Regional biases, STAND UP!

"Everybody hates it, but you gotta see it once." - Murs (kinda)

LA's like my little brother, you see, in that I can make fun of it but you're not allowed to. Disparaging remarks about this terrible place will not be tolerated and I'll probably have to take it back to '96 and say you'll catch a bad one if any of you people make jokes about traffic or earthquakes, although that's mostly because they're cliched and unfunny.

The Dodgers are like Drake, of course, in that they're both well-funded, popular, and awful. The redeeming thing about LA baseball, though, is that when you're walking to Dodger Stadium (which can be done from apartment 15!), you'll pass traffic and might get swallowed up by the earth thanks to plate tectonics but goddammit if you don't have the greatest and most elegant logo of baseball aesthetics on your fitted.


Breathtaking! It's so strong and foxy, this design--even with serifs, which normally adds daintiness and makes the masculinity plummet. Says the astute David Kipen of the LA Times (my partner in geeking out about the history of stuff and then feeling obligated to share it with the world), "Whoever takes credit for it, the Dodger symbol represents a triumph of logocraft." (Spell-check doesn't recognize logocraft, it turns out, because spell-check is stuffy and unhip.)


"On a purely aesthetic level, the Dodger insignia is, demonstrably, the most beautiful in all of baseball." It's clean. Uncluttered. It's got thrift, Kipen says, because nothing is wasted. The lower bar of the L doubles as the cross bar of the A.

It demonstrates teamwork, "because the letters don't just share that crossbar, they overlap and interlock. This is how baseball is supposed to work...get on base, set the table, move the runner over, play hurt, take one for the team." Aww.

It connects. "No one calls Boston 'B,' and NYC isn't generally known as 'NY' but we go by 'L.A.' at least as often as Los Angeles. (There's) speculation that before the Dodgers came west, people may not have thought of Los Angeles as 'L.A.,' or not nearly as ubiquitously." DJ Muggs and Paul's Boutique-era Beastie Boys prove that people and organizations really start to do their best work, I mean really really start shining, when they start in NY and come to LA.


So even though the Black Thought is technically superior to The Game in every way, when it comes to the logos they display to the world on their head and etched into their facial epidermis, respectively, LA has it sewn up tight. Knowin nothin in life but to be legit, you guys. We don't call it 5-0; we call it one time. Joni Mitchell, OJ, porn, the gunpowder on Phil Spector's hands, Cypress Hill's first record. LA, you're a jerk and I love you.









"Blue Monday," Fats Domino, preceding New Order by about a hundred years. Because the Dodgers have their own shade of blue, and because this song was a hit right around the time they moved to LA in '58. I'd also like to add that, FYI, I should work in a '50s theme restaurant, not only because I have the gams for a short cheerleader skirt and I can make change for a customer on the fly totally in my head, but because I'd get to listen to bass-y, heavy-bottomed rock n' roll music like this my whole shift.

Saturday morning, oh Saturday morning. All my tiredness is gone away. Got my money and my honey. And I'm out on the stand to play.



This post written most definitely without the expressed written consent of Major League Baseball, but please realize it was all made possible by Kirk Gibson's moustache, the iced elbow of Swarthy, Handsome Judaic Man Sandy Koufax*, and the fact that Vin Scully and Manny Ramirez are both from Washington Heights (!).































.