Baseball is an old and aging sport. It is an anachronism, conducive neither to highlight reels nor cult of personality. Games drag. Scores are low, rules arcane. It has not translated well to the twenty-first century; football is the sport of today, basketball certainly the sport of tomorrow. Who among us is as excited by MLB arbitration as by NBA free agency? How many millions who own LeBron and Steph and Westbrook jerseys could not put a name to the face of Bryce Harper, Mookie Betts, Andrew Miller? The sport has simply had its day. But for now it is still here.
And there is something to what we still have, especially here in Los Angeles. The Dodgers are nothing if not reliable — from April to October, today as in 1962, 81 baseball games are played in a well-aged stadium, in Chavez Ravine, in the very center of the city. Cracked blacktop parking stretches for miles, apparently. To the south, the skyline continues to metastasize. The 76 ball is still there, even if the gas is not. The stadium has not been named after a telecom company, nor a consulting firm, nor the smoothie division of a multinational corporate conglomerate. The stadium remains named for the team.
Of course, the Dodgers are a corporation themselves. Accumulation of capital by a cabal made up of entertainment industry vets, finance ghouls, and Magic Johnson is the team’s raison d’etre. Concession stands and souvenir shops make this point abundantly clear — $15.50 for a tallboy, $38 for a teddy bear wearing a Dodgers t-shirt. Advertisements are presented at every opportunity, Time Warner constantly reminding the crowd that it is now Spectrum, Forest Lawn imploring us to prepare for death by calling toll-free. The entire stadium is a monument to the civic failures of twentieth-century Los Angeles, sitting as it does on land stolen away from Latino families for the construction of public Neutra towers that never were. Turning off Sunset onto Vin Scully Avenue, passing wide Craftsman homes drawn back from the street, half of which sport natty paintjobs and tasteful sans-serif addresses mounted on dark woodpanel gates, one is reminded that imperialism is not dead, even in America. Especially in America.
The city of Los Angeles, after reneging on commitments to an “Un-American” federal public housing program, let Chavez Ravine lay fallow for some years. The land, earmarked for a nebulous, never-determined “public purpose”, eventually ended up in the hands of a New York lawyer who wanted to build a new home for his baseball team. Hardly a public purpose. But here’s the thing — fifty-odd years on, the Dodgers are an institution, a source of civic pride and solidarity amongst Angelenos. Sitting sweating in sunwashed plasticback chairs on a Sunday afternoon in July, children running up and down aisles, concession kids hollering about Dippin’ Dots and Dasani, couples on the Kiss Cam, Kershaw racking up strikeouts, some swinging, some looking — it’s a communal experience, as sticky and pungent and profound as one is liable to find in this city of ten million.
They’re reliable, remember. The world, the roster, oneself — changing, always. Dodger Stadium remains, and not only as an object at a distance. Each season we deposit bits of our lives there; memories made around the stadium. Sunday afternoon last week, a four and a half hour game with Ori and Lauren and Tori in the top deck. Family on Father’s Day three years ago, with the camera, in left field reserve. At first base with Jordan in 2015, watching Syndergaard dominate. Field Box 46 with Grace, wearing branded beanies (presented by Spectrum, fka Time Warner) in April. Game three of the NLCS last year with dad, Rich Hill throwing six shutout innings, Jake Arrieta giving up four runs in five. A rain delay in whatever September that was, with someone I once went around with. The Lakers will always be my first love, but the Dodgers and their stadium have meant so much more.
And how many just like me, watching men in white uniforms and blue hats win and lose baseball games as their lives take off or crater or simply pass? How many garlic fries eaten in a lifetime? The collective history of Los Angeles has been written in those 55,000 seats over the last half-century, forever unknowable, an invisible mural. Talk about a public purpose.
The Dodgers will be there for me tomorrow, next season, ten years hence, and when I am gone they will remain. Baseball doesn’t mean anything except what it means to us.
