On the Road
The Dodgers had an off day yesterday. The team is 23-20, in third place. They begin a road trip against division opponents San Francisco and Arizona.
Much has been written about how L.A. is such a tough place to drive. The traffic is truly horrendous. Some friends recently came out from New York, and though they had been warned, they were still amazed. “Every road is as bad as the Long Island Expressway,” they complained. Welcome to L.A.
But L.A. has New York beat on many other road-related scores. Although the occasional road rage incident captures the headlines, I’ve found that drivers here are actually very polite. They don’t cut you off in traffic, they obey the rules of the road, they make room for you to hang a left out of a driveway, even if it means crossing four lanes of traffic, and they come to a screeching halt to allow pedestrians to cross a busy street.
And you know that guy who hangs out in the left lane, driving 56 miles per hour, causing a two-mile backup behind him? He doesn’t exist in Los Angeles. Angelenos seem to know that the left lane is for speeding and if you’re not going as fast as the car behind you, GET OUT OF THE WAY. Perhaps that’s because there are so few opportunities to reach cruising speed on the congested freeways, but still.
There seems to be a collective acceptance of the hazards of driving, a notion that “we’re all in this together,” like that communal feeling you get when you and 75 other people are trapped together in the same subway car. Drivers here are accustomed to spending countless hours in their cars, so they’ve made them comfortable, with plush upholstery, tricked out sound systems, and speaker phones. The notion of spending an extra minute in traffic just doesn’t bother people that much, so they don’t feel the need to drive aggressively and shave seconds off their commute.
In general, people don’t rush around the way they do on the east coast because they lack that urgency. Not necessarily because they’re “laid back,” but because their daily lives don’t demand it. There’s no 5:15 train out of Penn Station to catch, so there’s no reason to crowd onto that already replete subway train.
The traffic is so terrible that hardly anybody expects you to arrive on time for anything. In the event that people have to arrive somewhere on time, like a job that requires it, or the airport, people generally leave plenty of time rather than try to cut it fine.
The only exception to all this serenity is on the half dozen times a year that it rains. On those days, people lose their minds and start crashing their cars all over the place. You’d think that people who spend so much time in their cars would be better drivers, but the minute the sun disappears, they forget how to drive. To be fair, the roads do become slick when water mixes with all the oil built up over months of sunny weather. But that only applies in the first hour of rain; the numerous accidents that occur the rest of the day are simply the fault of bad driving.
NOTES:
Paul Depodesta was quoted in the L.A. Times as saying he thinks the Dodgers are built to compete against the elite teams in baseball. He flatly rejected the notion that they are a team capable of winning the division but making an early exit in the playoffs.
Has he been watching the games? The Dodgers lost three out of four to the Cardinals, two out of three to the Braves, two out of three to the Marlins, and two out of three to the Angels. The last series they won was on May 6-8, against the Reds. Since the 12-2 start, the team is 11-18.
And they’ve been firing on all cylinders. Gagne is back. The hitters are all hitting better than expected. The bullpen has been lights out. What part of the team does DePodesta to get so much better all of a sudden? The starting rotation? The slide took place before Odalis Perez went on the disabled list. Scott Erickson came to the team with a 7 E.R.A. and he hasn’t done anything to change it. Jeff Weaver was consistently mediocre last year, and he’s been consistently mediocre this year.
DePodesta says maybe the team needs a fifth starter, but he doesn’t intend to make any changes of the magnitude he made last season. Too bad. What the Dodgers need is not a fifth starter; it’s a first starter. Brad Penny and Derek Lowe have been nice additions, but neither is a bona fide ace. Match them up with the number one starters for possible playoff teams and they come up short:
Mark Mulder of the Cardinals, Dontrelle Willis of the Marlins (last week’s win over him notwithstanding), John Smoltz or Tim Hudson of the Braves, Jake Peavy of the Padres (4-0, 2.29 ERA), Jason Schmidt (we’ll see tonight whether he’s returned to 2004 form). Those guys are all capable of giving their teams a 1-0 lead in a playoff series. Can you say the same about Lowe or Penny? Not yet.
