BOBBLE-HEADED DEMI-GODS

Last night, after tiring of watching the Giants trample over the NL West's worst team (talk about a backhanded "woohoo!"), I switched to the Padres@Dodgers game, hoping that San Diego would kick the nemesis' butt. I stared at the screen for fifteen minutes before I understood what was wrong with this picture.

The Dodgers wore their original Brooklyn uniforms, which looked great, but which made it difficult for me to figure out why I had such a hard time tracking players. For some reason, I wasn't decoding the incorrect uniforms as, "Hey, that's not the Dodgers' uniform," but instead as, "Hey, who are those guys?"

The team made this cool move to honor the 58th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's first day playing baseball in Brooklyn -- the first day a black man played in MLB. I've read several articles about Robinson and pored like a physics-major shut-in over his stats in the Baseball Encyclopedia. Robinson is a huge hero to my dad, who, while we were in Scottsdale, talked fondly and at length about the Negro Leagues. When you peer through all the media hype, you recognize that Robinson's time and place in history, his contribution as a man and player to the game, combine beautifully to form this pearl in a period of incredible racial division.

But the funniest, most absurd, and perhaps wisest thing to emerge from the day was Rachel Robinson on why she wouldn't allow bobble-heads to be made of her husband. I paraphrase her: "My beloved Jackie was never a yes man."