LOS ANGELES - I went to a baseball game last Thursday night and a forfeit broke out. I was there, in Dodger Stadium, when it started raining baseball-sized hail, or rather hail-sized baseball.
It was Autograph Ball Night at the stadium, meaning every fan got a baseball signed by all the Dodger players and coaches. At least that's what we thought until we got to the turnstyle, where we found out you had to be 14 or under to get the ball. Most people didn't care, however, because it was also Hideo Nomo Night.You know Nomo. He's the rookie pitching sensation from Japan who has a contorted hidden ball delivery that makes him harder to hit than a mosquito. Whether that had anything to do with the hidden ball deliveries that came out of the stands later on I don't know, but it might have.
I was at the game with my 19-year-old son, Eric; his college roommate and best friend, Cameron; and another friend, Winston Scott, who drove to the Dodger game through the night, nonstop, from Salt Lake City. True story. Winston is a huge baseball fan. The kind who can be sitting in his house in Salt Lake and read about Autograph Ball Night in Dodger Stadium and Hideo Nomo's pitching and the next thing you know he's in his Blazer filling up at the Rainbo station. His goal is to sit in every major league stadium before he dies, or before he's 19, whichever comes first.
As you might guess, Winston had a harder time dealing with the Ball Night age restriction than the rest of us. He thought about lying and saying he was 14, but he is 6-foot-3. He was a star on Highland High's basketball team last winter. He towered over the guy passing out the baseballs."
He opted for the mercy approach.
"I drove all the way from Utah for this," he said.
He was not making it up.
The guy tossed him a ball.
That seemed fairly insignificant at the time, since thousands of balls were being handed out, but that was before the seventh inning, when a very weird thing happened and many of those same balls got thrown back onto the playing field.
I mean, you figure it out. Thousands of people bring their kids through the L.A. freeway rush hour (it is always rush hour on the L.A. freeways) for the express purpose of collecting a genuine autographed baseball and then, a few innings later, they grab them from their kids and throw them back.
The only plausible explanation we could come up with is it was a full moon that night.
You may have read the various accounts that suggest that the fans were in an ugly mood, upset that the Dodgers were behind, and were trying to hurt the opposing players and the umpires. But that wasn't the case at all. That's press box theorizing. I know. Because this time I was 180 degrees away from the press box, sitting with the real people in the bleachers in left-center field. Top row of the bleachers, as a matter of fact. One more row back and you were in Nevada. We were in seats that cost less than an order of nachos. (Old hat to us. We once watched the Tour de France at the bottom of a hill; saw it only as a blur. We used to have season seats for Jazz games in the Delta Center so high you needed NASA clearance to get to them. It's kind of a specialty: good events, bad seats).
A lot of people who threw the baseballs were our seatmates.
The whole thing started - and you won't read this in any of the media accounts either - when John Mabry, who was playing right field for the St. Louis Cardinals, reached down to throw an autographed baseball back to the stands that somehow wound up in right field while everybody was standing and singing "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" in the middle of the seventh inning - the traditional seventh inning stretch.
Mabry flipped the ball back toward the stands and all might have remained sane, the world might have stayed on its axis, if not for one problem. He missed. The ball hit the wall and bounced back at his feet.
The fans rather enjoyed that. They snickered. And when Mabry picked up the ball again and chucked it high up into the stands, well, the full moon took over and that's when all those people went into their Hideo Nomo impersonations. In less than a minute, the field was flooded with baseballs.
The umpires quickly pulled the players off the field, although none of the balls were pegged at anybody. This was just one of those perpetuating ballpark things with a life all its own - like a wave or one of those beach balls that someone starts bouncing and it never stops.
Anyway, when Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda got into an argument with the umpires in the ninth inning and yet more balls came onto the field, the umps, who had a quick fuse on this night - who knows why? Maybe they'd lost their luggage at the airport; maybe it was an O.J. backlash; maybe they'd just seen WaterWorld - had had enough. They didn't just throw Lasorda out. They threw everybody out.
As we left, Winston held tight to his official Autograph Night baseball. One of the few remaining balls still in the custody of the public. A remnant of undoubtedly the last Autograph Ball Night ever held in Dodger Stadium. He got in his Blazer and headed back for Utah. He'd gotten what he came for.