A Stupid Loss for a Great Team

For the third straight year, I was in Los Angeles in early July to see the Dodgers with Sean, Pete, and Lorenzo.  Two years ago was a low point in their season.  Last year, I went to the game the night before Clayton Kershaw’s 3,000th strikeout.  This year I was there to see some interesting Dodger history.

We all knew Shohei Ohtani was one home run away from 300.  What I did not know until after the fact was that this was the Dodgers’ 11,110th game as the Los Angeles Dodgers (between the regular season and the postseason).  That is noteworthy because the Brooklyn Dodgers played 11,109 games between the regular season and the postseason.  The seasons are longer now and there are more postseason games so they still haven’t spent as much time in Los Angeles as they did in Brooklyn, but they have now played more games as the Los Angeles Dodgers than they did as the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Before the game, Sean and I stopped at Philippe’s for French dip sandwiches.  Philippe’s is pretty close to the stadium so it is always a good option before a Dodger game.  They should have Philippe’s inside the stadium.  There are a decent number of food options, but they could use something local like this in the stadium.  But I’m not too concerned about the food inside the stadium because if I’m only going to get there for one game a year, I’m getting Dodger Dogs and not worrying about the other options.

As for the game, it was Justin Wrobleski for the Dodgers against Michael Lorenzen for the Rockies.  I had just seen the Rockies get pounded a week earlier.  I hoped to see that again, but it was not to be.  Justin Wrobleski probably doesn’t get enough credit for his performance in the World Series last year.  He pitched five scoreless innings in four games (including four scoreless innings in the Dodgers’ last three wins).  He did that after not pitching at all in the playoffs before that.  This year, he’s been excellent as a starter.  He’s 7th in the NL in ERA, tied for 4th in wins, and tied for 3rd in WHIP.  He was not originally selected as an all star (he would have been if not for the fact that every team gets an all star and the Dodgers already had five).  I figured he would get added as a replacement and that’s what happened.  As for this game, he was really good.  He allowed one run on six hits and two walks with nine strikeouts in seven innings.  He left in position to win.  Unfortunately he didn’t get the win.

Shohei Ohtani got rid of any possible suspense by hitting his 300th career home run leading off the bottom of the first.  He’s going to break Mookie Betts’s record for most career leadoff home runs (Betts has 32, but Ohtani is now at 27).  Only two Dodgers have ever hit 300 home runs with the Dodgers (Duke Snider and Gil Hodges), but Ohtani was the eighth player to hit his 300th career home run with the Dodgers (Snider, Hodges, Gary Sheffield, Adrian Gonzalez, Freddie Freeman, JD Martinez, Mookie Betts, and Ohtani).

Shohei Ohtani is about to hit his 300th home run.

The Dodgers made it 2-0 on a bases loaded walk by Andy Pages in the fifth, but they missed an opportunity to add more that inning.  The Rockies scored on a groundout in the sixth, but the Dodgers answered with an RBI single by Alex Freeland in the bottom of the sixth to make it 3-1.  The Dodgers brought in World Series hero Will Klein in the eighth inning.  He was the most random World Series hero for the Dodgers last year after pitching 15 ⅓ regular season innings and just one inning in the postseason (a very low leverage inning when the Dodgers lost Game 1 by a score of 11-4) before pitching four scoreless innings in Game 3 (he was the only Dodger other than Yamamoto to get a win in the series).  He’s been very good for the Dodgers in a bigger role this year, but he was not good on this night.  He only got one out and three runs on one hit and one walk (all of the runs were unearned because of an error, but Klein wasn’t good).  The first run scored on Miguel Rojas’s error fielding a possible double play ball that could have ended the inning.  The worst case scenario should have been runners on the corners with two outs.  Instead it was runners on the corners with one out and a run scoring.  Although Klein wasn’t good, he could have gotten out of it without any runs scoring if the Dodgers had gotten the double play there.  But they didn’t and the Dodgers brought in Jack Dreyer.  Jake McCarthy put down a bunt to Max Muncy and Muncy threw to Alex Freeland covering first base on the bunt for the second out.  The tying run scored on the bunt and with Muncy fielding the bunt, nobody was covering third so the runner from first just kept going.  Alex Freeland made a poor decision to throw it and try to hit Miguel Rojas on the run covering third.  Even if Rojas caught it, they probably weren’t getting the out.  But Rojas didn’t catch it, the ball went into the dugout and the run scored.  So the tying run scored from third and the go ahead run scored from first on a bunt.  Miguel Rojas had the biggest hit of the World Series with his game-tying home run in the top of the ninth inning in Game 7.  But this wasn’t a good inning for him.  It was a really stupid inning.  But Will Klein and Miguel Rojas are definitely allowed to have a bad game after what they did for the Dodgers in the World Series last year.

