Getting into Dodge

At least for the night

It finally happened: I went to a Dodgers game.

Absolutely a superspreader event

It started how all things in LA start: with a nightmare parking situation. Dodger Stadium is nestled in Elysian Park (park), a hillside oasis close to downtown in Echo Park (park and neighborhood). If you’re dumb enough to drive, you follow a quaint road winding through a bunch of trees that suddenly transforms into a multi-lane thruway packed with cars. At the crest of a hill, you and all the other cars are deposited into a concrete-paved crater, the stadium rising from its center.

A lot of security checks and escalator rides later, you make your way to your seats, many of which face the mountains. Those mountains will slowly turn blue and then fade away as the sun sets on the other side of town.

Even I have to admit that there’s a romantic allure to the American baseball game. The great outdoors, healthy competition, watery beer, group singing—it draws you in. You start to feel some sense of national identity, and then the complicated aftertaste of that national identity. We are AMERICANS! We CHEER! We wear HIGH SOCKS over PANTS! We hit BALLS with BATS! We cannot in good conscience take PRIDE in WHAT WE’VE BECOME or MORE ACCURATELY what WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN!

The Dodgers are a solid team at the moment, which sucks. As any sports movie will tell you, the hint of underdog dusts a franchise in a nice patina. You could sense the Yankee-fication in the air. Was it the twenty-dollar beers? Was it the crisp uniforms? Was it the DodgerVision moments sponsored by Bank of America? The place smelled like Dodger Dogs but it also smelled like something a lot more American: money.

This made root-root-rooting for the home team less fun, but in the end, I cheered for the Dodgers because I cannot think for myself. And I was glad I made that non-decision because sometime in the first inning a man on the very top deck dumped his beer on a group of Padres fans in the section next to us. There was a lot of yelling on both sides. At one point the Padres fans disappeared, but I saw nothing and/or no one pitched (LOL) above my head so I assume they got up for the normal reasons: to spend a small fortune on refreshments and/or to relieve themselves of the refreshments they had spent a small fortune on

Spot the hand that spilled the beer.

Baseball is similar to life in that most of the time absolutely nothing is happening, or bad things are happening, but then every once in a while a really good thing happens and that’s enough to keep you interested in how the whole thing will turn out. Wow, look at me! The first writer to ever compare life to a game of baseball.

At the top of the eighth, I advocated that we head for the parking lot because I pictured that parking lot crater emptying all at once, and had no interest in being stuck in a bottleneck with people who had collectively consumed, ballparking (LOL), two billion dollars of Bud Lite micheladas.

Besides, the Dodgers were winning. The mountains had faded to black. There was nothing left to see.