Day baseball, a midweek rarity. The marine layer lingers over Dodger Stadium an hour before the Arizona Diamondbacks’ leadoff batter steps to the plate on Mexican Heritage Day, my first game during the stadium’s 60th-anniversary season.
Traffic is light, also a rarity on the almost-ceremonial route I follow down Sunset Boulevard and into Echo Park before reaching forested Elysian Park and driving through Gate B to enter the sprawling 16,000-vehicle parking lot. (If you wonder why Dodger fans arrive late and leave early, that’s why.) Once inside the ballpark, I climb, via a series of escalators and stairwells tucked underneath the stands behind home plate, from field level to the stadium’s top deck, to take in the panorama.
From the time of William Mulholland and the Los Angeles Aqueduct, L.A. has been a city unafraid of engineering on a grand scale, no matter the environmental or social costs. When owner Walter O’Malley moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn following the 1957 season,
