Story Extract
I axed this story at about 11:45 p.m. Tuesday night after a Dodger game. Thinking about it for a day I think I made a mistake for not publishing it.
But given that I write about sports, it would be my third consecutive story that would be viewed anarchy in the sports world. After all who in sports would understand a David Lynch reference? This after a day I wrote extensively about imagining suicide.
I’ve been gnawing on this for a bit, and I’m regretting it a little. So here is what I wrote. It’s not completed: it needs about three or four more paragraphs with quotes from Javy Guerra. But here it is.
There was a lot of psychic paranoia in the air Tuesday night. It was being stuck in the middle of a David Lynch film right before the horror that’s embedded in your psyche gets unleashed causing you to skip dimensions and enter into a psychic hell.
In heaven. Everything’s all right.
There was a kid wearing a chef’s hat sitting behind the Arizona Diamondbacks’ dugout. There were other kids with him attired normally. But this kid was running around with the rest of them, chef’s hat affixed to head like everything was normal.
Maybe it’s the grind of the baseball season that has changed what used to be informative this-is-what-happened-in-the-game to meandering diatribes that are attempting to find a point (and failing quite badly at that).
But this game was about being stuck in that moment.
It was gnawing even when the Dodgers came back and scored four runs off of D-backs’ starter Ian Kennedy in the bottom of the first inning. Lifting Chad Billingsley and the two runs he gave up in the top of the first, the Dodgers managed to do that with Matt Kemp only hitting a sacrifice fly to score that first run.
A good sign, yes, but also something forboding.
The D-backs scratched another run across in the third inning, then Billingsley found his groove.
“I felt he was okay,” Manager Don Mattingly said. “That first inning is trying to get the feel of the game. Bills battled today.”
After his three clunkers, he managed to come back nicely going 6 1/3 innings giving up those three runs.
“I was just getting back to the way I was,” Billingsley commented on his fine tuning of mechanics. “My timing was off.”
Then it just seemed everything went off when Billingsley left. Hong-Chih Kuo came in with one out of the seventh inning and struck out pinch-hitter Collin Cowgill. Then things got bizarre with Gerardo Parra at bat.
Kuo, whose yips have widely been documented, let a ball go that was close to Parra’s head. Parra took exception to that, grabbed his crotch and pointed back to Kuo.
Oblivious to it all, Kuo kept pitching. Parra got his seeming revenge hitting a solo shot. Clayton Kershaw on the bench and catcher A.J. Ellis took exception to Parra’s actions, and Ellis had a discussion with Parra. “It was just baseball talk,” Ellis said after the game.
“It’s just emotions,” Mattingly deflected. “Both teams are trying to win.”
Whatever it was got a warning to both benches and life went on.
Except the game was tied 4-4 and headed for a quagmire into extra innings. And that kid in the chef’s hat kept running around.
In heaven…