Apr 09

Welcome Back to Dodger Stadium!

Posted on April 9, 2012 by Tom

One thing you should know about me as a sports fan: the Los Angeles Dodgers are a veryclose second to USC football. And, to be honest, without the fact that I eventually attended USC after growing up a Trojan football fan, the Dodgers would likely be far and away No. 1. The first Dodger game I remember attending was in 1976 (vs. the then-brown-and-gold clad San Diego Padres), and in the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of my annual birthday presents was tickets to a game, usually on the next homestand (in mid-late May). Those tickets included two of the more memorable moments I enjoyed as a child with my dad at Dodger Stadium: a Dusty Baker 3-run HR to beat the St. Louis Cardinals and seeing Pete Rose and Larry Bowa of the Philadelphia Phillies both get thrown out of the game arguing the same call at third base in an eventual Dodger victory.

The colors ... the packed house ... it's Dodger Stadium on Opening Day (here, 2009).

However, those memories – and many, many more – often take a back seat to one of the greatest traditions in this city: the Dodgers’ home opener. It’s an event that is always sold out, and for generations of Southern Californians, tomorrow’s 50th anniversary opener against Pittsburgh (intriguingly, it’s the Dodgers first home opener against the Pirates since 1957, the club’s final year in Brooklyn) carries an awful lot of emotional attachments. With the recent announcement of the sale of the team to a big-bucks investor group fronted by Laker legend Magic Johnson, hopes are high that a turnaround from the embarrassment of the past two seasons is not too far off, and that the 24-year drought without a National League pennant or world championship may be closer to an end. At the same time, the fact that the opener is 50 years to the day from the first Opening Day at Dodger Stadium once again will allow long-time fans to revel in the decades of great memories that have occurred in Chavez Ravine.

Tomorrow will be my 27th Opening Day in the past 31 seasons, and the night before has always been a Christmas Eve of sorts for me. To celebrate, here are my personal top 10 Dodger Stadium Opening Day memories.

Armando Benitez likely looked rather similar after the 2005 Dodgers' home opener.

10. April 12, 2005: Dodgers 9, Giants 8. In a very sloppily played opener between two teams that would go on to underwhelm for the next six months, Jeff Weaver allowed eight runs in 3+ innings and the Dodgers trailed 8-3 after four. It was still 8-5 Giants heading to the bottom of the ninth, when the Dodgers staged a two-out rally against San Francisco’s wildly unreliable closer, Armando Benitez. With the bases loaded and still trailing 8-6, Milton Bradley lined a single to left field that went between defensive replacement Jason Ellison’s legs, allowing all three runners to score for what, looking back, was probably the most enjoyable win of a horrible Dodger season.

9. April 1, 1997: Phillies 3, Dodgers 0. In the second-most masterful Opening Day pitching performance I’ve seen at Dodger Stadium, Curt Schilling strikes out 11 L.A. batters and allows just two hits over eight innings to outduel Ramon Martinez and silence the big Dodger Stadium crowd.

Hideo Nomo outdueled the Braves' Tom Glavine on Opening Day 1996.

8. April 8, 1996: Dodgers 1, Braves 0. Schilling’s performance, though, paled to Hideo Nomo’s complete game shutout one year before. While Nomo was (predictably) wild, walking five while striking out six, he made his best pitches at the biggest moments. Atlanta’s Tom Glavine made just one mistake, allowing a two-out run scoring single to Raul Mondesi in the third inning, during his 7-inning performance. But Nomo had an answer for every Brave rally, holding Atlanta to just three hits.

7. April 14, 2000: Dodgers 8, Reds 1. In what was to be Orel Hershiser’s final major league victory (he had rejoined the Dodgers in the offseason and would retire in late June after struggling for most of the season), the Bulldog pulled out one more bit of Dodger Stadium magic, holding the Reds to one run over 6 tough innings. The Dodgers then broke open a tight game with a 6-run seventh inning, including back-to-back 2-run doubles by Shawn Green and Eric Karros.

Hubie Brooks' game-winning HR in 1990 was just part of a packed day.

6. April 9, 1990: Dodgers 4, Padres 2. In a season opener delayed one week by a pre-season players’ strike, new Dodger Hubie Brooks clubbed a 3-run home run in the bottom of the eighth innning to give Dodgers’ fans a memorable Opening Day victory. This day was also the only time where I attended both the Dodgers and Angels home openers on the same day. My friends Lee and Jeff rolled with me to Dodger Stadium for the afternoon game and then headed south down the 5 for the Angels evening opener, where Ken Griffey Jr.’s booming 3-run HR off Bert Blyleven provided the difference in a 7-4 Mariners win. Amazingly, our seats for each game were within about 2o feet of the landing spots of both Brooks’ and Griffey’s home runs. A truly memorable day.

