Dodger Stadium - 5 days in heaven

By Ed Piper

Don't read this if you're sick of the Dodgers.

I haven't taken the time to write about it, but in mid-June (it's now a month later, mid-July) I was able to audit a course in Pasadena for five days. I got the brainy idea to attend Dodger games at night: It started with Monday, buying a cheap seat way up on the Reserved Level or Top Deck on StubHub for $5 or $6 (fees making the total $10 or close to that).

Over the space of a couple of weeks leading up to my course on the New Testament book of First Peter (a letter) June 19-23, I periodically went back to the computer to check how prices were. Meanwhile, I also Googled parking, and got ready to buy that at $10--saving me $10 from the gate price.

Background, if you haven't read my blog, is that I grew up in Long Beach and Camarillo, both in Dodgers territory. So, at age eight, I attended my first Major League game with my Grandpa Merle, my dad's dad. Grandpa always bought seats on the green level, Reserved. $2.50 apiece! Can you believe it? That bought something back then.

Grandpa was economical like my dad, his son, was taught to be. Hence, Reserved Level, not Loge, which was a hike to $3.50 a ticket. (The numbers seem hard to believe now.)

Long story short, on my stay in Pasadena last month, of course there was a heat wave. I still went to Dodger games--my first time ever attending Major League games more than two days in a row. They were warm nights without need of even a windbreaker on the top deck, after 97-degree heat one day (Wednesday).

Fortunately for my Dodger fandom, and unfortunately for the Mets, who are suffering through a lousy season, the Dodgers were on a tear and won, not one night, not two nights, but all five--5!--nights I went in a row.

It was part of a 10-game win streak the Bums put together over the period I was in L.A.

Clayton Kershaw, the lefthander, who I had never seen pitch in person before, was shelled the first night, Mon., June 19, for four home runs by Mets hitters for the first time in his career.

As a diehard Dodger fan remarked to me later in the week at the stadium, "But the Dodgers still won, right? That's the important thing."

The upper decks, where I bought tickets for but where I rarely sat (just like at Petco Park, you can roam the park and stand at counters placed behind back row on each deck to watch the game from a closer perspective), are heavily Latino-attended. The bottom deck, where I occasionally bought tickets as a youth on the yellow level for the whopping amount of $5.50 to see Sandy Koufax, Maury Wills, Don Drysdale, and my other childhood heroes, is heavily white-populated. I found the two strata interesting.

I broke my former record when I followed attending Monday's and Tuesday's wins over New York--rookie phenom Cody Bellinger had a pair of home runs in one game, shortstop Corey Seager homered three times in another--with going to Wednesday's win for my third game in three nights. Then I set new personal records Thursday (four nights in a row) and Friday (five nights in a row).

It was a slice of heaven for a boy who grew up practicing a lot of his reading in the Long Beach Independent-Press Telegram sports section, a large chunk of that Dodgers coverage. And boy, to see five wins in a row. Really something.