Phillies up 2 to nothing in the playoff series.\u00c2\u00a0 This is good because I despise the Los Angeles Dodgers.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 I have always hated the Dodgers, with a white hot passion, and have pumped my fist in triumph\u00c2\u00a0year in and year out when they’ve invariably been eliminated from post-season contention.<\/p>\n
It is weird, because I don’t even have a team I root for.\u00c2\u00a0 I just root for the Dodgers to fail.\u00c2\u00a0 I think this came from my dad.\u00c2\u00a0 It really sticks with you, watching at the age of eight a ball-game with your dad.\u00c2\u00a0 I assume my father picked up his Dodgers – hatred from growing up near San Francisco, but he never rooted for the Giants.\u00c2\u00a0 Anyway, the Dodgers would cause him to rattle off, completely uncharacteristically, a string of profanity and bile toward their star players.<\/p>\n
This spilled over into my brief woeful Little League career.\u00c2\u00a0 See, we were coached by this major Dodgers fan — this burly man Aaron Mantle, always wearing a Dodgers\u00c2\u00a0cap and asking “What would Tommy Lasorda Do?”.\u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0He was interesting — something of the permanent little league coach and not a parent, and the norm for children’s sports’ leagues is that a parent of someone was the manager\/coach.\u00c2\u00a0 But this did absolve some of the problems that come from that — preferential treatment to the coach’s kid, so maybe that should be the standard.<\/p>\n
I wasn’t on that team too long.\u00c2\u00a0 The star of the team was also a big Dodgers fan.\u00c2\u00a0 He was a kid by the name of Mickey Ruth.\u00c2\u00a0 He\u00c2\u00a0started to tease me about this.\u00c2\u00a0 I didn’t have a leg to stand on, since the only reason I was ever pulled into a game was the “everyone plays” ethic which comes with Little League, and even at that I was always coached to bunt the ball.\u00c2\u00a0 But this intense confrontation eventually came to blows.\u00c2\u00a0 All I can say is that my parents picked me up, blood pouring out of my nose, and some raw skid marks on my arms.\u00c2\u00a0 I lied about what happened, and rattled off an incoherent and self-contradictory story, which at any rate went against the story as relayed later by Coach Mantle.\u00c2\u00a0 I only went to a couple more practices — even at that age, I could sense I was done.\u00c2\u00a0 My parents tried to gracefully exit me to something else and suggested I pick up Karate practice, which I agreed to but was never taken to.<\/p>\n
The Little League team went on to win the World Series against a team from Taiwan, and Mickey Ruth became a major nationwide sensation.\u00c2\u00a0 Adding insult to injury, this was also the year that the Dodgers won the pennant.\u00c2\u00a0 My hatred for the Dodgers intensified.\u00c2\u00a0 A few years later, I experienced great schaudenfruede when it was revealed that Ruth was a ringer who was lying about his age and was actually seventeen years old, which also helped me feel better about him beating me to a pulp.\u00c2\u00a0 I cannot quite recall what happened to the rest of that team’s championship title, and now that I think about it it must have been shattering — but Hey!\u00c2\u00a0 I had no connection to that team, so what did I care?\u00c2\u00a0 And I never slackened off on my hatred of the Dodgers.\u00c2\u00a0 A\u00c2\u00a0group of athletically elite millionaire ball-players assembled out of free agency– how can anyone relate to such a team?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Phillies up 2 to nothing in the playoff series.\u00c2\u00a0 This is good because I despise the Los Angeles Dodgers.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 I have always hated the Dodgers, with a white hot passion, and have pumped my fist in triumph\u00c2\u00a0year in and year out when they’ve invariably been eliminated from post-season contention. It is weird, because I don’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}