5. April 13, 2009: Dodgers 11, Giants 1. The Dodgers walking through the stands and among the 56,000 fans down to the third-base line during pre-game introductions. Vin Scully, perhaps the most important Dodger of them all, throwing out the first ball to celebrate his 60th season broadcasting for the team. And a 10-run victory over the rival Giants? That’s gotta be a top-fiver, right?

Raul Mondesi celebrates his game-winning HR on Opening Day 1999.

4. April 5, 1999: Dodgers 8, Diamondbacks 6 (11). Raul! Raul! Mondesi’s 3-run homer with two out in the bottom of the ninth spoiled Randy Johnson’s strong 7-inning start by tying the game at six. And his two-run blast deep into the Dodger bullpen in the bottom of the 11th won it. A great memory provided by a player whose flashes of brilliance were too far and few between for a man of his prodigious physical tools.

3. April 13, 1989: Astros 4, Dodgers 2 (15). The game itself was a 4 1/2 hour exercise in pulling teeth, basically previewing the Dodgers’ season that year. But, oh, the pregame ceremony celebrating the 1988 World Champions! Watching the entire roster carry the World Championship banner from home plate out to the centerfield flagpoles and hoist it up – unforgettable. It was the perfect way to celebrate a team that truly was more than the sum of its parts.

2. March 31, 2008: Dodgers 5, Giants 0. Speaking of unforgettable, the Opening Day celebration of the Dodgers’ 50th season in Los Angeles featured a who’s who – in uniform – of past players, all gathered in their positions on the field. With the final trio of Tom Lasorda, Fernando Valenzuela and Sandy Koufax literally bringing thousands of Dodger fans to tears, it was the perfect encapsulation of Los Angeles Dodgers history. The poetic justice of the final score – 5-0 (fifty years); 5-0 (then the total of World Series titles won by the rival Dodgers and Giants in the 50 years since their tandem move west) – was just icing on the cake.

Dusty Baker's walk-off single is still the highlight of my ultimate Opening Day.

1. April 6, 1982: Dodgers 4, Giants 3. Amazingly, after all these years, the first is still the best. And, that’s the glory of Dodger history (as well as representative of the struggles of most of the past two decades). My favorite childhood player, Dusty Baker, singled home the winning run in the bottom of the ninth to beat the Giants about three hours after the Dodgers raised the 1981 World Champions banner in centerfield. I remember our family and friends lingering after the final out for souvenirs, the awe of the fact that we’d gotten to see the opening game, the banner raising and the Dodgers beat the Giants – all in one day – kind of coursing through me. And then my sister and I spotted Dodger pitcher Bob Welch jogging through the field level concourse to his car, and chasing after him for his autograph. Unfortunately, he was a lot faster than a 10-year old and an 8-year old.

Will April 10, 2012 crack the list? Isn’t that always the hope that is part of Opening Day?

Go Dodgers!

Mar 03

A Smattering of Unrelated Mini-Rants

Posted on March 3, 2012 by Tom

For all the media’s predictable hype, at 11:30 p.m. on Friday, March 2, the Lakers (who, if you are to believe the tenor of the local media since the NBA blew up the Chris Paul trade in December, are old, poorly coached, boring and barely hanging on to relevance) and the Clippers (who, if you believe the tenor of the local media since the NBA allowed their clearly inferior deal for the same Paul to go through, are young, hip, exciting and a clearly elite threat to win the NBA title) are in a virtual tie for first place in the Pacific Division more than halfway through the season. This is proof of one of two (or maybe both) things: the canyon between these two franchises was so incredibly vast prior to December 2011 that the Clippers having an almost identical record to the Lakers (and a 1-1 split in the season series to this point) is reason enough for Clipper-based orgasms of BS; or that the sports media, both locally and nationally, are more prone to bogus hype than the bastard child of TMZ.com and the National Enquirer …

"Basketball reasons."

