My last Dodger game of the season came on the last day of summer, as the Dodgers opened a three-game series against the Padres—the beginning of their final regular-season homestand at Dodger Stadium. It was an opening night that was really part of a closing: the opening act in the ballpark’s farewell to another regular season. Even on a warm Southern California evening, there was the promise of winter somewhere ahead. Perhaps that is why the familiar rituals begin to matter more as a season draws to a close. For this last game, mine began as it had so many times before: I took the train to Chinatown and made the familiar walk up to Dodger Stadium.
This time I had clubhouse seats—padded, comfortable, a little wider than the standard seats, with a good view of the field. The section has its own restrooms and concession stand, and there is in-seat service, so there was rarely a reason to stand in line for anything. The only curious omission was a cup holder. For seats designed around comfort and convenience, nobody seems to have considered where you are supposed to put your drink. Other than that, they were good seats. They aren't my favorite seats at Dodger Stadium, but they were comfortable, convenient, and a fine place to watch my last game of summer.
After the game, I walked back down to Chinatown Station and reached the bottom of the platform just as the train was pulling away. I had missed it by perhaps a minute. My first thought wasn't really about the fifteen-minute wait for the next train. I wondered whether I had just missed Robert and James.
That thought itself told me how much these rides had changed. The first few times I encountered them in the front car, it was entirely by chance. But it happened again, and then again. By the fourth time, coincidence had begun to feel like a pattern. On the previous ride I had found myself anticipating that they might be there, and this night I strongly expected it. As I made my way toward the station, I was already thinking about walking to the front car and finding Robert and James inside.
So when I watched that first train disappear, I thought perhaps I had missed them along with it. Instead, maybe fate was holding me back for fifteen minutes. The next train arrived, I headed toward the front car, the doors opened, and there they were: Robert and James. They were glad to see me, and I was glad to see them. Somewhere during this baseball season, without any of us planning it, I had become one of the regulars.
I have taken the train to Dodger Stadium seven times this season, six of them by myself. On those solo trips, I kept encountering these same two men in the front car on the way home. Sometimes both were there and sometimes only one, but cumulatively I have probably spent six hours talking with them. Six hours is a long conversation, particularly on a train at night. Once you leave downtown, there isn't much to see through the windows. Mostly there is darkness. There are other passengers, of course, but most of them are doing what people now do when they have an hour to fill: looking down at their phones.
For whatever reason, the three of us didn't. We gave up the screens and talked to each other. An hour at a time, over a half-dozen rides, you can learn quite a bit about people you originally knew only because they happened to sit in the same part of the same train.
Even our names developed a peculiar formality. The first man introduced himself as Robert—not Bob, but Robert—and that is what everyone called him. The other introduced himself as James, never Jim. I understood immediately because I am Raymond, not Ray, and I have spent a good portion of my life correcting people on that point. So there we were: Robert, James and Raymond. Three full, slightly formal-sounding names belonging to three men riding home together on a late-night train. Nobody shortened anybody else's name. It was simply Robert, James and Raymond, and somehow that suited the whole arrangement.
You would not necessarily look at either Robert or James and imagine how interesting the next hour might become. Robert is very tall and looks a little like an unkempt Kevin Costner who has wandered off the set of Waterworld. He dresses as though Waterworld was a particularly cold world, and every time I see him he is carrying a baseball mitt in one hand. The mitt is the first clue. Robert loves baseball, and not casually.
He knows baseball statistics at a level I didn't realize baseball statistics could be known. Launch angles, slugging percentages, obscure measurements and the increasingly complicated numbers that are supposed to explain what is happening on the field. He has even attended some sort of baseball statistics camp. He knows the numbers, and more importantly, he knows what they are supposed to mean. Sometimes he knows considerably more than I need to know, but he is fascinating to listen to.
Over those hours on the train, I have gradually pieced together parts of his life. Robert has worked around both major and minor league baseball, doing everything from bat-boy work to concessions and various other jobs around ballparks. Somewhere along the way, he was also involved in strongman demonstrations at air shows, including pulling airplanes. I still have no idea what Robert actually does for a living, but I have learned enough to know that his life has taken some interesting turns.