The Dodgers were only down by a run against a bad team so I was hoping they would come back.  They didn’t do anything in the eighth.  In the ninth inning, they had 8, 9, and 1 coming up.  I figured we would get pinch hitters since Mookie Betts and Teoscar Hernandez weren’t playing.  Dave Roberts let Alex Freeland hit and that worked as he got a single.  Then Roberts went to Teoscar Hernandez to pinch hit for Miguel Rojas and Hernandez walked.  So it was looking pretty good for the Dodgers with the tying run on second and the go ahead run on first with nobody out and the top of the order coming up.  But Shohei Ohtani popped up on the infield and Andy Pages hit a fly ball to right.  That brought up Freddie Freeman.  The first pitch was called a ball.  The Rockies challenged and the call was overturned.  The second pitch was called a ball.  The Rockies challenged and the call was overturned.  Freeman ended up striking out on the sixth pitch of the at bat to end the game.  The game didn’t end on a challenge, but it made me think of how lame it would be if a playoff game ended on a challenge or if you thought a playoff game ended and then it didn’t because of a challenge.  I have my issues with the ABS strike zone and I would just get rid of it, but that’s not going to happen so I would be fine if they just used it instead of having challenges.  Or if they just used it for the ninth inning and extra innings and got rid of challenges after eight innings, that would be better also.

This was my 17th game at Dodger Stadium.  The first games I went to there were before the blog in 2011.  The Dodgers are 9-8 in the games I’ve been to at Dodger Stadium.  So that’s a .529 winning percentage.  Apparently their overall winning percentage at Dodger Stadium since the start of 2011 is .635.  So they’ve been bad by their standards with me in attendance.  But it’s a small sample size and also it’s correlation not causation so I’m definitely not going to conclude that I shouldn’t go to games at Dodger Stadium.  The only stadiums where I’ve seen more baseball games are Shea Stadium (my estimate is that I attended around 50 games at Shea Stadium) and Citi Field (I’ve been to 34 games at Citi Field), and maybe the old Yankee Stadium (I’ve been to eight baseball games and four football games at the new stadium and my estimate is that I went to like 13-20 games at the old stadium).  I wish I could get to more games at Dodger Stadium.  I used to try to get to two games when I would visit, but ticket prices are so crazy now.  I had a couple of Dodger Dogs that were very good, but the lack of real mustard was disappointing.  To drink I had a 310 Blonde from Santa Monica Brew Works (which Pete and I visited many years ago).  Dodger has a couple of areas with a decent craft beer selection.  A lot of it is from California, but more like San Diego or northern California.  I wanted a more local beer (I can’t be drinking beer from Padres or Giants territory at Dodger Stadium) and the 310 Blonde was very good.

It was a disappointing result, but the Dodgers have won the last two World Series, so whatever.  I always like being at Dodger Stadium and it was good seeing Pete and Lorenzo there again.  It was 76°, attendance was 47,806 (probably the biggest crowd for a baseball game that I’ll get to this year), and the game took two hours and 30 minutes.  Major League Baseball just released their 2027 schedule.  Hopefully I’ll get back to Dodger Stadium to see a win next year, but that schedule is very much tentative at this point with a lockout possibly coming.  Hopefully Major League Baseball won’t be stupid enough to have a work stoppage, but Rob Manfred is the commissioner so I’m definitely worried.  If he has his way, Major League Baseball might come up with a collective bargaining agreement as stupid as the NBA’s.  I wonder what the position of the Dodgers’ ownership group is.  If I was them, I’d pretty much be on the players’ side.  So we’ll see what happens.  I hope we get a full 162 game season next year.  There’s a chance that this was my last baseball game of the year as I don’t have any solid plans to go to anymore games.  But there’s still a lot of summer left so I hope I’ll get to at least a couple more games before school starts.

