All the Leaves Are Blue

A prediction for the 2020 World Series

As I write this, the Dodgers are crushing the Tampa Bay Rays in Game 1 of the World Series, and forgive me for getting ahead of myself but it feels inevitable that the Dodgers will be crowned champions of this weird pandemic-shortened season. 

There are a lot of reasons for this. The Dodgers were the best team in baseball for most of the abbreviated season. They had an absolutely ridiculous run differential of +166. (San Diego and Atlanta came in tied for second and third at +73). The Tampa Bay Rays best hitter is a rookie who is having an insane postseason, but he’s got Hunter Renfroe behind him with a pitiful .156 batting average. 

On paper, the Tampa Bay Rays appear to be overmatched whereas the Dodgers feel like a team of destiny. (OK, the disparity between the clubs’ payrolls is also a factor: $107.9 million vs. $28.3.)

But the fact of the matter is the Dodgers are due. The were cheated out of the World Series in 2017 and while the hammer hasn’t come as hard on the Red Sox as it has on the Astros, let’s not forget that the Dodgers 2018 World Series opponent was punished for cheating too. The Dodgers have won the National League West eight years in a row. While Clayton Kershaw is no longer the best pitcher in baseball, he’s a slam-dunk first ballot Hall of Famer. 

Now you may be wondering how someone who was born in New York and grew up in the D.C. suburbs became a Dodgers fan. It’s kind of a long story. When people ask, I usually just tell them I was born in New York and the teams was the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers long before they moved to L.A. But obviously there’s more to the story. 

I don’t know why my father, who was born and raised in the Bronx, isn’t a Yankees fan, but he didn’t pass on a love of the game to me. 

I grew up in a town without baseball. When I was growing up in Falls Church, Virginia, there wasn’t a baseball team in Washington, D.C. The closest team was the Baltimore Orioles, but this was before Camden Yards was built and the team played in a shithole called Memorial Stadium. The Orioles were led by Earl Weaver, whose managerial style can best be described as belligerent alcoholic Irish uncle. 

I knew the players – Jim Palmer and Al Bumbry spring immediately to mind – but that’s because I briefly collected baseball cards. 

I fell in love with the game of baseball in a weedy field. My brother had a friend named Tony who lived next door to his grandparents. They owned the lots behind their houses and left it undeveloped. Every summer we took over that massive weed-choked field. It’s probably a lot smaller than I remember it but in my imagination it’s huge. Tony’s dad cut it with a riding mower, and we used real baseballs, not softballs, so it couldn’t have been too small.

In the summer, all of the kids in the neighborhood would ride their bikes to Tony’s house and we’d play baseball all day long. I wasn’t particularly good, but I loved playing. Something about hitting the ball with the sweet spot of the bat was intoxicating to me. Lord knows it didn’t happen very often. 

One time I hit a screaming line drive and the pitcher stuck out his bare hand and somehow caught it. He’s was big beefy kid, and it took a few seconds for the pain to register. I don’t think I’d ever hit the ball that hard and I had tears in my eyes as I retreated into the shade of the trees. It just seemed so… unfair. 

That’s baseball. A humbling game no matter how old you are or what position you play. 

From there I decided I wanted to play organized baseball. No one encouraged me to do this. It was something I pursued on my own. I signed up for a county league for boys aged 12-15. I barely made the cut and was by far the youngest person on the team, perhaps even in the whole league. Some of the guys on my team chewed tobacco and shaved. I was a scrawny late bloomer and years away from hitting puberty. 

I was catastrophically bad. It wasn’t just that I was young and uncoordinated, but I also lacked a grasp of the fundamentals. Everything I knew about baseball I’d learned on the field behind Tony’s house. I’d never been coached in how to hold a bat, how to stand at the plate, how to run the bases, etc. Stuff that most of the boys I played with had learned a decade before. They weren’t teaching these things on the team I was on.

My position was right field but I never started a game. I always came in when we were losing badly or far ahead. I got one hit all year, and it was at the end of the season off my friend Mark Malloy who was making his first start and was just as terrified as I was.

I stuck it out for one more season after that and that was the end of my baseball career. 

I spent a good chunk of my life without thinking about baseball. I moved to Los Angeles in 1996, eight year after the Dodgers won the World Series for the last time, and two things happened that turned me into a Dodgers fan. 

