--Picking up where he left off in his last Dodger Stadium appearance, Brown fielded a comebacker with his bare hand in the third inning, when he could have easily used his glove. (He made four barehanded plays May 4.) He finally got around to trying out the leather in the seventh.

--The last two games I've attended have been Brown games. Total game time has been 4:12.

--Brown has also helped me inch my attendance record above .500 and above my non-attendance record for the first time this season, at 4-3.

--Maddux had trouble in the first inning, which isn't that unusual - check out his ERA and OPS stats and you'll see it's always been his worst inning. But Maddux never really got it together. In the second inning, he threw a first pitch to Adrian Beltre in the one place we know that Beltre can hit - in the up-and-in quadrant of home plate.

--Dodger Stadium concession stands will sell you beer in a plastic bottle, but if you buy a bottle of water, they will not let you keep the plastic cap. They do this because security is afraid you'll throw the cap at someone. They're adamant about this. Kind of ridiculous, don't you think? Well, that ain't all. If you buy a bottle of water from a vendor roaming the aisles, they do let you keep the cap. We live in quite an intelligent age.

--Speaking of which ... a woman three rows behind us at the game heckled Gary Sheffield at every at bat by yelling, "Get a job!" Very strange. Was she a member of Sha Na Na? Unless she intended her heckle to make Sheffield step out of the box and wonder, "What the hell is she talking about?" I have no idea what her train of thought was. I felt like turning around and yelling at her, "Attend a sporting event!"

--Robert Fick's throwing error in the seventh inning produced the fifth Dodger run, but Paul Lo Duca produced the throwing error. With runners on first and second and one out, Shawn Green grounded to second baseman Marcus Giles. Lo Duca stopped in his tracks, causing Giles to throw to first to get Green and keep the double play alive. Lo Duca then hung out between first and second, hoping to produce a rundown that would allow Cora to score. It was pretty hopeless, but it worked - Fick threw the ball in the dirt 10 feet from second base. Never give up - never surrender.

--My brother Greg didn't understand why, when the Dodgers put on the scoreboard the statistics of a pitcher who has pitched, say, 6 1/3 innings, they print it as 6.1 innings. If it's 6 2/3 innings, they print it as 6.2. This disturbed him. But when I pointed out that this was a clever combination of Base-10 and Base-3 mathematical systems, he seemed much more accepting. (You may have to be in your thirties to appreciate this.)