In Which I Fall In Love With Dodger Stadium All Over Again

In Which I Fall In Love With Dodger Stadium All Over Again

Ah spring, it’s that time of year again when it gets darker later and the weather is nicer. Love is in the air. And if you’re at Chavez Ravine you’ll know what I mean. Plain and simply, Thinking blue has never been so good.


This is the part where I show off my seats

While opening day is on Monday, I have made it a habit to go to the exhibition games for the last couple of years. Compared to opening day, the parking is actually something that wont drive you stir crazy. That and it’s an excuse to take in a long awaited Dodger Dog a couple of days early.

Add in that with the trip comes the chance to see all the changes that have happened to the stadium since last September. For months they were showing us glimpses and really, I was getting a little worried. For example, here’s some of the before and after shots.

From this


to this



to this


And from this

to


I know what you’re thinking, "Holy shit, what’s up with those Ghost?" Don’t worry, I thought the same thing. I can at least say that even with the new changes, the ghost of old players weren’t getting into fights with others because of a bad call. Then again, they haven’t had the Giants come to town yet. That’ll be the true test.

As if the pictures didn’t tell you enough, you may be asking what exactly did they add? For starters, the field section, and personally speaking the best place to sit in the stadium, has gone through a lot of changes. The old concrete look is long gone and it has a slick new shine and feel. Add in two new stadium club higher end dinning establishments as well and you got the ball rolling.

On that note, it should be mentioned that ghost get hungry. When they do, they’ll need new places to dine. Now I don’t know about your spooky old hospital ghost, but Dodger Stadium ghost are pure foodies


Add in the new food concession stands and you have yourself some amazing food to partake in while you sit and watch Joe Torre run a player into the ground. Which, by the way now has new bullpens with plenty of green. Something, I’m sure, Eric Gagne requested that they finally got around to it. Must have been why he signed to Boston.

So to run down some of the new treats, Camacho’s finally gets a spot for itself. In the years past, to get their nachos you would have to track down the one line hidden within the other stands. Now you get all the Camacho’s Nachos you can handle. Ruby’s Diner has its own stand. But since I really don’t care about that place and Angel stadium has ruined my taste for the place, I’ll just ignore it. Then you have the tried and true Gordon Biersch that has garlic fries that you would die for. There’s also a new Think Blue Bar. Which I guess it’s sort of themed. Just give me a good drink and I’ll be happy. Really, after a couple of Dodger special drinks and I really don’t know if I’ll be thinking much of anything.

Have a Hurricane and you’ll be ready to rock like one.

Finally we get to the best new addition to Dodger Stadium. Canter’s famous Jewish deli now has a concession stand. Which is great because I always felt that baseball was missing kosher food. I don’t know how many times I’ve been reading my tora while a ground rule double was in play and thought to myself "Boy is it drafty in here, what does a person have to do to get a matzo ball soup around here! Oh, don’t worry about me, I’ll just sit here and die of frost." So they answered my call. To be honest I’m glad they picked Canter’s over Jerry’s, I really don’t know how they would fit Jerry’s ten page menu into the food stand.


Oy! Canter’s in Dodger Stadium. What a world!

And last, but certainly first when it comes to food at Dodger Stadium is the classic Dodger dog. And I’ll answer this one off the bat, I do put ketchup on my dog. You no-ketchup on a hot purist can rot in hell for all I care, I like my wiener the way I like it! It should be mentioned that you should only buy the Super Dodger Dog. While I put my trust into grilled meat in tube form, I still like the taste of the Super Dog better.

mmmmm, first dodger dog of the season

And all that makes for signs of a great new season. Hell, so far I’ve gone to two games and am going to what will obviously be a cluster fuck Saturday game at the Coliseum. So all these are reasons for me to be excited. Maybe you also share the same feelings to the boys in blue. Just know that Dodger stadium keeps getting better and there’s no place I’d rather be on a warm summer night than catching a game at Dodger Stadium.

On a final note, if you are a guy and have ever pissed at Dodger Stadium, you would sure enough remember the troughs.

Horses and cattle eat from these, you.. pissed in one.

Lovely, aren’t they? Well, Good bye troughs, thanks for the awkward memories. At least in the field level area. They re-did all the bathrooms and made them pretty advanced. I’m not sure if they got to the other section bathrooms, but on the field level is where I sit whenever I come so it’s a change for me. And really, I’m going to miss those things. Nothing brought you together as a team like awkwardly pissing in the same general toilet as everyone else.

But when the baseball gods (Frank McCourt) closes a door, he opens a window. And this window is huge. They may have taken away the pissing spot for us guys but they added one piece of technology to all the restrooms. The airblade
I may just have to develop OCD so I can wash my hands and dry them in this thing 20 times in the span of a couple of innings. Simple instructions. Put your hands into it and it’ll blast both sides with blades of air. It’s like sex if you had to get wet for it and do it in the bathroom.


wait.. what did I just type?

