A Night of ADD

Being someone that covers and writes about multiple sports I frequently am at a game while having to pay attention to two, three other games. But last night was something ridiculous.

I’m sitting in the press box at Dodger Stadium taking in a leisurely game between the Dodgers and St. Louis Cardinals. However at the same time the other team I cover, the LA Kings, were playing the first game of their playoff series against the San Jose Sharks up in the Shark Tank.

The game in front of me was a mess: wild pitches, passed balls, errors. It wasn’t fun to watch which made for finding something to write about quite difficult.

The game in San Jose: the Sharks score a goal 28 seconds into the game and completely dominated the Kings in the first period despite the score remaining 1-0. So two bad games. Eh, you can’t win them all.

But in the second period the Kings found new life and eventually ended the period tied 2-2. In other words it got very interesting. Meanwhile in front of me, a single here, a single there, a run comes through – it was watching death by paper cuts.

Usually I have the majority of a recap written out by the eighth inning so all I have to do after the game is insert quotes and do some editing. On this night I was in front of a television in the press box dining room along with Fox Sports Net television reporter Patrick O’Neal (son of Ryan, baby-daddy of Rebecca De Mornay’s kids) watching as the Kings and Sharks went into overtime.

I got nothing. So I wrote a couple of paragraphs quickly, the game ended, I got quotes and I finished a particularly unremarkable piece. By the way when I was downstairs waiting to get into the Dodgers’ clubhouse after the game the Sharks’ Joe Pavelski hit the game winning goal.

Things will get interesting next Thursday. The Dodgers have a 12:15 p.m. game while the Kings have a 7:30 p.m. home game. So it will be a rare double-header for me where I will be running around from 8:00 a.m. to hopefully midnight (unless the game goes into multiple overtimes.)

Anyhow that’s it. Just a little look behind the proverbial media curtain.