By Allen Bacon
Editor
Bosco
Baseball returns to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for the first time in nearly fifty years for a one time exhibition game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Boston Red Sox Saturday night (7 PM PST Bosco Radio: The Sports Channel). Over 133,000 tickets have been sold for the event.
The only problem is that the Los Angeles Coliseum was never designed to host a baseball game. It’s not an all purpose stadium. The seats don’t come out or magically pull back to make a baseball field. It was built for track and field or soccer or football or Bruce Springsteen concerts or Promise Keepers Conventions…. but not baseball. Maybe over the line or homerun derby…but not real baseball. Before the Los Angeles Dodgers took over Chavez Ravine, they didn’t have any place to play ball after they deserted Brooklyn (or depending on who you believe… Brooklyn deserted them). Little LA Wrigley field or Hollywood’s Gilmore Field wouldn’t accommodate the demand for the Dodgers.
Down near the USC campus was this huge edifice with a lot of seats. So the Dodgers decided to play there. Never mind that it was not even 250 feet down the left field fence or that you might as well have been sitting in the garment district in some places because the seats were so far away….it had over 100,000 seats and the Dodgers saw the possibilities to make a ton of money off Major League baseball-starved Southern California.
What is it about putting a sport in a place where it is not supposed to be makes it such an attraction? When the NHL played a game outdoors in the snow at Buffalo’s Rich Stadium over 100,000 came out in the sub-zero temperatures and the game had one of the biggest television ratings ever a few months ago. Actually that’s how hockey is supposed to be played…outdoors on frozen ponds. But baseball in football only stadiums is just weird.
The people that were around in the late 50’s to go to the baseball games at the Coliseum will tell you about the wonderful hotdogs or the fact that this sub-par ballplayer Wally Moon became an overnight sensation by learning how to poke a homerun over the short wall. The dimensions would also conversely serve to stifle a great player…Duke Snider who couldn’t get use to the configuration of the Coliseum and couldn’t hit it over the vast center field and right field walls. The Dodgers would actually go on to win a World Series in 1959 at the Coliseum against the White Sox.
But they will mainly tell you about their love affair with Vin Scully. The Dodger fans got a bonus when they moved from Brooklyn…they got the greatest baseball announcer and story teller of all time. Vin Scully calls a game like he is telling a story. Each inning is a chapter and you want to stick around to see how the story is going to end.
In those days, everybody would take their transistor radio to the game with no ear plugs. With all those radios on at the same time in the Coliseum it sounded like Vin Scully was actually the public address announcer. When Vin told a joke, the entire stadium would erupt in laughter…When the Dodgers clinched the National League title in 1959, Vin had a simultaneous call of the Giants game up at Seal Park in San Francisco. So when the Giants beat the Phillies on that day, and Scully announced the score the entire stadium knew and they cheered wildly.
Last Thursday night, my Angels played the Dodgers in an exhibition game in Anaheim. Usually I would turn my radio on to Rory Markus and Terry Smith on the Angel Broadcast. But this night I wanted to hear Vin Scully again. He was in mid-season form. With being in his 70’s now….. I wondered how many more games we have with Vinny before he decides to hang up his microphone.
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