THE NIGHT IT RAINED BASEBALLS IN DODGER STADIUM

LOS ANGELES - I went to a baseball game last Thursday night and a forfeit broke out. I was there, in Dodger Stadium, when it started raining baseball-sized hail, or rather hail-sized baseball.

It was Autograph Ball Night at the stadium, meaning every fan got a baseball signed by all the Dodger players and coaches. At least that's what we thought until we got to the turnstyle, where we found out you had to be 14 or under to get the ball. Most people didn't care, however, because it was also Hideo Nomo Night.You know Nomo. He's the rookie pitching sensation from Japan who has a contorted hidden ball delivery that makes him harder to hit than a mosquito. Whether that had anything to do with the hidden ball deliveries that came out of the stands later on I don't know, but it might have.

I was at the game with my 19-year-old son, Eric; his college roommate and best friend, Cameron; and another friend, Winston Scott, who drove to the Dodger game through the night, nonstop, from Salt Lake City. True story. Winston is a huge baseball fan. The kind who can be sitting in his house in Salt Lake and read about Autograph Ball Night in Dodger Stadium and Hideo Nomo's pitching and the next thing you know he's in his Blazer filling up at the Rainbo station. His goal is to sit in every major league stadium before he dies, or before he's 19, whichever comes first.

As you might guess, Winston had a harder time dealing with the Ball Night age restriction than the rest of us. He thought about lying and saying he was 14, but he is 6-foot-3. He was a star on Highland High's basketball team last winter. He towered over the guy passing out the baseballs."

He opted for the mercy approach.

"I drove all the way from Utah for this," he said.

He was not making it up.

The guy tossed him a ball.

That seemed fairly insignificant at the time, since thousands of balls were being handed out, but that was before the seventh inning, when a very weird thing happened and many of those same balls got thrown back onto the playing field.

I mean, you figure it out. Thousands of people bring their kids through the L.A. freeway rush hour (it is always rush hour on the L.A. freeways) for the express purpose of collecting a genuine autographed baseball and then, a few innings later, they grab them from their kids and throw them back.

The only plausible explanation we could come up with is it was a full moon that night.