What I do know is that he has cultivated a remarkable network around Dodger Stadium. Season-ticket holders who cannot attend a game give him their tickets. Sometimes they want the bobblehead or whatever giveaway is being handed out that night. Robert gets their giveaway, they get what they wanted, and Robert gets another night of baseball. He seems to have attended nearly every Dodger home game this season.
Robert is the quintessential insider-outsider. He isn't officially part of Major League Baseball, but he knows the people, the routines, the ballparks and the little ways of navigating that world. He has spent enough time around baseball that he seems to belong to it without actually belonging to it. He is the kind of person you could easily pass on a train without a second glance—the tall, somewhat disheveled guy carrying a baseball mitt—and never discover the world of baseball knowledge walking past you.
James presents an entirely different picture. He has been a security guard for more than thirty years, and when I see him he is usually heading home from work. He wears his uniform, with a protective vest underneath his polo shirt, carries a firearm and has his work bag with him. He tends to slouch down in the train seat and bears a remarkable resemblance to Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation. He even talks a little like him.
Looking across the train car at James, you would never guess that he is a world traveler. Every year he goes somewhere—Europe, Asia and wherever else interests him—and he knows how to travel. Not resort travel, but the kind involving rail systems, backpacks, hostels, inexpensive places to sleep and the practical mechanics of moving through another country. There used to be a travel guide called Europe on $5 a Day. James is that kind of traveler. Sitting in his security uniform on a Los Angeles train after another shift, he can tell you about trains and hostels on the other side of the world.
That is the thing about both of them: you wouldn't know any of this by looking at them. You wouldn't know about Robert's lifetime around baseball from the tall, slightly disheveled man carrying a mitt. You wouldn't know about James's travels from the armed security guard slouched in his seat. You have to engage people in conversation to discover these things, and conversation takes time. We had that time—roughly an hour at a stretch, over six different rides.
On this final ride, Robert and James started with the Dodgers' win and the intricacies of the wild-card possibilities. Before long, baseball became travel, travel became the rail system, and the rail system became a discussion about the jumper between Chinatown and Union Station. From there, the conversation could go almost anywhere—work, world events, people, whatever had happened that day. We had fifty-five minutes, and by then that had become our routine.
Nobody had arranged any of this. We hadn't exchanged schedules, and there was no group text asking who was taking the train that night. Three people simply kept getting into the front car of the same train. At first we were strangers. Then we recognized one another. Then we started talking. Eventually, without anyone declaring it, we became regulars. Maybe even rail friends.
There was something particularly fitting about realizing that on the last day of summer, after my last baseball game of the season. Baseball seasons are long enough to make temporary things feel permanent. In March, there always seems to be another game, another train, another walk up from Chinatown, another night at Dodger Stadium and another fifty-five-minute ride home. But the sand keeps falling. September arrives, the shadows lengthen, and you discover that even the routines you have come to count on have endings.
I probably won't see Robert or James again this year. Maybe next season. There are always things we assume we will do again and people we assume we will see again, until eventually there aren't as many agains ahead of us as there once were. Perhaps next spring I'll take the train to another Dodger game, make the walk up from Chinatown, watch nine innings and head back down the hill afterward. Maybe I'll step into the front car and find an unkempt Kevin Costner holding a baseball mitt and an armed Ron Swanson slouched in his seat. I hope so.
Because one of the things baseball gave me this summer had very little to do with baseball. In a train car filled with people staring down at their phones, three strangers chose instead to look up and talk. An hour became six hours. Strangers became familiar faces, and familiar faces became people whose stories I wanted to hear. Had we done what most of the other passengers did and spent those rides looking down at our screens, Robert would still be nothing more than the strange tall guy with the baseball mitt, James would still be the security guard who looked like Ron Swanson, and I suppose I would just be another old guy coming home from a baseball game.
Instead, by summer's last ride home, we were Robert, James and Raymond.
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