Our Dodgers, Ourselves

I live in California. Southern California, more specifically. One thing that the nonnative sect usually notes about this part of state is that the weather is always pretty much the same here - fairly temperate and, more often than not, completely lovely. Even though my aversion to the whole “California girl” image is substantial (and yours would be too if you were brunette and pale and bookish), I have to admit that I love California. There’s something nice about being able to wear flip-flops every day for eleven months of the year. Forget flip-flops – how about the fact that you can enjoy a nice day at the beach for that same period of time as well? Hell, think bigger than the beach – how about the fact that it’s totally possible to, if you were tremendously motivated (and in tremendous physical shape), surf in the ocean, ski in the mountains, and go four-wheeling in the desert, all in the same day? That’s actually pretty extraordinary. So Cal is pretty extraordinary. And I count it an extraordinary privilege to get to call myself her native daughter.

Still, as closely as I hold California to my heart, enjoy her many pleasures, and defend her countless virtues to bitter and lofty out-of-staters (whose outward hate is, I believe, secret envy of the sunshine-y, carefree beauty of my home turf), I have to confess that living here has a tendency to become somewhat tedious. I guess you could say that the grass is always greener on the other side, but that’s just it – the grass is always greener in So Cal, and while the absence of changing seasons makes it an awfully nice place to live, it robs you of a feeling of time and space and rhythm and a sense of the natural progression of things. It’s hard to differentiate between the months when they’re all just an endless parade of warm days strung together one right after the next. There’s really no winter or spring or summer or fall here. It’s just one long, sunny blur until we roll over the calendars in January and start again…that is, unless you’re a baseball fan. To baseball fans, there are two seasons, and two seasons exclusively, no matter where you live: Baseball season, when nothing else seems to hold as much importance as how your team did that day, and the off season, when you sit around waiting for baseball season to start up again. And if you are So Cal born and bred like me, there’s more than a fair chance that you’re a Dodger fan. And if you are indeed a Dodger fan…well, I feel your pain.

Is there anything or anyone in the world that can take your heart, break it, and put it back together again more effectively than the Dodgers? I doubt it. But that’s what they do. They take your already half empty glass, knock it over, then fill it to the brim before downing it, again and again and again, until it occurs to you that your life as a blue-bleeder is nothing more than several minor nervous breakdowns in nine inning increments, 162 times a year. But you love it. It makes you a sadist, sure, but you love it for those moments when it makes you an optimist. And, to be honest, at the core of every Dodger fan’s soul lies a hidden optimist. You would have to be to cherish a team who will unfailingly win enough games to get you thinking that this is the year they’re going to make something big happen, only to inexplicably lose their steam come September, taking your heart and your dreams of post season glory with them. Yet even then, you can’t deny that every time Vin Scully declares, “It’s time for Dodger baseball!” you know in your gut that those are the most beautiful and comforting words in the English language. The Dodgers – they do that to you.

When the train inevitably jumps the tracks, it becomes a spectacle that’s literally painful to watch. It’s like a stab in the heart. Most people say that the ungodly traffic is the reason Dodger fans leave the games in the seventh inning; I say it’s because we just can’t stand to see how bad the damage is when the wheels come off. Either way, you have to know that we’re listening to the game on the radio as we shake our heads and battle our way out of the parking lot. Because that’s what we do – we love them no matter how much they screw things up for us. We keep coming back for more because we know, somewhere in the depths of our souls, that the Dodgers can find their way back from whatever defeats they will most certainly suffer. We might not have a lot of proof to substantiate this claim, but still we cling desperately to the hope that our injured players might get it together and Kirk Gibson their way into baseball history, that our misfit infield will somehow morph itself into a kind of Garvey-Lopes-Russell-Cey magic machine, that when our pitchers take the mound, the memory of the greats like Koufax and Drysdale will be there with them, inspiring every pitch to dance over the plate. We hope for these things because we have no other choice than to hope for these things. For better or for worse, the Dodgers are inherently ours and vice versa.

Maybe being a Dodger fan is a fantastic metaphor for life: It’s a constant, devastating, bullish struggle. You have to be steadfast and unflinching and hopeful, because if you’re not, you have no chance whatsoever of succeeding – you’ve lost before you’ve even really begun. You’ll strike out – a lot – but you have to come to your next at-bat believing that the next pitch is your pitch. You may have lost by 20 runs today, but you have to know that you can win by that many tomorrow. It’s about recognizing and appreciating the fact that you’ll have another opportunity to make things right. It’s a blank scorecard. A freshly raked field. A clean uniform. Another at-bat. Another game. Another chance to start over. Maybe that’s a kind of beacon of hope that we could all use in our lives every once and a while. I’m more than okay with letting the Dodgers be that beacon for me.