All You Can Vomit
I sat in the all-you-can-eat right field pavilion today and watched the Dodgers get trounced by the Angels 10-4. Randy Wolf sucked for five innings, then Rudy Seanez, Mark Hendrickson, and Brett Tomko sucked after him. It got to the "unwatchable" point around the eighth inning, when my buddy and I just couldn't take it anymore and got the hell outa there.

Rafael Furcal hit his first home run of the season, indicating he might be pulling out of his power slump. Hopefully some of it will rub off on Nomar, who still inexplicably has just 1 home run. But I guess it's fine. I mean, we can make a run in the playoffs playing a #3 hitter with a .650 OPS, right?

A scary moment occurred in the eighth, when James Loney (for some reason inserted to play right field) ran into the wall trying to make a catch and hurt his knee. He was down for about six minutes, causing everyone in the stands to worry (especially Ned Colletti), and had to be carted off. I have a couple problems with this:

First of all, that right field wall scoreboard and its Plexiglas covering have to go. We've now lost Jason Repko, Matt Kemp, and Loney for periods of time because of them running into the outfield wall. What genius thought that would be a good place for a scoreboard anyway? "Gee, let's replace the padded wall with a hard plate. Sure, we'll probably lose a few outfielders, but at least people will be able to see what the score of the Reds-Pirates game is." Someone needs to be fired over this.

Secondly, James Loney should never have been able to leave the infield. He's a first baseman, and a damn good one at that. He's a god-awful outfielder. I know it may have opened up a little more playing time for him, but he won't be playing very much on the DL. Nomar was playing his way on to the bench anyway, why not give the kid some work at his natural position? It's not as if we don't have enough young outfielders who need playing time already (Kemp, Andre Ethier). This makes no sense to me.

As for the buffet itself, ... a great concept that could use a little tweaking. The all-you-can-eat items included regular Dodger Dogs (of which you can get two at a time), nachos, peanuts, and soda. That's it. And the Dodger Dogs were not of the grilled variety. Next season, I would like to see them include the Super Dodger Dog as well as some other menu items like cotton candy, pretzels, and iced malts/lemonade (which would make a world of difference in the shade-less pavilion).

But by far the biggest peeve I had about the buffet was the soda cups, which were about the size of a small soda at McDonald's. I'm sure this is the McCourts' way of attempting to deter people from consuming too much and thereby cutting down on their profits, but that's just stupid. When I'm sitting in 90 degree heat under the blistering sun, I am going to drink as much cold soda as I can get my hands on. So the least they could do is give me something that holds 20 oz. There is absolutely no excuse for forcing patrons to make repeated trips to the soda machine and miss large portions of the game because the cups are too small. And believe me, when it's that hot, you never want to be caught without something cold to drink in your hand. If they really want people to drink less, put a damn canopy over the pavilion and give us some shade. Assholes.

Overall though, it was a pleasurable experience and I encourage everyone to do the buffet thing once just so you can see what it's like. Hopefully by then they'll have made some improvements. As of right now, I give it a B.