A World Series Hero in the Wrong Uniform

Just a few days after getting home from Colorado and Wyoming, I headed out west again.  This time I was going to California for three baseball games.  I wanted to combine my nearly annual trip to Los Angeles with something else.  We were going to the Dodger game on Tuesday and a minor league game on Wednesday.  So that meant doing something on Monday or Thursday.  I looked at the minor league schedule for Thursday and the only games out west that would be easy to get to were places I had already been to (Reno and Las Vegas) and Sacramento (which I’m hoping to get to next year for an A’s game).  So that meant going to a game on Monday, but there are usually no minor league games on Mondays so I went to a Padres game.  It was my third Padres game.  I saw Dodgers-Padres in 2012 and Pirates-Padres in 2017.

This was Diamondbacks-Padres.  I had mixed feelings about the game.  Both teams are division rivals.  Both teams were tied for second at 14 games behind the Dodgers.  So there was no obvious rooting interest for the benefit of the Dodgers.  The Padres have been probably the Dodgers’ biggest rival this decade (the Dodgers beat them in the playoffs in 2020 and 2024 and lost to them in the playoffs in 2022).  But the Padres’ starter was Dodgers World Series hero Walker Buehler.  I hate that Buehler is on the Padres, but I can still root for him as long as he isn’t playing the Dodgers.  On the other hand, the Padres’ first three hitters were my three least favorite active players other than the cheating 2017 Astros who are still around:  Fernando Tatis (cheater), Jake Cronenworth (Michigan), and Manny Machado (Manny Machado).  So I guess I was rooting for the Padres to win this game 1-0 with anybody other than those guys scoring or driving in the run.  Unfortunately, Walker Buehler was not good.  It’s a shame he didn’t come around when pitchers weren’t throwing too hard because maybe he could have stayed healthy and had a great career.  Since having his second Tommy John surgery, he is 16-18 in the regular season with a 5.18 ERA and a 1.50 WHIP.  Before his second Tommy John surgery, he was 46-16 in the regular season with a 3.02 ERA and a 1.04 WHIP.  He’s had a nice career with some great postseason moments, but if he had come around a couple of generations earlier, he might have had an Orel Hershiser-type career.

The bad news was that Buehler was bad, but the good news was that the Padres didn’t hit.  The Diamondbacks took a 2-0 lead in the first with runs scoring on a throwing error by Buehler and an RBI single by Max Kepler.  Buehler ended up giving up seven runs in five innings, with Max Kepler and Geraldo Perdomo hitting home runs off of him.  Nolan Arenado added another home run later to make it 8-0.  And that was the final score.

It's not as good as PNC Park, a great view at Petco Park.

Petco Park is really good.  It’s one of the best in the Majors (I have it ranked fifth among stadiums that still exist, but the second best to be built after Dodger Stadium in 1962).  It opened in 2004, but I noticed during this trip that it has a little bit of a Fenway Park thing going on with ramps in random places a slight changes in elevation walking around the lower level.  I visited the Padres Hall of Fame, which I think has been added since my last time there nine years ago.  Since it's the Padres, it wasn't very big.  The craft beer selection looked really good.  I didn’t have one because I was definitely going to have a beer the next night at the Dodger game.  I did get the short rib quesabirria tacos.  They were fantastic.  Being in San Diego, I was hoping for fish tacos, but I didn’t see any.  I’ll take a hot dog at a baseball game any day and be perfectly happy, but these might have been the best specialty food I’ve had at a baseball game.

They gave me a fork, but the structural integrity of these tacos was very good.

