History is doomed to repeat itself

Milwaukee 11, Dodgers 6

…and what’s amazing about that score is that it doesn’t even begin to tell the whole story. As scores often do, they inform quickly and mostly inadequately. If they were the only important statistic then we’d not have a multi billion-dollar T.V. contract for Major League Baseball and revenue for the league in excess of six billion dollars last year. Still, it doesn’t make every game fun to watch, and this one is proof.

It was somewhere around the third inning that I gave up all hope of having a truly engrossing ball game to watch, when the Dodgers had a light single into right field and Narveson had what was until then a perfect game spoiled. Down 9-0 at that point I was ready to find a large soda and some ice cream to drown my sorrows in since I was the designated driver. I was astonished by how at the beginning of every inning the players faithfully donned their caps and gloves to field and bat in this game whose end was wholly over and hardly in doubt. Of course, the Dodgers combined team salary of 96 and some odd million is probably a big part of why they’re still chipper after an embarrassing showing by Kershaw, their starting pitcher. He walked one batter, hit two more and then gave up two home runs, and all in the second inning. I will leave it there so that we don’t have to usher the women and children out of the room before continuing to read the article.

Somewhere in the eighth inning Loney hit a home run to give the Dodgers their fifth and sixth runs and the drunken dad in front of me stood up sloshing his beer on the seats and the aisle shouting we’re not done yet. My grandfather slapped him a high five and with an obvious tint of sarcasm shouted, “Yeah! We’ve really got Milwaukee on the run now.” The game was over, but everybody loves home runs.

What I can say with unequivocal certainty is that the odds of this game turning out the way it did and me being there under these circumstances were even less than the chances of a Dodger come back in the bottom of the ninth with two outs as Garret Anderson took up his first at bat in the game as a pinch hitter. When I was thirteen my grandpa took me to a Dodger game, and my middling teen aged body was more awkward than a dirty joke in a nunnery. Still, we went and saw something that will probably never happen again in my lifetime; Fernando Tatis hit two grand slams off of Chan Ho Park in the third inning. What sort of sadistic manager would let a pitcher sit through the entire line up again after one grand slam is beyond me, someone who’s into some real dark stuff at least? We’re getting off topic here, the important part is that that was the last time anyone scored nine or more runs in an inning against the Dodgers, shoot, that was probably the last time anyone scored nine runs in an inning in Dodger stadium at all, and eleven years ago me and my grandpa were there to see it.

On the drive home we tuned in to the last minutes of the Lakers game and all I can say about that is at least L.A. has one team that’s not a loser tonight.