi-possible schedule to see every team with my standard, one-city-a-day suicide march. Unlike the Midwest, some locales (Denver, Seattle) were too far to drive in a day, so I added the extra scheduling difficulty of plane flights. Challenging, sure, but the only way to coax those last half points out of the Russian judge. Yet the potential problems with such an ambitious plan would become immediately apparent.
On Perseverance
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| My rental PT Cruiser |
Friday, June 27th, 2008
Redondo Beach, CA
Outside the Game:
I have extraordinary bad luck traveling to the Left Coast, and I can’t help but think someone is trying to tell me something. The last time I attempted the feat, my flight was delayed eight hours, so I suppose I should be thankful I was only delayed two hours this time.
Once finally undertaken, the flight out was a cavalcade of minor and major inconveniences. To quote some forgotten comedian, I won't say which airline it was, but it was an
American airline. The seats were a foot wide if they were an inch (with proportional legroom), and I was the lucky recipient of the seat right in front of emergency exits (no recline for me) and right next to the attendant area (dozing off? Let's chop up some ice for the First Class passengers). As if this were not sufficient, I was in a two-seat aisle next to a man who was somewhere in the realm of seven feet tall, who, in order to avoid getting his legs smashed by flight crew every five seconds, wedged the extra parts of his trunk into my pathetic little domain. I didn't even get a video screen. As I was in a window seat right behind First Class, the screen in the aisle was obstructed, and the only other display was the 2-inch LCD that they put in for the row ahead of me. I could barely discern it as a screen, never mind see the content therein. As the in-flight movie was
Penelope, it may have been for the best.
The only mild amusement I received was that it was stereotype central in the cabin crew, and due to my location, I could overhear most their conversations. There was the young, fabulous gay guy; the young, pretty, and utterly insentient blond; and the two just-past-their-ship-date women who were constantly catty to each other. They seemed awful busy, but they didn't have much to do, as there was no food or drink service on this six-hour flight -- unless you weren't in steerage.
I was eventually released from my flying aluminum slave ship and deposited on the welcoming shores of Los Angeles at some time around 1 AM. Things looked up from there, as I had a quick and uneventful ride to the car rental depot. I was given my choice of cars, and picked up a white PT Cruiser, which seemed appropriate. I hit some mild traffic driving down the Pacific Coast Highway to my hotel, which I no doubt should have seen as a harbinger of things to come.
The Accommodations:
I rolled into my Ramada Inn at Redondo Beach at about 2 in the morning. The manager greeted me by name, as I was the only guest that had not yet checked in. I parked the car, dragged my bag up to my room, and turned on the TV. The previous guest had left the tube tuned to the adult home shopping channel. This led to several revelations in short order: there is an adult home shopping channel in California; people watch said channel; and it is disturbingly similar to regular home shopping channels, except instead of collectible plates, the ladies are describing the beneficial features of dildos that would make King Kong walk funny for a week.
On Disappointment
Saturday, June 28th, 2008
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim vs.
Los Angeles Dodgers
Dodger Stadium
Major League Baseball, Interleague
Los Angeles, CA
7:10 PM
Outside the Game:
I spent the morning at Redondo Beach, and after the horror of the trip out, it was very therapeutic to just bum around on the beach for a while. In the course of wandering out on the rocks, I'm fairly certain I'm in someone's engagement photos, as I was directly in the background of where they were shooting. Good luck, you wacky kids.
After loafing on the beach, I went out on the boardwalks for a while and goofed off in the arcade before grabbing lunch further down the marina. It was good to just walk around for several hours, especially given what was to come.
On paper, it was only a half hour to Dodger Stadium from Redondo Beach. In LA time, that duration was an hour and a half in reality. It was Saturday afternoon, for the love of all things holy. There is no reason for bumper-to-bumper traffic on Saturday afternoon. The traffic got worse towards the stadium, as driving was the only viable transportation to get to there.
Dear Los Angeles: It's called mass transit. It has been around for about two centuries now, so you may have heard of it. Give it a look. Thanks.
At The Game With Oogie:
Apparently, the Dodgers/Angels games are a big deal, as evidenced by the near-capacity crowd. I had a seat in the upper section behind home plate. (These areas are no longer called the "Upper Deck" in most new stadiums, but rather, the "View Level," or some similar euphemism.)