So to summarize, the good news was that the Padres lost and the stadium and the tacos were great and the bad news was that Walker Buehler wasn’t good.  Oh well, he’ll always be fondly remembered by Dodger fans (he's on the All-Jim Team).  It was 72°, attendance was 38,204, and the game was two hours and 25 minutes.

The next day I was off to Los Angeles.  I’ll get to the game later, but I took the train from San Diego.  I had done the opposite train ride in 2017.  Going from San Diego to Los Angeles, most of the first half of the ride is right along the coast so that was cool.  The stop at Anaheim is right by Angel Stadium.  So I saw three Major League Baseball stadiums on this trip, but only attended games in two.

I took this picture from the train.

Shohei Ohtani used to work here.

Mile High Baseball

I don’t remember when I came up with the goal of getting to a sporting event in all 50 states.  Whenever I did, I had probably already been to a sporting event in 30+ states.  But actually doing all 50 seemed like a long shot.  The state that seemed most unlikely was Wyoming.  Well, I crossed Wyoming off the list and I only have three left.  It was the second leg of my first trip of the summer.

I flew out to Denver and went to Marlins-Rockies.  Those two teams didn’t exist until I was nine years old.  It was my third time at Coors Field.  The first was in 2012 for Dodgers-Rockies.  The second time was when I flew out to Denver and met Tom to help him move across the country in 2017.  We didn’t get to a game, but we did the stadium tour.  So I was back for a second game.  It was really just because I wanted to combine Wyoming with something and Denver was pretty much the only logical choice.

I got to Denver and I didn’t have anything planned other than the game so I took a nap when I got to my hotel room before the game.  The forecast was good for the game, but when I left my hotel to walk to the stadium, the sky looked ominous.  There were some rain drops and I saw a few lightning strikes in the distance.  But the forecast still looked good for the game.  I got to Coors Field and took a lap around the stadium and then headed up to my seat.  Right before the game started, it started raining pretty good.  So I headed up to the purple row, which is 5,280 feet above sea level.  It was about five rows from the top, but it was high up enough to be under cover.  So I watched the beginning of the game from up there.  The rain didn’t last long and then I went down to the field level to get food and a beer.  I got the taco trio (three different tacos) and a 90 Shilling Amber Ale from the Odell Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colorado.  The tacos were pretty good and the beer was underwhelming.  I got it because it was one of the few craft beers I saw at the stadium.  There was a lot of crafty beer (Coors Field is where Blue Moon was created, but that’s owned by Molson Coors), but not a lot of actual craft beer.  I watched a little bit of the game from the field level down the first base line and then I headed back up to my actual seat.

This was the view from 5,280 feet above sea level.

As for the game, I didn’t really care too much who won.  In theory, the Rockies are a division rival for the Dodgers, but they’re terrible so I didn’t care if they won.  They also had Eric Karros’s son playing third base so I guess I was rooting for them.  It was Tanner Gordon pitching for the Rockies against Eury Perez.  The game was not very competitive.  The Marlins took a 1-0 lead in the first, but the Rockies tied it in the bottom of the first on a Mickey Moniak home run.  But the Marlins retook the lead in the second and then went up 5-1 on a three-run home run by Javier Sanoja in the third.  The lead got to 10-1 on a Joe Mack two-run home run in the seventh.  The Rockies scored a run in the bottom of the seventh to make it 10-2.  With a non-competitive game that I didn’t really care about, I left after seven innings.  The Marlins ended up winning 14-3.  It was 83° and attendance was 20.526.  I assume that will be the smallest crowd for a Major League game that I get to this year.  The game lasted three hours.

