We’re a month away from an exhibition game between the Dodgers and Red Sox at LA Memorial Coliseum. In honor of this game between my two favorite teams, I present to you a history and some other nuggets of information on the Coliseum, the original home of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Multipurpose stadiums have never been and will never be a good idea. They have to be able to effectively house baseball and football, but they’re never quite the right size, and most of them are downright unattractive from the outside. Just say “Veterans Stadium” to an Eagles or Phillies fan and see what kind of reaction you get.
But what if you play in a stadium that isn’t even intended to serve as a field for your sport of choice? Not only is it the wrong size, but no amount of fences and tweaking will ever make it the right size. It’s a nightmare in which to watch that sport, not to mention play in it, and you are playing in it because your owner picked seating capacity over proper accomodations while he was waiting for your new stadium to be built.
This is the tale of Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
The Coliseum opened in 1923 and the first event it hosted was a football game between Pomona and USC. The USC Trojans still play football there. The stadium also hosted the Summer Olympics in 1932 and 1984 and professional football. And, for four years between 1958 and 1961, the Coliseum was home to the Los Angeles Dodgers.
What I said above is true — Walter O’Malley did choose the Coliseum over Wrigley Field based on seating capacity, even though Wrigley Field was built for baseball (it hosted the PCL Los Angeles Angels until O’Malley bought the park and the team from P.K. Wrigley). And the park was, in fact, poorly suited for baseball. Home plate, in an actual baseball field, is usually at the narrow end of the field. In the Coliseum, it is in the middle of one of the long ends, and there is a fence around right field to center field. The left-field foul line is only 250 feet long, and a screen is placed in front of the left-field stands to prevent every fly ball from leaving the park. This is a photograph of what it looks like.
The Dodgers did not do well their first year in this “ballpark.” Neither would you if you had to play baseball in a football field. They were dead last, or close to it, in most statistical categories. But they picked themselves up in 1959 and won the World Series, setting a couple of attendance records along the way, so maybe O’Malley wasn’t completely nuts when he picked this place to house the Dodgers until Dodger Stadium was completed. Not that this excuses the crazy dimensions of the place or anything, though it did give Wally Moon some of his best years…and the pitching staff some of their worst.
So now the Dodgers have a perfectly nice ballpark, but they’re celebrating fifty years in LA, so they’ll be honoring their roots by playing in this thing. And the best part is that it’ll be even worse this time. The place is narrower than it was in 1958, so the left-field line is 200 feet long. Solution? Make the screen taller. Oh, that’s not asking for disaster. Of course, it does guarantee an exciting game. And they’ll probably break the exhibition attendance record they set in 1959 against the Yankees.
It’s just one game this time, instead of four seasons, so we’ll just have to enjoy the absurdity of it all. I can’t be the only one who wants to see if Manny Ramirez falls into the screen, right? See Ortiz launch an opposite-field bomb over the screen? Who knows — maybe people will have to bring their radios so they have some way of knowing what’s going on. And you know Vin Scully won’t be at a loss for words. So sit back and relax. It doesn’t count and it’ll probably be pretty funny. What else can you ask for?
McCourt kicks off Coliseum project [Dodgers.com]
1958 Los Angeles Dodgers Statistics and Roster [Baseball Reference]