Completely Useless Facts

An hour of your life vanished two weeks ago. Poof. There it went. Gone until November. Chances are you didn’t notice outside the fact that it was a little darker than usual when your alarm went off; or, more likely, when your mom opened up the curtain and told you that you were late for school. I was originally going to write something carefully detailing hours in my life that I wish would disappear. But I soon realized that I already did that last year and added a ton of useless blogs about daylight savings time before. Instead, I’ve decided to focus on a few hours we all wish to erase, that is, the hours that I learned all these useless facts. In an effort to pass on tiny bits of knowledge and waste even more hours of your life, here’s some facts that are completely and utterly useless. Enjoy. And if you taught me these, be proud that I remembered them.

John D. Rockefeller was the richest self-made man in human history. Adjusting for inflation, he would be worth 318.3 billion dollars today. At the time of his death in 1937, he was worth 1/65 of the entire GDP of the United States. The all-time richest person in human history however is King Solomon. His gold alone would be worth trillions and he had a vast amount of diamond mines in addition to that.

The phrase "play it again, Sam", made famous by the movie "Casablanca", was never actually said in the movie.
The actual lines from the movie were
"You played it for her, you can play it for me. Play it!".
"Play it, Sam. Play ’As Time Goes By"’.

To continue with misquoted Bogart movies, "We don’t need no stinkin’ badges" is never said in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It’s, "Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges."

Male opossums have forked penises, which is fortunate because the females have a forked vagina.

The letters U and J did not appear in the English alphabet until the 16th century. Before then, V and I were used in their place respectively, and still maintained the function we’ve come to know today. So next time you want to write to me, spell it with an I please.

The liver of a polar bear contains lethal (to humans) amounts of vitamin A. And while eskimos can’t go around eating polar bear livers, they can eat poisonous (to non eskimos) amounts of Vitamin A. There are stories of the accidentally poisoning explorers because the fish they ate contained so much Vitamin A which they were used to, but the explorers were not.

During the week of April 4th, 1964 the Beatles had twelve songs on the Billboard Hot 100 and they occupied the top five slots, which had never been done and to this day remains a record. They’re also the only artists to have back-to-back-to-back singles at 1. Boyz II Men , Nelly and Outkast have have back-to-back 1’s, but no one else has had a three-peat. Yesterday is the most covered song of all time.

Alaska is technically the westernmost, northernmost, and easternmost state. The Aleutian Islands cross the 180th meridian.

The first pornographic film was created by Thomas Edison’s assistant

A "tid bit/tit bit" is so called because it used to be a piece of information the newspapers printed for the guys to tell their wives.

The first Tuesday after the Easter break is colloquially called "Tits Tuesday" in London. This is because its typically the first time of year the girls get a chance to sunbathe. As such, the girls tend towards displaying their newly tanned flesh en masse during the weeks after. Hence "tits tuesday" names the first working day after the national holiday and reflects the fact that its the first day of the year men get to appreciate the female form in its resplendent glory. Sunbeds have challenged this "fact", but, it still holds water to a degree.

When you hear about wine meant to be served at room temperature you have to factor in that the standard room temperature is now warmer because of home cooling technology. So to reach room temperature you now need to put your reds into the fridge for about 15 minutes before serving. Oddly enough, White wine should be kept in the fridge and then removed 15 minutes before it is to be served.

Galileo drank a glass of warm blood every night before bed. Not entirely sure if it was room temperature.

The indentation on a person’s upper lip is called the philtrum. According to Jewish mythology, it is caused by angels teaching the unborn baby all the knowledge in the universe and then removing it by touching their lip right before they’re born.

Those angels are total jerks.

The letter J is the only letter to not appear in the periodic table of elements.

My absolute favorite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.

"race car" is a palindrome.

A female pig orgasms for 30 minutes.......lucky swine

PIN stands for Personal Identification Number. If you say ’pin number’ you’re actually saying ’personal identification number number’. And if anyone says ’personal pin number’ you can ask them what a ’personal personal identification number number’ is.

Elephants are the only mammals that cannot jump... them and White men.

In the movie Ghostbusters, Peter Venkman was played by Bill Murray.
In the cartoon he was voiced by Lorenzo Music (for a time).
In the Garfield cartoon, Garfield was voiced by Lorenzo Music.
In the Garfield movie, Garfield was voiced by Bill Murray.

A woman has never won an Oscar for best director. Only three have ever been nominated: Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, and Lina Wertmuller

Voyager 1 is speeding along at about 57,600 kph (35,790 mph).
If it had the speed to escape the Milky Way galaxy, it would do so in approximately 1,296,480,000 years. It will have enough juice to send communications until the year 2020. Once Voyager reaches interstellar space in about 8-10 years, there will be virtually no solar radiation to degrade it meaning it will likely float off into the void long after we are all gone.

Well there you have it. I’m sure you can never use those in anything productive but maybe, just maybe, you’ll be on Jeopardy one day and the Final Jeopardy qurstion will be one of these. You’ll thank me then. Perhaps with a percentage of your winnings, maybe?