The next day, I was off to Casper, Wyoming.  But before that, I picked up breakfast at Sam’s No. 3 in Denver.  It was on Man v. Food.  I had a breakfast burrito that was pretty good.  Then I flew to Casper.  As far as I could tell, Denver was the only city that had flights to Casper.  The post-security area at the Casper airport was like one big room.  There were vending machines and no other food (there was a restaurant on the other side of security).  Casper is the second biggest city in Wyoming with a population of about 59,000 in the 2020 census (Cheynne had about 65,000).  The elevation is about the same as Denver.  In 2012, I drove from Denver to Cheyenne for breakfast because I figured I would never be in Wyoming again.  As it turns out, this was my third time in Wyoming.  Tom and I drove through Wyoming going from Denver to Salt Lake City on the first day I was with him when I was helping him move.  But of course, I hadn’t been to a sporting event in Wyoming.  Casper had a minor league team from 2001 or 2002 (Wikipedia has conflicting information) to 2011.  It was a rookie league team (rookie league doesn’t exist anymore) and the team eventually moved to Grand Junction, Colorado.  They played at Mike Lansing Field (named after a former Major Leaguer who was identified in the Mitchell Report as a cheater).  Now Mike Lansing Field is home to the Casper Spuds (the minor league team was the Casper Ghosts, which was a better name).  The Spuds are a collegiate summer league team.  I’ve done collegiate summer league baseball to cross off Alaska, Oregon, and Vermont on the list of states to see a sporting event in and so I was doing that with Wyoming.

I went to two games because I didn’t want to take the chance of traveling all the way to Wyoming and having a game rained out.  It was the Casper Spuds against the Oahe Zap (from Pierre, South Dakota).  I’m pretty sure the Zap won both games.  I left after seven innings both times.  I tried to look it up, but the websites for the two teams and the league are not good.  There was no information about the players (I would have checked to see where they play college baseball).  The Zap’s website has their scores from last season, but not this season.  The Spuds’ website doesn’t have anything.  But the Zap were leading when I left in both games and when I went to the second game, I heard some people talking about how the Spuds made a comeback the night before but came up short.  The food and beer selection was fine for a collegiate summer league team.  I had a bratwurst at the first game and nothing to drink.  For the second game, they had a food truck making quesadillas, but they were kind of expensive and also it was July 2 (our actual Independence Day) so I wanted to have a hot dog.  That worked out well because Thursdays are energy night.  I had no idea what that meant, but apparently it was $2 off hot dogs and beer.  So I got a hot dog for $3 and a Spuds Suds from the Black Tooth Brewing Company (a craft brewery in Wyoming).  Unfortunately they only had yellow and not real mustard, but the hot dog was good.  The beer was nothing special, but it was very cold.  The temperature was in the 80s for the games (on days when the highs back home were right around 100°).  I have no idea what the attendance was.  Wikipedia says that the stadium has a capacity of 2,500.  I’m pretty sure there were less than 1,000 people at the games I went to.  The stadium reminded me of the stadium in Boise, Idaho (another spot that no longer has a minor league team).  There were three sections of seats (one behind home plate, and one on each side of the field).  I sat behind home plate up near the press box for both games mainly to stay out of the sun before it set.  I think all the tickets were $10.  The scoreboard looked super old.  It must be the scoreboard from when the stadium originally opened.  If this was still a minor league stadium, it would be pretty terrible, but it's fine for collegiate summer league baseball.  So I got to cross Wyoming off the list of states to see a sporting event in and I celebrated the 250 years of American independence with baseball, a hot dog, and craft beer.  That was pretty good.

I think Wyoming was the most unlikely state for me to watch a baseball game, but I did it on my third trip to Wyoming (which is at least two more times than I ever thought I would be in Wyoming).

The only states I still have to see a sporting event in are West Virginia, Mississippi. and Hawaii.  I don’t know which one will be next or when that will be.

Mendoza!

I am not going to be able to see the Dodgers when they come to Citi Field this summer.  But I wanted to make sure I got to a game at Citi Field and a baseball game seemed like a good way to start summer vacation.  The plan was to go to Cubs-Mets on June 22.  That was the first day I was going to be off because of summer vacation.  My last day of school was June 18, but I would have been off the next three days even if it wasn’t summer vacation because it would have been Juneteenth, Saturday, and Sunday.  So my dad and I were planning to go on Monday, June 22, but that game got rained out (I never bought tickets because the forecast looked pretty bad for a while).  The next two nights were the NBA Draft (which should be one night, not two) so we went on Thursday, June 25.  It ended up being Carlos Mendoza’s last game as the manager of the Mets.

