Where I've been

I went to my first Dodger baseball game since 2014.

Snow-covered Mt. Baldy is visible on the right side of the San Gabriels’ ridgeline.

Between procrastinating on my taxes until October 15 and going to the Dodgers-Brewers playoff game on Thursday, I’ve been neglecting my Substack readers.

If you watched the third game of the National League Championship Series (i.e., the semifinal before the World Series) on TV, you no doubt saw me in the background because a kind reader furnished me with his season ticket in the first row behind the Dodgers’ dugout.

I was the guy who could lose 15 pounds wearing a red shirt. I looked like I was the only person in Dodger Stadium who knew how to dress appropriately for an Alabama Crimson Tide football game. (The Dodgers’ main colors are electric blue and white and the Brewers’ color is navy blue, so in crowd shots I appear to be the only person dressed in red in the ballpark.)

Sitting in the first row on TV is a little nerve-wracking because there are a lot of everybody-clap-along-to-the-Mexican Hat Dance-type cheering routines (modern baseball games are wall-to-wall PA sound, except when pitches are being thrown), but I am embarrassingly devoid of any sense of rhythm. So I mostly twirled the blue Dodgers towel they handed out to everybody at the front gate because it didn’t seem possible to mess that up and become a meme.

It was a close 3-1 win for the Dodgers to go up 3 games to 0 in the NLCS. Pitchers dominated (the Dodgers got only 5 hits and the Brewers 4), because the main hurlers (Tyler Glasnow for the Dodgers and rookie phenom Jacob Misiorowski, whose 101 mph fastball and 96 mph slider were as unhittable as his name is unspellable until his velocity dipped a couple of miles per hour in the 6th inning) are really good. And tall: Glasnow is 6’8” and Misiorowski 6’7”.

And it was low-scoring because the game started at 3:08 pm, so the batters were mostly standing in the stadium’s shadow trying to see shaded pitches against the bright sunshine on the outfield bleachers. Pitchers throw so hard these days that it’s almost unfair to hitters to play late afternoon games with weird shadows.

Shohei Ohtani led off with a bloop triple, but mostly looked still slumping at the plate, like he has after the first game of the postseason, when he hit two home runs.*

Dodger Stadium, which opened in 1962, is now the third oldest ballpark in the big leagues after Fenway in Boston and Wrigley in Chicago. It’s a fine example of old-fashioned modernist design. Unlike recent ballparks that emphasize an urban view, Dodger Stadium faces away from nearby downtown L.A. toward hills and mountains. Mt. Baldy with snow above 7,000 feet was visible from the upper decks on Thursday.

Baseball stadiums have been getting smaller in recent decades, so old Dodger Stadium now has the highest seating capacity at something like 52,400.

Capacity used to be a famous 56,000, but Dodger fans got fatter so they put in wider seats in this century. Still, since much of Los Angeles’ urge toward traditionalism is expressed through its sports teams (e.g., the Dodgers had Vin Scully working on the radio broadcast from 1950 in Brooklyn through 2016), the Dodgers still claim an official capacity of 56,000, while the real capacity is a secret.

This playoff game was about 96% sold out. The fourth deck beyond the right field foul pole was almost empty: it’s really far from the action and it’s broiled by the late afternoon sun. That the Dodgers’ first home game would be played on Thursday rather than Monday wasn’t clear until the Brewers beat the Cubs in the quarterfinals last Saturday night, and then the time wasn’t announced until this week. The logistics of getting to Dodger Stadium are never easy, and with $65 parking during the playoffs, you can’t just tell everybody in your group to go drive themselves. (I got dropped off.)

Dodger Stadium is on top of a hill about a mile from Downtown Los Angeles. It is surrounded by 130 acres of parking lots. They could build a four story parking garage and have ~100 acres left over for development. But how would people living up there get up and down the hill without further overwhelming the winding surface streets?

Since 2018, they’ve been talking about building a 1.2 mile ski-lift-like gondola from Union Station to Dodger Stadium. Supposedly it could move 5000 people one-way per hour. (Of course, it’s only been seven years of studies, so, this being California, nothing has happened yet.)

A gondola ride sounds like a fun tourist amenity to add to a trip to the ballgame, but probably not a serious transport solution for housing at Dodger Stadium. At present, everybody in L.A. wants their own car because there are so many places to go in L.A. that are all over the place. Maybe in the future, robo-taxis will be a good replacement for private cars? Or could they dig a tunnel to connect to a freeway?

After the game, I walked 5.5 miles west to Gower in the middle of Hollywood. Los Angeles looked … Basically Fine, as Drukpa Kunley (or perhaps Kunley Drukpa?) would describe, say, Belgrade.

* Now in tonight’s fourth game of the NLCS, Ohtani has enjoyed perhaps the greatest postseason game in baseball history: 6 innings pitched of shutout baseball, 10 strikeouts, and only two hits allowed. At bat, he has hit three home runs.

The only other pitcher to hit three homers in one game was Jim Tobin in May 1942.