Today is Tuesday and I wake up half an hour before my alarm was supposed to go off. 25 years ago, that was a feat saved for only Christmas day. Today however is April 13th and that only means one thing — Opening Day at Dodger Stadium! It's time to go welcome the Boys in Blue back for another great season and enjoy all the fanfare and festivities that only occur on Opening Day.

Within a matter of moments, however, I had a feeling that this great day might be a little less enjoyable than I had hoped. A story on the KTLA morning news caught my eye. Lot's of Dodgers fans at a park by the stadium already rowdy, drinking out of red plastic cups and it's only 8 in the morning. A mob of people already losing their sobriety and the game does not even start for another 5 hours That can only lead to good things, right?

Nevertheless, this was not going to deter me. But before I get into all of the negatives of my experience, let me highlight the positives.

• The Dodgers Official Twitter ran a contest during Manny's second at-bat where if you were one of the first three to reply with your seat location, you would win a Manny prize. I was lucky enough to be one of the winners and within an inning was presented at my seat with a golden Manny bobblehead. Awesome! If you are not following the Dodgers on Twitter, you absolutely must. They have insight and access that nobody else does. Click here to follow them.
• The Dodgers won!
• Four homers set a record for a home opener.
• A good opening day ceremony featuring fireworks, LeAnn Rimes singing the National Anthem and a fly-over.

So now let's get on to the bad. Before you read any further you must accept this disclaimer. Anything I may say or allude to should NOT deem me as being a racist. If you gather that feeling, then you do not understand the subtle difference between racism and just generally disliking the individuals, in mass, who give the rest of their people at times a bad name.

Starting as early as the third inning, fights were breaking out around us on the reserved level. I may have been the only person trying to sit and look forward, rather than stand and look back. I'm sorry, are we at a baseball game? Repeat this in the 4th and 5th innings. A good third of the time I was sitting trying to watch the baseball game, I had everybody in front of me standing up and looking back at morons whaling on each other, then security coming, then the aforementioned morons being escorted out.

During one of these fights, I overheard a girl behind me ask the guy she was with, "Why are they fighting if they are both Dodger fans."

The answer she received was simply, "They are from different gangs." 

This was the same guy that was upset that he had missed Manny's homer.
He claimed to have waited in a long line for the restroom, only to make
it to the front of the line and have security tell the line to wait, they needed to break up a fight in the bathroom.

Somewhere in the midst of all of this was when the guys from the Dodgers came to my seat to bring the bobblehead I won. I was excited, because as most people say, I never win anything! It was discouraging, however,  to be gawked at, heckled and honestly made to feel like I was going to be the next person getting assaulted because of the prize I had won.

I was with my girlfriend and as uncomfortable as all of the extracurricular activity was making me feel, I could only imagine how uncomfortable she was. We decided to go take a bathroom break and get away from all of the hostility around our seats. We climbed the stairs and were shocked by what was waiting at the top. There was a mob of drunken younger guys everywhere, stumbling into us every step we took. We overheard a very similar conversation many times over from different people that was either, "I'm so wasted," or a close variation to that.

While walking towards the restroom, a parade of security guards and police officers were rushing past us, in the direction of our seats. I had to wait longer than my girlfriend to get to the restroom because the setup of the mens room allows those who choose to avoid the line to walk straight in through the exit door and bypass the line, making the rest of us have to wait just that much longer. Classy. When I came out, she was clearly shaken from being harassed repeatedly while waiting for me. Seeing more security, police and now paramedics with a stretcher rushing towards our section, we were forced to make a decision that sickened me.

Before I go any further, let us rewind 5 years and a day. April 12, 2005, Dodgers home opener against the hated Giants. Dodgers are losing 8-5 after 8 innings. My friend and I decide to leave and beat traffic. That day I established a new rule for myself — never leave early, ever. The Dodgers held the Giants in the top of the 9th that day, then went on to score 4 runs and win the game. I hated myself for leaving. I have never left a game early since, no matter what. Until today.

