5.31.00
LOS ANGELES DODGERS vs NEW YORK METS
Tonight we got to see how the other half lives. Specifically, that half which through some mysterious confluence of circumstances ends up occupying those prestigious new “Dugout Club” seats behind home plate at Dodger Stadium, where it can engage in its habitual cellphone chattering, air-kiss planting, cocaine snorting, Wolfgang Puck cuisine eating, and non-baseball watching in a setting far more novel than merely, say, poolside at the Mondrian.
My friend Sean got four tickets from his girlfriend's appliance-company-VIP father is what I was doing there. And all of the above-enumerated nonsense aside, when you're sitting sixty feet from home plate at Dodger Stadium on a perfect summer evening with your every whim being catered to by a friendly and attentive wait staff and all the free Dodger dogs you can eat, well, it's easy to fall prey to the illusion that all—and I mean everything—is right in the world. An illusion only enhanced when the Dodgers are playing the Mets, and Kevin Brown is facing Mike Hampton.
The best thing about our seats was not the outrageous novelty of being someplace that you've no business being, that giddy feeling of imposterhood I used to get in high school when we velvet-rope-crashed the swank A-list L.A. nightclub of which Jon and Marty's uncle was part-owner, where we'd hang out on the balcony watching Rick Rubin walk to his '59 Caddy, the guy from The Cult in tow (this was A-list circa 1987, you understand). Indeed, nearly everyone around us did vaguely resemble somebody famous, but the only face I could name for certain (and probably the only person actually deserving of any admiration) was that of Ron Cey.
No, the best thing about our seats, which were seven rows back and about two degrees to the third-base side of the plate, was the amazing view they afforded of the game, and in particular, the pitching. From nowhere but the batter's box itself could one better study the baffling array of arm angles and release points employed by Kevin Brown, or the movement on Mike Hampton's fastballs. After a while, one could actually anticipate what was going to happen as the ball came out of the pitcher's hand, the same way one learns to instinctively judge a ball's trajectory as it comes off the bat. Now, you're not going to hear me claiming that I could ever react to it, but with God as my witness, when Hampton delivered a 1-and-2 pitch to Chad Kreuter in the third inning, as soon as it left his hand I knew it was gonna be big. Sure enough, Kreuter turned on it and sent the ball over the left-field fence.
Brown was nails until the sixth when he was hit in the ankle by an Edgardo Alfonzo line drive; Brown made a spectacular play to retrieve the ball and get it to Karros for the out, and managed to finish out the inning, but his evening was finished at that point. The Dodgers led 3-1 at the end of six, but reliever Alan Mills gave up two runs in the eighth.
Mike Fetters worked out of Matt Herges's two-on, one-out jam in the top of the ninth, at which point we got to see the Mets' resident nutcase Turk Wendell, who can perhaps best be described as the good version of John Rocker, his antics on the mound seemingly driven by genuine goofiness rather than misdirected and barely-contained rage. We didn't get to watch him for long, though, because after Eric Karros struck out Kevin Elster drove the first pitch he saw out of the park. It happened so quickly, in fact, that it didn't completely register when the Dodger dugout emptied onto the field. “Wow,” I mused, “they're all coming out to congratulate him.” Only after completing the thought did some other part of my brain respond, “No shit, you jackass—that's the game!” Duh.
FINAL SCORE: DODGERS 4, METS 3
MEMORABLE HECKLE: Glitterati don't heckle much, as it turns out. There was a nice moment when Tommy Lasorda received a standing ovation for walking up the aisle from his seat along the third base line (nice if you're a member of the “Tommy is a national treasure” camp, and not the “Tommy is a tiresome, self-promoting buffoon” camp—you can place me squarely in between the two).