Speaking of sports hype: Jeremy Lin. Nice story. Impressive run. Plenty of intrigue to it, from the Harvard angle, to the Asian-American angle, to the out-of-the-blue angle. Fortunate to be in the center of a New York media maelstrom that glorifies the Knicks as if their history is comparable to the the Lakers or Celtics, rather than that of the Rockets or Pistons. Here’s hoping the kid keeps it up and becomes a long-term NBA star, rather than simply another reason for ESPN to run more Tim Tebow stories …

Hey, Rush Limbaugh: Way to steal the spotlight from Andrew Breitbart. For once, thanks, big guy …

New Springsteen: Big thumbs up. April 27 can’t come soon enough …

The First Amendment is just as much about the freedom from religion as it is the freedom of religion. Read it. In essence, the idea is no law should restrict a person’s ability to practice his or her religion, but at the same time, no law should be based on the beliefs of a specific religion. Make of this what you will …

“The Artist” as Best Picture at the Oscars seemed foregone for a while now. Excellent film. But, as an L.A. guy, I still think it’s victory was a West Coast example of the N.Y./D.C. East Coast navelgazing media winning out. Hollywood’s a company town. I found “The Descendants” a much more relevant film for our time …

RE: the UCLA basketball story in Sports Illustrated. Of course, as an SC guy, I get some mild amusement from it. But, really, what’s going on there that isn’t going on with a ton of other college students or not-very-successful athletic teams? Kids in college going to a rave? Getting high? Showing up somewhere hung over? Struggling teams featuring bad seeds? Dissension? Poor coaching and leadership? None of this is really massive news, is it? To give UCLA due credit, the reason SI makes this a story is because UCLA has the greatest winning tradition in college basketball. So, in the end, I find this story a different kind of hype than the ones above … but hype nonetheless …

You'd be smiling too.

RE: the recent Oregon/NCAA news (which was expertly dumped late on a Friday; good work Oregon athletic department taking cues from the U.S. government’s way of keeping bad news quiet by releasing it when the pundits are well into a weekend-beginning Happy Hour): Here are two links that fit my thoughts as an observer of the NCAA’s growing impotence (at best) or crookedness (at worst) and where my amusement comes in as a USC fan.

Finally, I just spent a week at an industry conference in Miami. Thoughts:

Our people still know how to use their expense accounts to treat each other to amazing meals and drinks at incredible bars, lounges and clubs. I’ll never rant about that; it’s the way business gets done AND it’s a helluva perk …
That said, those hefty expense accounts are one of many things that seem to give a level of self-importance to people with no real right to it. Just be you, and I’ll be me, and if it makes sense for us to work together, let’s do it …
DR is an industry of optimists. If a product deserves a chance to work, the people in this business really will give it a fair shot …
I’m always amazed by the ability of four people around a table discussing direct response advertising (myself included) to make said conversation appear to outsiders as important as a discussion between world leaders on nuclear disarmament. I’m telling you, we’ve all got that “interested/concerned/piqued/amused” rotation of faces down pat …
I don’t think I’ve ever spent five days in a hotel at a networking show and never once seen a single employee of the organization hosting that event … until this week (that’s especially surprising when the organization has something along the lines of two-dozen staffers). As someone who co-founded and co-hosts an industry event that draws 3,000 people, it seems that it’s kind of hard to know what your constituents want or need from the event if your staff is locked up in board rooms or “working” an essentially non-existent “show floor” while the massive bulk of your attendees are doing business across the many bars, restaurants and public spaces at the fantastic property you’ve booked. For me, understanding the full experience of everyone at the event is always crucial to improving it the next time around. That’s why I always spend time on the floor, in the conference rooms, with our sponsors, around the hotel’s bars and restaurants, and at the parties that other companies throw in conjunction with our event …
Smartphones are great. I love my iPhone. But they’ve become the bane of the scheduled meeting at events like this. “Hold on, I need to take this call,” is rarely a sufficient excuse to put a 10-minute hold on the one face-to-face meeting we’re likely to have in the next 3-5 months …
“I have a hard stop.” Yea, I have a meeting at 2:30, also. But I don’t need to use a dumb corporatized catch-phrase to tell you that (and make you feel like this meeting doesn’t remotely compare to your 2:30) …

With that, this blogging effort has reached a hard stop … for bed.

Feb 04

Picture This?!

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Tom

I’ve always enjoyed taking pictures (as anyone who’s a Facebook friend of mine will readily attest, perhaps even derisively). And I feel like I have a pretty good eye with a camera. But I’ve never considered myself a “photographer” if you catch my drift.

But with some access to a really nice Nikon and Adobe Lightroom, I’ve decided to give “photography” a try in 2012. So, here are some of my best efforts from my first couple weeks of fiddling around. I’d love to hear what you think — even if you think I should just stick to taking pictures rather than becoming a photographer.

For larger image sizes, just click on any picture to take you to the scrollable gallery of “full-size” photos.