I got a job at an advertising agency that bought season tickets every year that no one ever used. Sometimes they’d be given away to prospective clients but the Dodgers weren’t very good and there wasn’t much demand for the tickets. I was one of the few straight single men at the agency so I went to the ballpark for free a lot. That’s how I fell in love with Dodgers Stadium.  

Then the tape player broke in my pick-up truck and the Clash’s self-titled debut (the UK version, not the US release) got stuck in the deck. I started listening to the radio during the long drive out to the beach where I lived. At first it was a matter of trying to make the time pass because the commercial breaks between innings were much shorter than on KROQ, which played shitty music anyway. 

At some point I fell in love with Vin Scully’s voice. And why not? He’s a New Yorker, a veteran of the U.S. Navy and the best broadcaster who ever lived. I loved the way he spun a narrative out of numbers that allowed me to visualize the game while sitting in L.A.’s mind-deadening traffic. 

I think I fought off baseball fandom for as long as I did because sports already took up way too much of my life. I was obsessed with the New York Giants and was in a bad relationship with the New York Knicks, fantasy sports and, occasionally, gambling. 

But then I gave up basketball for good, stopped going to bars, and haven’t owned a television in 15 years. There was room in my life for the Dodgers.

I go to a handful of games each year because a trip to the ballpark is always a great way to spend the day. Every spring I renew my subscription to MLB Radio. For $20 I can listen to any game, home or away, in English or Spanish, all season long. It’s one of the best values in entertainment. 

Thanks to the COVID-19, I never felt more disconnected from sports than I did this past spring. I thought the decision to open up the leagues was crazy. I was convinced it couldn’t work. For a time I went along with the idea that sports are a reward of a functioning society. Insisting on pushing through with shortened seasons was just going to get more people sick with a deadly disease we still don’t understand. 

When the games started, I tuned in. I was convinced it couldn’t last so I might as well listen for a week or two before they shut it all down. Outbreaks in Miami and St. Louis bolstered this belief. But somehow MLB managed to keep the bulk of its players healthy. Even more impressive, the teams managed to keep their staffs and employees healthy. Many teams went through the season without a single case. Baseball has done a better job of keeping its people healthy than the federal government, which is both shameful and horrifying.

It was weird at first. Empty stadiums filled with cardboard cutouts and piped in crowd noise? Was that really baseball? Sure it was and I was astonished by how quickly I got used to it. 

The Dodgers two broadcasters, Charlie Steiner and Rick Monday spent the entire season working together but apart—just like the rest of us. Charlie had a studio installed at his home. Rick essentially moved into Dodgers Stadium, going into the booth for home games and working out a trailer for away games where he also slept at night because it was too dangerous to travel. 

And yet, listening to Charlie and Rick call games in this weirdest of seasons was one of the few times when I wasn’t worried about the pandemic or the monster in the White House. In other words, when the Dodgers were on the radio and I was texting with friends about the action on the field or playing a board game with my family, things felt normal. 

Win or lose, that normalcy is coming to an end. If the series goes to seven games the Dodgers and the Rays will still be playing next Wednesday, but I don’t think it’s going to come to that. 

In a year that has been so improbable could the impossible happen—again? 

A spooktacular tale of desperation and debauchery  

There was a time in my life when I used the word spooktacular without irony. This coincided with the time in my life when I drank vodka and snorted cocaine on the job. So it wasn’t exactly a happy time but the point is I feel no shame about any of these things.

Many of you know a few years ago I wrote a novel about a tribal casino that may or may not be haunted and may or may not be based on my own experiences of working in a tribal casino. However, many of you may be blissfully unaware of this fact. Well no longer! 

While organizing my studio, I found a box of these novels, which is called Forest of Fortune. Since it’s the Halloween season and Forest of Fortune is a quasi-horror story with at least one ghost and a not-insignificant body count, I’d love to send you a copy.  

You could order from Amazon, which carries copies of Forest of Fortune for shockingly low prices, but if you order through my Etsy store I’ll send you a spooktacukar drawing (meaning kind of spooky and not very good) along with your copy. Think of it as a sigil to keep you safe on your journey into the unknown…

Be safe and don’t take chances with the coronavirus.