Can they keep it up?
At this writing, the Dodgers, at 12-6, are tied with the Red Sox for the second-best record in baseball. To be sure, it\’s terribly early, but it does make me wonder how likely the Dodgers are to continue playing well. They were already contenders in the relatively lusterless NL West, but most observers had L.A. tabbed for third place or worse.
There isn\’t a whole hell of a lot to do in Lansing, Michigan. There aren\’t any mountains, and there isn\’t any seacoast. The nearest amusement park is 400 miles away. There\’s a minor league ball team there now, but there wasn\’t when I grew up. There\’s a college there–a big, state university–with lots of college parties, and lots of college girls, and a lot of kids from Lansing start behaving like college students long before they really should. But even those with precocious synapses manage to sneak in a few years of relative innocence before learning what sororities and beer bongs are, and my synapses were late to the party. There\’s a big city not too far away, but to paraphrase W.C. Fields, the prevailing sense that one has when one is in Detroit is that, all things considered, one would rather be in Lansing.
So what you do a lot is drive. You drive past the cow farms and the meadows and rolling hills or whatever the hell they\’re called in the TripTik and the dilapidated country town with the antique store that your mother likes so much. You drive with your dad in an American-made sedan and you listen to Ernie Harwell and the Tigers. You drive at 62 m.p.h. past a shuttered-up farmhouse with peeling gray paint and a half-working windmill, and Steve Balboni stands there like a house by the side of the road and watches Frank Tanana\’s fastball go by, or that\’s what Ernie tells you. You drive and you listen and you daydream and you talk about baseball.