The Baseball Playoffs are sure bringing back childhood memories
Phillies up 2 to nothing in the playoff series. This is good because I despise the Los Angeles Dodgers.  I have always hated the Dodgers, with a white hot passion, and have pumped my fist in triumph year in and year out when they’ve invariably been eliminated from post-season contention.
It is weird, because I don’t even have a team I root for. I just root for the Dodgers to fail. I think this came from my dad. It really sticks with you, watching at the age of eight a ball-game with your dad. I assume my father picked up his Dodgers – hatred from growing up near San Francisco, but he never rooted for the Giants. Anyway, the Dodgers would cause him to rattle off, completely uncharacteristically, a string of profanity and bile toward their star players.
This spilled over into my brief woeful Little League career. See, we were coached by this major Dodgers fan — this burly man Aaron Mantle, always wearing a Dodgers cap and asking “What would Tommy Lasorda Do?”.  He was interesting — something of the permanent little league coach and not a parent, and the norm for children’s sports’ leagues is that a parent of someone was the manager/coach. But this did absolve some of the problems that come from that — preferential treatment to the coach’s kid, so maybe that should be the standard.
I wasn’t on that team too long. The star of the team was also a big Dodgers fan. He was a kid by the name of Mickey Ruth. He started to tease me about this. I didn’t have a leg to stand on, since the only reason I was ever pulled into a game was the “everyone plays” ethic which comes with Little League, and even at that I was always coached to bunt the ball. But this intense confrontation eventually came to blows. All I can say is that my parents picked me up, blood pouring out of my nose, and some raw skid marks on my arms. I lied about what happened, and rattled off an incoherent and self-contradictory story, which at any rate went against the story as relayed later by Coach Mantle. I only went to a couple more practices — even at that age, I could sense I was done. My parents tried to gracefully exit me to something else and suggested I pick up Karate practice, which I agreed to but was never taken to.
The Little League team went on to win the World Series against a team from Taiwan, and Mickey Ruth became a major nationwide sensation. Adding insult to injury, this was also the year that the Dodgers won the pennant. My hatred for the Dodgers intensified. A few years later, I experienced great schaudenfruede when it was revealed that Ruth was a ringer who was lying about his age and was actually seventeen years old, which also helped me feel better about him beating me to a pulp. I cannot quite recall what happened to the rest of that team’s championship title, and now that I think about it it must have been shattering — but Hey! I had no connection to that team, so what did I care? And I never slackened off on my hatred of the Dodgers. A group of athletically elite millionaire ball-players assembled out of free agency– how can anyone relate to such a team?