Dog Day Afternoons

As children growing up in Los Angeles, my brothers and I basically lived on Farmer John’s line of fine pork products: ham, pork links, bacon, franks, smoked chops. They were L.A.’s own--”Easternmost in Quality and Westernmost in Flavor,” the Farmer said--and they were enough. They tasted much better than vegetables.

The year I discovered baseball, I became acquainted with Dodger Dogs, Farmer John’s long, top-of-the-line franks, and I liked the way the tips of the dog would protrude from either end of the bun, liked the snap of the dog and the slight flavor of char, liked to eat them with onions and Gulden’s brown mustard, more exotic than the yellow mustard we used to have at home. My youngest brother liked them plain, and still does.

The spicy funk of grilling dogs was as much a part of the Dodger Stadium experience as the first green flash of outfield and the buzz of Jerry Doggett from 10,000 radios, the crunch of peanut shells in the aisles and the cool, fragrant fielder’s gloves we always brought along in case a foul ball should come our way (it never did). What made things even better was that our father basically disapproved: “Don’t you feel silly watching grown men chasing a ball around a field?” he’d say. Baseball, of course, became my life, and Dodger Stadium was where I always wanted to be. It was a happy summer.

When I got a little older, I discovered pleasures more profound than baseball (music, girls), and when I hopped on the RTD at dusk, I headed more often toward the Bowl than toward Chavez Ravine. By the time I left high school, I was pretty much down to one or two games a season; by the time I became old as most of the rookies, I’d forgotten to care about the sport. And last week, when I visited the ballpark for the first time since the ’78 World Series, Farmer John’s pungent smoke had disappeared.

There may be little need to rehash the reweinerization of Dodger Stadium, the steamed-dog versus grilled-dog controversy, the shift of concessions from loyal old Arthur Food Services to Marriott, the multinational corporation that operates the single worst restaurant in Dayton, Ohio. The sports page has already batted around the new concessionaire the way the Senate does Supreme Court nominees. And the people have spoken: Grilled Dogs Only.

Still, somebody had to check out the new ballpark grub, so The Times treated me to a pair of $7 seats in the nose-bleed section, and all the peanuts I could eat . . . Two-Baggers! The guys sitting next to us thought we were crazy trotting around with all that food, but they seemed happy enough to accept the Polish sausages and cartons of nachos that we didn’t need.

The first thing about the new Dodger thing is the abundance of places to buy beer--spigots in every food stand and kegs scattered around the stadium’s perimeter--which makes a foaming paper flagon of Miller Lite something easily purchased between innings. This is handy for heavy drinkers who don’t want to miss too much of the game.

Then there are the chain-restaurant outlets behind home plate, cholesterol-clogged areas that now resemble certain approaches to the I-15. Carl’s Jr. flings out soggy, acrid burgers and fries; Taco Bell sells limp tacos and enchiladas; Pizza Hut sells oily, slightly suspect-tasting mini-pizzas to its waiting crowd. The lines were short here too: Most of us can staunch our hunger for a Famous Star until after a game, when the burger will be fresher, hotter, cheaper and we can eat it in the car.

The best food in the park--the best food in any park, I suspect--is a sausage from the stalls operated by Jody Maroni: juicy, fennel-spiked Italianesque chicken sausage; rice-stuffed Louisiana-style boudin spicy enough to finish off two cups of beer. (Avoid the Polish sausages, which have the texture of baked gum erasers.) Links from the Venice sausage king are grilled, dressed with a few shreds of fried onion and green pepper, tucked into a soft, uninteresting bun.

In the Maroni stalls, Marriottistas also grill a few Dodger Dogs, though the aroma is overwhelmed by garlic from his other sausages. We bought a few grilled dogs, also a few steamed ones from the regular stands, and had a little tasteoff--with and without mustard, with our eyes closed and staring right at the narrow black stripes on the grilled ones, washed down with beer and helped down with bites of a frozen Carnation malt. We got sort of sick to our stomachs. We passed dogs to the people sitting next to us, sort of an unsteady bunch of guys wearing heavy-metal T-shirts, and asked them if they could tell the difference.

“Why do you want to know, man?” one of them asked.

“I’m a restaurant critic,” I said. “I’m reviewing them for the L.A. Times.”

“Naw, man . . . get out of here,” he said. “ Hot dogs ? And I’m Jose Canseco.” He took the dogs though, and he and his friends studied them as if they were taking the Pepsi Challenge. “They’re both kind of all right,” he said.

But to me, the basic difference between the grilled and the steamed was one black stripe and a slightly less slimy texture--both of which were pretty hard to spot under a blanket of chopped onion and brown Gulden’s mustard. It must be a nostalgia thing. They both tasted better than vegetables.