A Few Thoughts From ALDS Series "B" Game 2

As "easy" as traffic was for us on Thursday, on Friday it was just as nightmarish.  Why does it take over three and a half hours to drive less than fifty miles?  And that's with us in the carpool lane and me using sigalert.com on my iPhone to scout out and avoid the worst jams.  Why is there absolutely no realistic mass transit option to get to either The Big A or Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles?  There's an Amtrack station there on the property, why can't they run light rail trains from the stadium to outlying parking lots?

When we get there we had to fight our way off of the freeway, fight our way into the parking lot, and then desperately try to find a parking space.  I've never seen the parking lot so full, beyond capacity.  We finally got The Older Daughter's VW bug into a teeny tiny spot between two huge "bigfoot" pickup trucks.  (I'm trying not to remember the way she just whipped around and into that spot at about 0.99c.)  When we get out and start hustling toward the stadium in the distant dusk, we come up behind two horse-mounted Anaheim cops.  Does anyone warn me about the huge pile of horse droppings in the middle of the road?  Noooooooo.  (I missed it, but only barely, and only by luck.)

We were in the nosebleed seats in the third deck, probably 500 feet or more from home plate.  Do they really need to have the sign about bats?  I can concieve, maybe, of a foul ball getting up there, but a bat?  Maybe I was just cranky about being late and slightly carsick from the ride.  But then the bat came right over our head, repeatedly!  It was the small, winged mammalian type, but by that time we were ahead and I was feeling more forgiving, so sure, let's assume that's what they meant.

I did dearly love seeing the rally monkey "lurking" on the ribbon board directly behind the batter when Josh Beckett got in trouble in the seventh inning.  There was a special little bit of schadenfreude in seeing Beckett get knocked around, especially after some of the cheap shots and dirty playing that he's thrown against the Angels this year.  Anyone else still remember the time he threw a fastball behind Bobby Abreau's head in April of this year and then the umpires threw our guys out of the game while leaving Beckett in?  (MLB later suspended Beckett for six games for the affair.)  I think there were quite a few of the 45,223 in attendance who were well aware of Beckett's special place in recent Angels' history.

Hey, we finally rated the Goodyear blimp at our game!  I know that it was up over Dodger Stadium for both of the games there on Wednesday and Thursday, but we didn't get it afterward on Thursday.  Why couldn't we share, or have them fly it down here after the Dodgers were done?  It's only 27.86 miles by air between the stadiums and the blimp cruises at 35 miles an hour with a top speed of over 50 mph.  So why couldn't they do both?

I know that they're doing some stadium upgrades for next year's MLB All-Star Game, and one of the big items is a new & improved "Big A", but I would have thought that they would wait until after the playoffs to start the work.  Nope, they've got it all ripped apart and the cranes out there now, so even after these two huge wins the last two nights the call to "Light Up The Halo!" is futile.

Since we had an hour or so to kill before we even tried to get out of the parking lot, we considered climbing the crane with some lighter fluid or a flashlight or something to light up the halo ourselves, but thought that just maybe the local constabulary might object.  Maybe.

A Few Thoughts From ALDS Series "B" Game 1

Last year we went to the two first round playoff games that our beloved Angels played against the hated Boston Red Sox at Anaheim Stadium and we were very, very sad to see them lose both games.  This year we swore that it would be different!  (Yeah, somewhere deep in my psyche I realize that the universe doesn't give a rat's ass what the fans swear or how much we think we deserve anything, it's all about the players actually playing the game, but that doesn't explain Cubs fans.)

We were most pleased to see that at the end of the night it was different.  We were happy.  We were giddy.  We were very hoarse.

The kid who sang the national anthem was too cute and she had a really good voice as well.  It was surprising that in this town, where they could probably pull in just about anyone they wanted for a nationally broadcast game, they had her, but that's a good thing.  She was able to avoid my favorite pet peeve - she sang the anthem at a decent tempo rather than dragging it out for 50% or more longer and slower than it should be.  Remember (all together now, family) -- "It's not a dirge, it's a drinking song!!!"

All of the other games I've gone to this year had kids that looked to be ten to fourteen or so years old playing the "stealing third" game between innings.  Tonight's contestant looked to be about five or six years old.  Nonetheless, he was as intense of a competitor as we've seen all year.  About five yards short of the finish line with about ten seconds left he did a total face plant and the stolen base went flying (left picture).  But he got up, the finish line and some help came to him, and he won.  Now THAT's an Angels fan of the future!!

Was it just me, or did their ribbon board logo look more like it was saying "AIDS" instead of "ALDS" most of the time?  Perhaps someone could have reviewed that graphic with a more critical eye...

Torii Hunter hit the three-run homer and then gets hit in the arm with a fastball on the first pitch in his next at-bat.  Yeah, that was an "accident".  Sure.  Right.  I understand that folks like Bob Gibson and Nolan Ryan and Don Drysdale used to play the game that way, and maybe that's right and maybe it's not, but didn't they get tossed from the game when they went "headhunting"?  Or at least get warnings issued by the umpiring crew?  Or something?  Yet another reason to get ride of the designated hitter.  Let's see that happen in the National League, where the pitcher might be coming up to the plate with a bat in his hand the next inning.  Payback's a bitch!

There were two guys in cammy & boots sitting down in front of us, sure looked like active duty guys who either just got off of their shifts and didn't have time to change or had to go straight from the game to their shifts.  The guy on the right (you can almost see him in this picture) was wearing a black beret, but the other guy had on an Angels cap.  Not sure what the military regs say about that, but he was *NOT* out of uniform in our book.  It's kind of like the whole "sanctuary" thing when you're protected in a church.  For an Angels fan, The Big A is hallowed ground, so he's OK.  Now if he had been wearing a Red Sox hat...  What's the number for the MP's?

OK, it's blurry, he was all the way across the stadium behind the Red Sox dugout, but this guy had the most gigantic beard any of us had ever seen.  When I first saw him in binoculars I thought that he might be wearing a Santa Claus mask, or maybe Bigfoot.  Maybe he swore in the early days of the Angels to never shave until we beat the Red Sox in the playoffs and won the World Series that year...

We happened to be sitting in the middle of a big mob of Red Sox fans.  Now, I've been to Fenway.  I love Fenway.  I've taken the family & my kids to Fenway.  We went while wearing Angels gear & jerseys while the Angels were playing the Red Sox.  And we got heckled.  More or less kinda friendly sorta heckled, but heckled.  So when all of the Red Sox fans started bailing out of the park after the top of the eighth, I thought it was only fair and just to start a little "Na-na-na-na, Na-na-na-na, Hey hey, Good Bye!"  They didn't seem to appreciate it.  For the record, I'm OK with that, especially since I heard it from those same Red Sox fans at The Big A last year.

GO ANGELS!!  On to Game #2 tonight!!