Early birds are here, but the worm doesn’t seem to be

I have absolutely nothing to post on this blog, so I thought perhaps you would be interested in knowing what goes on in the press box at 3:30 p.m. (10 minutes BEFORE the clubhouse opens to the media). Most of us arrive at 3. Right now, there are three Phillies beat writers sitting together at the third-base end of the front row. To their right, on the first-base end, are Dylan Hernandez from the Times and Joe Resnick from the AP … oh, and Al Balderas from the Register just showed up down there, too. I’m in the second row, two seats to the right of the center aisle, where I sit every night (the Daily News has two front-row seats, but for a variety of reasons, I established squatter’s rights here a few years ago). To me left, on the other side of the aisle, are Ken Gurnick of mlb.com and Josh Suchon, who is having a conversation with Matt Hurst of the Press-Enterprise, who is in his final couple of weeks there because he just took a job as an assistant sports information director at UC-Santa Barbara. There is nobody in the back row yet. Almost everyone is checking their email. That’s what we do between 3 and 3:40, maybe fill out expense forms, read the daily clips packet that the Dodgers provide with all of the day’s media coverage.. Tony Kinkella from Dodgers on Demand just walked in and patted me on the shoulders. He has a thing about patting people on the shoulders. Think it’s a compulsion. Times blogger Brian Kamenetzky just walked in and sat down by the Phillies writers. Tony just walked by and patted me on the shoulders again. Alex Torres from the Dodgers’ clubhouse staff walked in and is now talking on his cell phone. Our own Steve Dilbeck just walked in with John Nadel of the AP. That’s about it. Hope you found this fascinating. Clubhouse opens in three minutes.