Yes, we left in the 6th inning. I no longer felt safe. Worse than that, I wanted my girlfriend out of that environment immediately. Everyone I passed seemed like they drunk and stumbling and still holding a beer in each hand. The cantina that has been added to the reserved level was packed with people that seemed clueless that they were even at a baseball game. On top of all of that, a major factor in my decision to leave was that I wanted a head start out of the parking lot and to be nowhere around any of these drunk morons driving.

So there is another positive I missed on my earlier list. I didn't have to deal with traffic.

The worst part of all of this is that we came to the decision to leave right at the top of the steps of the section behind home plate where my grandparents had season tickets for over 20 years. We were mere feet away from where I had some of my best childhood memories with my grandfather. I was never scared at a game as a kid. If he were with us today to experience what has become to our favorite place to spend quality time, he would be sick to his stomach and I am sure that if he was looking down today, he was turning in his grave. Dodger Stadium was dubbed with the nickname Blue Heaven on Earth for a reason. It is still the most beautiful ballpark around. It is disgusting that it felt more like Blue Ghetto on Earth today to me.

I have felt deflated all day since. I have seen the changes in the crowd slowly over the years. There have been some rougher experiences that have grown more and more frequent, but never anything like today. This was a Raiders crowd. This is why families stopped taking their kids to football games at the Collesium. The family atmosphere is non-existent. This is no place for a kid. This was no place for me today. I have never, ever felt out of place at a Dodger game, but today I did and that just plain sucks.

I do not blame any of the event staff or Dodgers personnel today for anything. From everything I saw, they responded to everything as quickly as they could. It was just a numbers game, there were too many scumbags everywhere.

There are a lot of sports teams out there that I have no ties to, but I love to see them lose, just because I hate their fan bases. Teams like the Raiders who I love to watch lose just so their fans suffer. It's sad that at times I feel the same feeling for the Dodgers, the same team I grew up loving. I want them to win, but I don't that certain subset of scumbag fans sharing my joy.

I spoke with a few other lifelong Dodger fans about this experience and they shared some stories with me about similar experiences at Dodger Stadium.

Matt King who writes for us here at DodgersFYI told me about his experience last month during spring training at Camelback Ranch. Matt said, "I left early, I drove all the way to Arizona and the disrespectful Dodgers fans got so far under my skin, I just had to leave early. Two thirds of the men around me were harassing a woman in the crowd to take off her shirt."

I also spoke with Kevin Elms whose family had season tickets on the Loge level for years. Kevin told me, "The people in the seats around where ours were changed for the worst. It went from a respectable crowd to a very rowdy, disgusting crowd. The fun was sucked out of it and my family ultimately decided to give up the tickets because the new era of Dodger fans made it feel more like a Raider game."

Matt Schneider talked about an experience where he accompanied a group of underprivileged kids to a game. "One of the other counselors wore a Mets jersey to the game. The Dodgers fans did not even have the slightest bit of respect that he was with a group of kids. They threw stuff and cussed."

I could probably talk to a thousand fans who have been to a Dodger game in the past couple of years and each would have their own experience and I would be willing to bet that many of them would use two words that I feel as if I repeated many times — disgusting and Raiders.

I've said in the past that DodgersFYI 2.0 is coming soon, but I think that it is time to center the next phase of DodgersFYI around a new premise. I want this to be a community of the best Dodgers fans out there. I want DodgersFYI to represent what is good about Dodger fans and why, even with all of the thugs and gangsters wearing blue, the rest of us good fans can overcompensate for them because we are still the best fans in baseball. The objective for DodgersFYI will be a place for all good Dodgers fans to connect with each other, to share, talk and reminisce and catch up on what matters with the team. It is our mission to bring all of that and reinvent the image of the Dodger fan by bringing it back to what it once was. It will also be our mission to enforce that the correct pronunciation of
the name of the team is Dodgers, not Doyers.

I refuse to accept that what I experienced today is evolution and that I need to accept it. If I had to accept this, I would quit being a fan. Tommy has taught me better than that. 

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