My row might as well have been general casting from a mid-80s summer camp comedy movie. To my right was the waspiest WASPs you ever did wasp -- seated directly next to me was a meathead wrestler with a broken hand, no doubt a testament to his even-headedness. And to my left were two cousins straight out of the barrio, one in his late teens and another in his early 20s. As the game progressed, the older hombre got drunker and drunker, hitting on a woman and her mother in front of us, chastising everyone who came past for not getting him a beer, and generally screaming at the top of his lungs at
everything. This was less of an issue until Pappa WASP came back through the aisle after a late inning hotdog run, and the drunk cousin asked him where his beer was. Meathead started screeching at him not to talk to any of them and demanding acknowledgment of this fact. For a glorious moment, the situation sat on the razor's edge, and I contemplated being stuck between these two paragons of good sense when the fists started flying, on the first day of my vacation. Thankfully, a Dodger's staffer was walking by right at this moment, and there was a testosterone stand down.
The Stadium:
On the one hand, I appreciate how they modeled the stadium into the geography, but overall the effect was kind of blah, especially when the stadium is literally surrounded by asphalt parking lots. There wasn't a lot to do, baseball-related or otherwise. I'm against the modern trend of turning baseball grounds into amusement parks, but there was literally nothing going on pre-game, and even the between-inning fare was sparse. To top everything off, there was also a strict segregation between the upper decks and the lower decks, in order, presumably, to keep someone's monocle from brushing a commoner.
On the plus side, there were piss-troughs in the bathrooms, and the crowd was enthusiastic (as anyone who survived that traffic was likely to be). But the stereotype of Dodger's fans showing up in the third inning and leaving in the seventh is very much grounded in reality.
The Dodgers were celebrating 50 years of being in LA, which, especially given the context of the day so far, seemed much more appropriate as the anniversary of them sneaking out in the night from their real home. We know the truth, Sparky.
The Hot Dog:
The signature Dodger Dog was also an unsurprising disappointment, a limp, skinny long hot dog in a dejected-looking bun.
The Game:
The game itself was the only redeeming part of the experience, as I witnessed one of the rarest occurrences in all of baseball: a no no-hit loss. Two Angels pitchers combined to throw a no-hitter against the Dodgers. However, thanks to an error, a stolen base, a throwing error, and a sacrifice fly (which does not count as a hit), the Dodgers scored the only run of the night, as the Angels were held scoreless. Both teams, in fact, had no-hitters going through the third inning.
What made this even rarer was the fact that because the home team was leading at the end of the top of the ninth inning, they did not have to bat. So it wasn't an "official" no-hitter, as the Angels pitchers did not have to face at least nine innings of batters. As was reported all over the sporting news that evening, this has only happened four times in modern baseball history.
The Scorecard:
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| Angels vs. Dodgers, 06/28/08. The Dodgers won, 1-0. |
It was part of the $5 program on glossy paper that made it difficult to write and erase. The entire ballpark seemed to be staffed with teenage interns, and it took three people to answer the question, "Is there a scorecard in the program?" (ultimately answered by me picking one up and flipping through it until I found the item in question). This is what happens when you move out to the West Coast, kids.
Oogie's East Coast Connection of the Day:
The manager at my hotel that evening had a daughter who was just starting her residency in a hospital in East Orange, which came up in a discussion on the hellish traffic in the LA area.
The Accommodations:
It was more of an issue to get there than anything else. In keeping with the Dodger's apparent "Hey, let's see what happens" management strategy, the situation in the parking lot after the game makes our Iraqi exit strategy look refined. It was just a block of unmoving traffic that constantly got worse and worse, with exits unopened for no apparent reason. The only people keeping the peace were the ever-present college interns, trying to come up with a good reason why there were only two exits open for the entire stadium. It seemed hit or miss if there was to be a riot or not. Eventually, someone just got out of their car, moved the cones blocking a closed exit, and drove out over the protests of the teenage intern. I and many others followed soon after.
Once out of the stadium, there were only minor difficulties driving down to the Travel Lodge in Oceanside, just outside of San Diego. Yet again, I was the last person to check in and was greeted by name on the way in the door.
2008 West Coast