Much has been written about how L.A. is such a tough place to drive. The traffic is truly horrendous. Some friends recently came out from New York, and though they had been warned, they were still amazed. “Every road is as bad as the Long Island Expressway,” they complained. Welcome to L.A.
But L.A. has New York beat on many other road-related scores. Although the occasional road rage incident captures the headlines, I’ve found that drivers here are actually very polite. They don’t cut you off in traffic, they obey the rules of the road, they make room for you to hang a left out of a driveway, even if it means crossing four lanes of traffic, and they come to a screeching halt to allow pedestrians to cross a busy street.
And you know that guy who hangs out in the left lane, driving 56 miles per hour, causing a two-mile backup behind him? He doesn’t exist in Los Angeles. Angelenos seem to know that the left lane is for speeding and if you’re not going as fast as the car behind you, GET OUT OF THE WAY. Perhaps that’s because there are so few opportunities to reach cruising speed on the congested freeways, but still.
There seems to be a collective acceptance of the hazards of driving, a notion that “we’re all in this together,” like that communal feeling you get when you and 75 other people are trapped together in the same subway car. Drivers here are accustomed to spending countless hours in their cars, so they’ve made them comfortable, with plush upholstery, tricked out sound systems, and speaker phones. The notion of spending an extra minute in traffic just doesn’t bother people that much, so they don’t feel the need to drive aggressively and shave seconds off their commute.
In general, people don’t rush around the way they do on the east coast because they lack that urgency. Not necessarily because they’re “laid back,” but because their daily lives don’t demand it. There’s no 5:15 train out of Penn Station to catch, so there’s no reason to crowd onto that already replete subway train.
The traffic is so terrible that hardly anybody expects you to arrive on time for anything. In the event that people have to arrive somewhere on time, like a job that requires it, or the airport, people generally leave plenty of time rather than try to cut it fine.
The only exception to all this serenity is on the half dozen times a year that it rains. On those days, people lose their minds and start crashing their cars all over the place. You’d think that people who spend so much time in their cars would be better drivers, but the minute the sun disappears, they forget how to drive. To be fair, the roads do become slick when water mixes with all the oil built up over months of sunny weather. But that only applies in the first hour of rain; the numerous accidents that occur the rest of the day are simply the fault of bad driving.
NOTES:
Paul Depodesta was quoted in the L.A. Times as saying he thinks the Dodgers are built to compete against the elite teams in baseball. He flatly rejected the notion that they are a team capable of winning the division but making an early exit in the playoffs.
Has he been watching the games? The Dodgers lost three out of four to the Cardinals, two out of three to the Braves, two out of three to the Marlins, and two out of three to the Angels. The last series they won was on May 6-8, against the Reds. Since the 12-2 start, the team is 11-18.
And they’ve been firing on all cylinders. Gagne is back. The hitters are all hitting better than expected. The bullpen has been lights out. What part of the team does DePodesta to get so much better all of a sudden? The starting rotation? The slide took place before Odalis Perez went on the disabled list. Scott Erickson came to the team with a 7 E.R.A. and he hasn’t done anything to change it. Jeff Weaver was consistently mediocre last year, and he’s been consistently mediocre this year.
DePodesta says maybe the team needs a fifth starter, but he doesn’t intend to make any changes of the magnitude he made last season. Too bad. What the Dodgers need is not a fifth starter; it’s a first starter. Brad Penny and Derek Lowe have been nice additions, but neither is a bona fide ace. Match them up with the number one starters for possible playoff teams and they come up short:
Mark Mulder of the Cardinals, Dontrelle Willis of the Marlins (last week’s win over him notwithstanding), John Smoltz or Tim Hudson of the Braves, Jake Peavy of the Padres (4-0, 2.29 ERA), Jason Schmidt (we’ll see tonight whether he’s returned to 2004 form). Those guys are all capable of giving their teams a 1-0 lead in a playoff series. Can you say the same about Lowe or Penny? Not yet.
posted by John Rosenthal @ 8:51 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home