The Big A

I surprisingly had a Friday night off, and we used it to go see the Anaheim Angels and the Baltimore Orioles play a baseball game. My bad, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, even though Anaheim is almost thirty miles from LA and has almost 400k people.

Corrie had procured very inexpensive tickets for the game, but because of car troubles we ended up missing the first four innings. (Car trouble post coming.)

The Angels play at Angel Stadium, which, because of this architectural formation, is known colloquially as "The Big A". (You might have to take my word that this shape is an 'A'.)



This was our first trip to the ball-park in Anaheim, the home of the Angels for almost fifty years now. I found an old photograph my dad took of Angels Stadium back in the late 70s, and the same Big A was propped up behind the left-field fence (it was later moved). Our seats were close to the left field fence, just inside the foul pole, on the foul-territory side. The view was pretty neat.



When we got there, the game was already 5-2 Angels over the Orioles, but the fireworks weren't over yet. We got to see Torii Hunter hit his second homer of the game (missed the first one), and got to see rookie phenom Mike Trout hit the second homer of his major league career. We also got to see a sac-fly from Baltimore to finish off the scoring at 8-3. It was pretty neat to see Vlad Guerrero as an O, a probable Hall of Famer in the twilight of his career.



This is the 50th Anniversary for the Angels as an expansion team, and all year long they've been wearing throw-back jerseys, their vintage outfits from over the years, many of which I realize I like more than I would have guessed.

In the recent past, since 2002 when the Angels dropped those dreadful cartoon logo-ed uniforms and went with the red scheme they use now, and beat the Yankees that same year, I've been an anti-Angel fan. It wasn't until they started really beating the Yanks regularly that I really started to despise them. I rooted for them against Bonds in 2002, I guess. The local television in San Luis Obispo was all Angels all the time, which grew annoying.

I didn't have a hate on, though, like I do for the Red Sox and Orioles (less so since The Wire, though, for Baltimore). The Oakland A's were my brother's team, not mine, so my natural rivalry with the So-cal counterpart is less developed. I admit that I probably do have an irrational religion-based distaste for the Angels, but it's mostly assuaged with the knowledge that the name is based on the city of LA's name.

In any case, the jerseys and throw-back uniforms with the dark blue interlocking LA and CA, seem to unfortunately hearken back to only the Angel's early years in the American League. They unfortunately don't seem to be wearing any cool PCL era garb.

I'll be putting up a post on the old Pacific Coast League in a while. The Angels are the younger LA baseball team, officially in MLB. The LA Angels, in a non-linear way, are the true Los Angeles baseball team, being the only southern California team in the 1903 charter year for the Pacific Coast League, which by all accounts was a third major league right before Brooklyn and the Giants moved west.

Since it was Friday night at the stadium, we got the fireworks show after the game.