Baseball!

(Peg demands updating. Sorry, I been busy. I almost blogged about my job the other day, because I was working at home and was just awesomely productive -- sitting here drinking about a gallon of tea and plugging away at what ultimately turned out to be a fairly kick-ass 45-page document. I like to think I'm quite good at what I do -- but, given the nature of my job (which is, basically, being an anonymous cog in the wheels of justice), there isn't all that much one can actually say about it without violating all sorts of very serious ethical obligations. And just coming here to post, "Yeah, I rock" isn't all that terribly interesting for y'all.)

So. Baseball. A friend of mine thinks of baseball as a sort of socio-economic equalizer. I mean, Dodger Stadium is a place where I can go, sit knee-to-knee with people of different races, classes, ages, genders, orientations, incomes, political ideologies, and any other demographic you might come up with, and be unified with the same common thought.

Which, unfortunately, happened to be, "You suck!"

Seriously. This game was not supposed to matter. The Dodgers were supposed to wrap up the NL West several games ago. They only needed one win (or for Colorado to have one loss) and couldn't manage to make that happen. All of sudden, they're starting a three-game series with Colorado and if they don't manage to pull together one freakin' game, the Rockies take the NL West.

So, my late-season not-supposed-to-matter game turned out to be a great big sold out affair, with people coming in from miles around to see the Dodgers clinch it ... or to fail miserably.

Guess which one we saw.

I'll give you a hint -- the Rockies scored two runs while we were still in the parking lot.

At one point, I noted that our (alleged) star hitter had four strike-outs, which was one less than the entire opposing team.

About the only thing left was the bonding experience. Guy next to us bought one of those six dollar bags of peanuts and was sharing with the whole row. People across the aisle were trying to take a picture with their baby, and the guy in front of me was making silly faces to get the baby to smile in the right direction. (And the biggest applause of the night went to the guy who did such a terrific over-emotional lip-synch to "Don't Stop Believing," the camera guys had him up on the big screen for the whole song.)

As we were heading out (with the other 54,000 people), the ballpark set off fireworks. (Apparently, they'd had them ready in case the Dodgers won, and dammit, they were gonna set off the fireworks anyway.) Some guys on the stairs in front of us yelled, "Woo! We lost!" which pretty much summed up the whole experience.