Help me find my car!

I (Evander) thought it only fitting, as the Los Angeles Dodgers run away with the 2013 N.L. West crown, to talk a little in this series about the Major League Baseball stadium that set the standard.

The third-oldest big-league field and traditionally “a pitchers’ park,” Dodger Stadium is otherwise pure Tinsel Town/Malibu Mentality.

Designed by Praeger-Kavanagh-Waterbury, opened in 1962 at Chavez Ravine, well-researched stories over how Dodger Stadium construction displaced locals (already disenfranchised) are well known. Prior to this time, the Dodgers had been playing at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which had been constructed for the Summer Olympics thirty years prior. (I’s the climactic setting for the screwball-comedy Million Dollar Legs.)

The Dodgers, of course, had been fanatically embraced by Brooklyn. There are no three franchise-settings more different: Ebbets Field, the Coliseum, Dodger Stadium—also known as Taj O’Malley for the redoubtable owner.

There have been few changes. How to upgrade perfection? No corporate name’s affixed.

There are 9 levels according to Keith Hernandez (other sources list 5) to the stadium, possibly 21 (!) to the terraced-parking lot(s), like the freeways’ interchanges, and uniquely, since the stadium is, for lack of a better term, “geologically constructed” like an ancient-Greek amphitheater, there’s no way, on foot, to circumnavigate the exterior on a single “ground level.” One parks the car (not the chariot) according to where one sits. In keeping with the film-industry, the arrangement is something like that of an unreal postwar drive-in theater or sandals-and-sand epic climaxing in the Eternal City.

The ca. 56,000 it holds at full attendance hasn’t much changed (as noted) either, along with the 1950s design by Emil Praeger. Beyond the fences, one takes in California-palm trees. The San Gabriel Mountains north of the bleachers are architecturally expressed in the stylized, undulating-peaked roofs covering these 2 stands. Its perfect lawn of Santa Ana Bermuda grass contrasts with pastel-shaded seats. The stadium remains 1950s-luxurious.

Uncharacteristically, more than two years ago a fan named Bryan Stowe fell victim to an ugly incident here. In 2018, a woman was killed by a foul ball. Following a baffling and inexcusable lifespan of 42 years, the 2022 All-Star Game was hosted at Dodger Stadium.

One of the allures of night baseball on the West Coast is to experience the completion of all games east of Phoenix and Denver well before the seventh-inning stretch (some maintain started by William Howard Taft).

Dodger Stadium is probably the neatest ballpark in the majors, and is the home of the famous Dodger Dog from those perfect concession stands.

In short, one could be transported in his or her sleep and realize he or she has landed in Dodger Stadium.*

*As of October 2018, the Los Angeles Dodgers have won the Western Division of the National League six straight seasons, tho this one required a one-game playoff against the Colorado Rockies to determine the division-winner. In the strange, truncated 2020 season, the Dodgers won a championship.