Opening Day Call To Arms
My good friend…. who just happens to be a rabid Dodger fan sent me this today.
Very nice…. very nice…
The thing about rivalries is this:
If the Los Angeles Dodgers didn’t exist…… I would be kind of sad. This great rivalry does not happen without two teams.
I remember the year that I met said friend (let’s call him….. George Donkov) we were going to school together in the south of France. He was the only other guy in the south of France who liked baseball. When you are in hostil territory (france) you don’t make a big fuss about baseball loyalties. We became good friends and we went on to win some money that year with a joint fantasy baseball team. I think the team name was “California Unity”…. haha.
Anyway we both took to cheering for Marseille football (soccer) team. Their greatest rival was Paris who was stinking it up about as bad as you can stink it up. They where at the bottom of the standings and had a good chance of being relegated* (check footnote) to League 2. What surprised me the most is how distraught the people of Marseille were. They were seriously pissed at the thought of playing the whole next season with no Paris in League 1. At the end of the year they were outright cheering for their rivals to win so that the rivalry would continue. Now to really understand this you have to realize that in soccer, fans straight up want to kill each other. Once, while standing out front of the official fan’s bar, we had glass bottles thrown at us by passing busloads of Paris fans. This is like two hours before the game started. These two fan bases hated each other sooooooo much. Yet the thought of watching a whole season without the grude matches was unbearable to Marseille fans.
So in with that in mind…. Thank you LA for being such a perfectly evil team (and place)…. oh and I hope you rot and come in last place this year.
* If you get relegated in football (soccer) it’s comparable to having your team play in the minors for the entirety of the following season. Each season, the three teams on the bottom of the standings go to League 2 (minor leagues) and the top three teams in the standings on League 2 move up to League 1 (major leagues). Which if that was the case in Major League Basebal, the Pirates, Royals and Orioles would have been in Single A for years now.
