Posted By Jeff Fletcher on October 7, 2009 2:42 pm

It’s about 2:20 pm, a little more than four hours before first pitch tonight, and I’m in the Dodger Stadium press box. Normally I arrive around four hours before the game, to have a little time to get the laptop all set up and make sure the ol’ WiFi is working.

Quickly back to last night. I hung around the ballpark to watch the end of the Twins-Tigers game with some other writers. What a ballgame. Classic. Then I wondered for a while what to do about dinner. Writers would often go out to dinner together at events like this, but in LA everyone is staying all over the place, so most people are on their own. (Or at least, I was.) I ended up at one of LA’s many poker rooms. I play quite a bit of poker, as some of you know. It was not a very good night. Stupid river three-outer! The good news is there is a nice casino in St. Louis, too, so I can win it all back there.

This morning my plan was to wake up and go to the beach to get in a little run. Of course, I slept too late and didn’t make it. I’m going to definitely set my alarm to wake up earlier on Thursday and do that. I can’t leave LA without seeing the ocean. So I woke up and drove to a restaurant near the ballpark to have lunch with a friend of mine who used to work with me at the LA Times.

And now I’m here.

So what happens between now and the start of the game? In the regular season the clubhouses are open before batting practice, but not in the playoffs. The thinking is there are just too many reporters here, so the players wouldn’t be able to get ready for the game if we were all milling around in their clubhouse. I understand that. Instead, they bring the managers and one player from each team (usually the next day’s starting pitcher) into the interview room. Since they pipe the sound from the interview room into the press box and give you transcripts, you can actually just avoid going down there at all if you don’t have a pressing question that you don’t think anyone else will ask. The other thing to do before the game is stand around on the field during batting practice and talk to whatever non-uniformed people you see wandering around. There may be some team executives or other baseball officials hanging out. Usually, none of it is terribly useful. The playoffs are all about the game, so most of what we write is going to be after the game.

Which brings me something else. I’m really excited to cover my first postseason in this job, because it will be a lot different than doing it for a newspaper. At the paper, I had tighter deadlines to worry about. I also had to produce a lot more stuff because I was covering for an audience specifically interested in one of the teams. So I had to write notebooks, sidebars and game stories. Now, I don’t have to get bogged down with menutia (like a whole story on why Guillermo Mota didn’t make the Dodgers playoff roster), so I can just write whatever big story the game produces. Also, without deadlines, I can hope for the most interesting game, regardless of what time it is. At a newspaper, I pretty much rooted for whichever team was winning in the fifth or sixth inning, so I could get my story done. That doesn’t leave room for much drama. Now, it doesn’t matter.

Here is the link to my story today about Dodgers starter Randy Wolf, and here is a story about how playoff baseball is different from regular season baseball. You can also check out our Live Blog, which I’ll be participating in throughout the rest of the day. We’ll do one of these each day, I think.