Watching the Dodgers From Different Viewpoints
Got an e-mail from reader Matt Hardy who said I should go to a baseball game with his friend Loren DePhillips, because DePhillips is a big-time Dodgers fan and believes they will be really good in time.
That was the first clue, of course, that Loren and I don't look at the broken-down Old Timers in the same way, and so when we met, I asked him, "What, are you blind?"
"Well, yes, as a matter of fact," DePhillips said with a laugh while following the lead of Athens, his guide dog, into Dodger Stadium on Tuesday night.
"Just checking to see if you have a sense of humor," I said.
"I'm a Dodger fan, aren't I?" DePhillips replied.
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WHY WOULD a blind man want to go to the stadium to watch a baseball game he can't see? I asked, and DePhillips seemed surprised by the question.
"No one has ever asked me that," he said. "Let me think about that."
I had called the Dodgers to buy tickets after hearing from Hardy, and the Dodgers said they'd set aside three in the disabled section, which didn't go over well with DePhillips, who insisted on being close enough to the field to hear and smell everything.
"When you're blind, it really does matter where you sit," he said. "I'll tell you, having a good sense of hearing is great, but having a good sense of smell I could do without. This world doesn't smell very good most of the time."
So instead of the disabled section, we took our $75 seats about 17 rows up from the Dodgers' dugout with Athens lying asleep beneath our seats.
"Kind of like the Dodgers' offense," cracked DePhillips, while petting the golden lab.
Right away one of the Dodgers pounded a ball foul into the seats, and I realized there was nothing to prevent DePhillips from being drilled. I thought it might be better to sit in the outfield seats -- given the likelihood these days of a Dodger hitting a ball there.
"Dude, if I was afraid of everything that could happen to me, I'd never get out of bed," said DePhillips, 54, blind from birth, and attending his 18th Dodgers game this year. "I don't know why, but for some reason Dodger Stadium is the one place I like to be, and if I could afford a season ticket, I'd probably go to all 81 games."
He went to his first Dodgers game in the Coliseum as a youngster in 1959, wore a Dodgers uniform at age 10 to attend a game at Candlestick Park and still remembers how terrible the hot dog was that day.