This was our view for the game.

This was my 34th game at Citi Field in the 18 years that it has existed.  The only stadium I’ve been to more was Shea Stadium.  I don’t know the exact number of games I went to at Shea Stadium, but I went to games there over the course of 20 years and I would guess it was an average of about 2.5 games per year so I would guess I went to around 50 games there.  Of the 34 games I’ve been to at Citi Field, 22 have been against the Dodgers.  This time I was a neutral fan.  I would have been inclined to root for the Cubs because the Mets were wearing their stupid black uniforms, but there were other factors to consider.  The Cubs are managed by former Notre Dame baseball player Craig Counsell.  But Craig Counsell also complained about the Dodgers being able to count Shohei Ohtani as a position player.  He brought this up for no reason one time (it wasn’t when the Cubs were playing the Dodgers), but also his complaint is stupid.  If your roster is limited to 13 pitchers and you have a player that both pitches and hits, you should be able to count him as whatever you want to count him as on your roster.  The Cubs do have some former Dodgers.  They have Michael Conforto (perhaps the Dodger who contributed the least to last season’s championship), Justin Dean, and Michael Busch.  As much as I wanted to root for Justin Dean (he played in 13 playoff games in the playoffs last year with zero plate appearances, but the Dodgers went 12-1 in those games, including Games 2, 6, and 7 of the World Series), I couldn’t root for the Cubs.  Why?  Because although they have some guys I want to root for, they also have cheater Alex Bregman on their team.

Baseball is harder when you’re not cheating.

This was the final game of a four-game series against the Cubs.  The Mets had lost the first three.  It was Freddy Peralta for the Mets against Matthew Boyd for the Cubs.  Boyd pitched four and two-thirds scoreless and was taken out after 76 pitches because the way pitchers are used in 2026 is stupid.  Peralta pitched five scoreless and then came out with two outs in the sixth after giving up three unearned runs.  Michael Conforto drove in the first run on a single, cheater Alex Bregman drove in a run on a double, and then Ian Happ had an RBI single.  The Mets responded well, tying the game on home runs by Eric Wagaman and Jared Young in the sixth and seventh.  And then a perfectly good game was ruined by Rob Manfred extra innings.  Pete Crow-Armstrong drove in a runner who was on second base for no reason with an RBI double in the top of the tenth.  The Mets went down 1-2-3 in the bottom of the tenth and lost 4-3.  So the Mets allowed four runs and none of them were earned.  The first three were unearned because of a throwing error by shortstop Ronny Mauricio.  The last one was unearned because Rob Manfred put a runner on second base for no reason.  The night before, the Mets made six errors and gave up five unearned runs (and also five earned runs) and lost 10-5.  After the series against the Cubs Carlos Mendoza was fired.

Besides being subjected to Rob Manfred extra innings, it was good to be at a Major League Baseball game for the first time since I was in Minnesota ten months earlier.  Attendance was 36,035.  The game lasted three hours and 13 minutes and it was 76°.

I’ll finish with my thoughts on the World Cup.  I don’t have many thoughts because soccer is stupid.  I thought the thing I would enjoy most about the World Cup would be not watching it.  And indeed, I have enjoyed not watching it.  But the best thing about the World Cup has been seeing all these foreigners visiting the United States for the World Cup and realizing that the United States is pretty awesome.  I have many issues with soccer, but I’ll just mention two right now.  Why do soccer broadcasters use improper grammar?  They’ll say stuff like “Belgium have played well in the World Cup.”  Belgium is a singular noun.  If you said, “The Belgians have played well in the World Cup,” that would be grammatically correct because the subject of that sentence is a plural noun.  And why is the United States always referred to as USMNT?  I know it stands for United States Men’s National Team.  Why can’t we just call them USA Soccer?  Whenever I see USMNT, I just think United States Mutant Ninja Turtles.  So those are all my soccer thoughts for now.  I hope the United States wins to embarrass countries that care about soccer, but I’m not going to be watching because as a patriotic American, I definitely don’t care about soccer.