Dodgers making it interesting on a hazy evening

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Game on.

Now the stands are rocking and just about entirely full. It helped, of course, that the hometown boys came back with a bunt infield single by Rafael Furcal to open the bottom of the first and a double by James Loney.

(Remember my first post this evening? Didn’t Ron Cervenka, the left-field bleacher bum, say something about Loney having a big night?)

That scored Furcal. Phillies 2, Dodgers 1, the crowd now going nuts, the entire stadium it seems swirling those white Dodgers towels around in tight windmills.

Derek Lowe got out of a nice jam in the top of the second, and as I type, there’s anticipation in the air: these fans are waiting to erupt.

A few questions coming in about the air quality here, what with the wildfires. The sky is sort of a pale-orangish-bluish soup right now, a result of sundown mixing with haze from the fires. It’s not hard to breathe, not if you’re a local and you breathe junky air almost every day of the year.

I doubt the Phillies are bothered, they sure aren’t playing like it (though Rollins did muff an easy pop-fly in the last inning).

Thought: Having traveled with the Dodgers to China for that historic-and-also-blatantly-commercial exhibition series against the Padres -- the first MLB games ever played in China -- I’d say this team is quite prepared for anything when it comes to breathing in bad dust.

It’s been months, a whole season now, and there’s still gunk stuck in my laptop keyboard from that trip. It’s dust and I don’t even want to think what that rained down from the Beijing sky. Maybe, by giving them a taste of playing in a cloud of pollutants, that trip will prove to have helped the Dodgers more than we ever thought.

Oh, back to the action. It’s still Phillies 2, Dodger Blues 1. Manny’s up: Manny works the count to 3-2. Manny walks.

-- Kurt Streeter