Final Week In Orange: Why I Hate Dodger Blue

If my sports-loving memory serves me right, it all started when I was about three years old.

I was sitting in the passenger seat of my dad’s Honda CR-X as he pulled out of the garage on a sunny weekend afternoon in the ‘burbs.

With the ballgame blaring through the radio speakers, my dad looked down at me and said with all the excitement in the universe:

“Chelena, say ‘I HATE Dodger Blue!'”

Being Daddy’s little girl, I parroted his chant back at the top of my little lungs.

Keep in mind, I grew up with baseball memorabilia in my house. I didn’t really know what the heck a Dodger was, I just knew that it wasn’t a Giant, and that was bad.

Heck, I couldn’t have told you who Tommy Lasorda was by name, but I knew what he looked like and knew that he wore the shade of blue which made him the enemy.

I might not have figured out that I wanted to follow sports for a living until after high school, but I was born a diehard Giants fan, and therefore, raised to hate that blue.

Then, at the age of 10, I brought home my first boyfriend. As fate would have it, he was a Dodgers fan.

We might’ve gone to a couple Athletics games together. It wasn’t all that long ago that you could root for both the A’s and the Giants without somebody looking at you like you were insane.

But he was a little league pitcher and worshiped Hideo Nomo, and therefore had allegiance to the Los Angeles ball club.

He and my dad would get into these really ridiculous arguments over which team was better. I only call them ‘ridiculous’ because my dad wouldn’t have normally waged baseball-fan-war against a middle schooler.

Not sure how I put up with it for so long. One thing, though, became incredibly clear: No matter how much I liked a boy from school, it wasn’t enough to shake my devotion for my favorite team.

Fast-forward past high school, college, and some really annoying non-sports-related desk jobs, and now I get to gab about the Giants and bash on their arch-rivals every day of baseball season.

Despite the fact I continue to attract SoCal boys with their LA hats, I will still whip out my “Dodgers Suck!” tee, just to remind them where my loyalty is.

Especially this week as we wrap up the last three games of the regular season on their home turf. The boys in Orange-And-Black have already clinched their playoff berth and are working out some last-minute kinks.

The Dodgers, on the other hand, are two games out of a wild card spot and hoping to bulldoze their way into the post-season.

As the Giants close out their season down south, that same little three-year-old girl — now in the body of a much feistier 26-year-old — will be screaming at the TV screen, willing her team to win.

Because at the end of the day, while it’s great that Buster Posey is in the MVP race, and that Hunter Pence’s home run in the ninth inning Sunday helped win the series in San Diego, there’s one all-encompassing constant:

We have to win these next three games. Because I hate Dodger Blue.

Period.