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.