The Dream That Hides The Ghosts
A personal history of Dodger Stadium
The Dodgers are winning this year. They’re winning steadily, handily. As I’m writing this, they’re 92–48, which means they’re 24 wins away from beating the record for most wins in a season. It’s a sturdy one: That number has held since the Chicago Cubs set it in 1906. (It was matched once—by the Seattle Mariners in 2011.)
So of course it happens that the only Dodger game I’ve seen this year was one of the few the team lost. I went with a friend from high school, another L.A. native for whom games are as much a summer ritual as they are sporting events. Our seats were $10 each, in the highest reaches of the nosebleeds, at the precarious tippy-top of the structure, which is built into the side of a hill.
If you don’t care about baseball—which I don’t, really—they’re the best seats in the house: Below you, the field is impossibly green, lit by hot white fluorescents; beyond it float the San Gabriel Mountains, this year still snow-capped and solemn. Weekday games tend to start around sunset, so you watch the sky turn neon, then pastel, before it gets smothered by a soft, undifferentiated dark. You can eat Dodger dogs and garlic fries and drink $16 Micheladas. You can have churros for dessert.
