Here I am “appreciating” the Angels WS trophy that Barry Bonds was 9 outs away from winning.
In 2002 I was living in Los Angeles, being young, doing dumb things, and hanging out with pompous art school kids in my spare time. I was, for the most part, puking in their studios and stealing their beer when I wasn’t attending a gallery opening. I once wandered into a walk-in closet stacked with cardboard boxes and immediately walked out thinking I had made a mistake.
“This is someone’s artwork.” a friend told me.
I’m not sure to this day if he was pulling my chain. Such is life in Los Angeles.
***
October came rolling around and the Angels and Giants were playing for the WS title…2 teams I just hated with a passion. Whom to root for?
It was gay rights icon Harvey Milk who described Orange County best, in response to California State Senator John Briggs describing San Francisco as “the moral garbage dump of homosexuality in this country.”
“Nobody likes garbage ’cause it smells,” Milk told reporters. “Yet eight million tourists visited San Francisco last year. I wonder how many visited Fullerton.”
–The Angels had the Rally Monkey, thundersticks, (basically inflated plastic) douche-bag and mouth-breather John Lackey, the most boring fans in the league, and they played in a white-power wasteland famous for birthing Richard Nixon: Orange County.
–The Giants had territorial rights over the A’s, were kind of dull, and had 2 cantankerous schmucks in their own right (who hated each other) in Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent.
In the end we all know what happens. The Giants blow a 5-0 lead in game 6, Dusty Baker makes some half-baked managerial decisions, Scott Spezio becomes a legend in Anaheim, and the Angels win their first World Series title essentially denying Barry Bonds his one and only shot and leaving him crying in the locker room.
The only saving grace? At least it wasn’t the Yankees.
Coco Crisp's Afro 
At the time, I was playing hockey and one of my good friends, a life-long Red Sox fan was teasing his wife, a life long Angels fan about “feeling his pain.” we were watching the game 5 at the rink, waiting to play our game. She was almost in tears and he just would not let up about ‘feeling my pain.”
Of course, we all know what happened. when that ball went over Bonds, she was umping all over the place. She made his life hell for the next few years!
Haha! Great story. Looks like his “pain” subsided a few years later. 🙂
Being a Dodgers fan you tend to be unconcerned about the Angels, but you absolutely, totally, forever hate the Giants. So I rooted for the Angels and had the additional satisfaction of seeing Bonds lose. Now 2010, 2012, and 2014 were painful.
v
I agree wholeheartedly, v. on every account. Not to jinx you, but I think the Dodgers are a tornado and don’t see them being stopped. That game against Philly last night was embarrassing for the Phils.