Fewer Ahead: Summer’s Last Ride

In March, the hourglass of baseball seems full. With so many games remaining, the season feels almost endless. The cool nights of spring stretch ahead, promising the hot, languid days of summer, when there always seems to be another game tomorrow. But the sand keeps falling. Summer gives way to September, the shadows lengthen across the field, darkness comes earlier, and the leisurely pace of the long season becomes the frenzy of fall. Suddenly, every game matters a little more, every remaining date can be counted, and every trip to the ballpark carries the knowledge that there are fewer ahead. Baseball is a lot like life that way. The hourglass never changes speed; we simply become more aware of the sand as the bottom begins to fill.

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.

The Ticket Was for Baseball. The Trip Was the Adventure

I’m getting close to two dozen baseball games this season, spread across six different ballparks, and Friday night brought me back to Dodger Stadium for the sixth time this year and, for the fourth time, by train. By now there are parts of the trip that have become familiar, but this one was different almost from the beginning. I bought my ticket through SeatGeek, which I had never used before. I wasn’t particularly thrilled about putting yet another app on my phone, but I liked the way it helped identify the better values around the stadium instead of simply presenting a sea of available seats.

As it turned out, I stumbled into a very good deal. Someone had listed four seats together in Section 9 on the field level, on the third-base side and only slightly off home plate. Another buyer purchased three of them, leaving behind a single seat—the aisle seat. I found it while hunting around for the best combination of location and price and paid $100 including the fees. Later, the woman sitting beside me told me she had paid $181 apiece, plus fees, for the other three seats. Row P put us only a few dozen rows from home plate. These weren’t merely good seats; they were fabulous seats, and apparently there are advantages to being the guy shopping for one leftover ticket.

There was another bargain involved this time. Since my previous train trip to Dodger Stadium, I applied for and received the senior fare, which reduced my $1.75 ride to 75 cents. There are, apparently, some financial compensations for getting older. It also changes the economics of a trip to Dodger Stadium. Parking alone is $45, and getting there and back probably consumes another $15 worth of gas, even before calculating the actual mileage cost of operating the car. Call it $60 just to drive and park. Looked at that way, taking the train meant that, comparatively speaking, about $40 bought the baseball ticket and another $60 bought the privilege of sitting in traffic and parking my car. For less than the price of a cup of coffee, the train seemed like the better bargain.

I left home around 4:30 and rode to the Chinatown station. From there, it is roughly three-quarters of a mile to the stadium entrance, with most of that distance going uphill. Fortunately, Southern California had cooled considerably during the week, so the climb wasn’t particularly difficult. Near the entrance to the parking lot at the bottom of the hill, I stopped for about ten minutes and talked with two members of the security staff, one a retired police officer and the other retired from corrections. Then I finished the walk up the hill and into the stadium.

My ticket also included access to the Stadium Club, someplace I had never visited before. I asked an usher where it was and, after she pointed me in the right direction, I asked whether it was any good. She laughed and told me she didn’t know, but I could come back and tell her. So I went upstairs to investigate. It was packed, even though the game was still an hour away, and the buffet was $70. The food looked good and smelled even better. I’ve eaten in the Dugout Club before, where the food is fabulous, so I have little doubt that the Stadium Club buffet was very good as well. If I had been there with someone, sitting down for dinner might have been worth the wait and the price. Alone, though, I decided that a draft beer, a Dodger Dog and some peanuts sounded more like a baseball game anyway.

I took them down to my seat and spent much of the next hour doing something I have increasingly come to enjoy: watching a ballpark slowly become a ballpark. When you arrive early enough, most of the seats are still empty. The grounds crew is working, players and stadium employees are moving around, ushers are getting into position, and people begin arriving first in ones and twos and then in streams. The noise gradually builds as this enormous empty place fills with people and takes on an entirely different personality. There is something satisfying about simply sitting there with a beer and a hot dog and watching the whole thing happen.

Eventually, the woman who had purchased the other three tickets arrived with her children. She was pleasant, and occasionally she would ask me about a play or something happening on the field. One of the kids wanted to be closer to the dugout, and I pointed out that where we were sitting had another advantage: we were in prime foul-ball territory. We didn’t catch one, but several came close enough to send people around us scrambling. That is part of the entertainment of sitting that close. You aren’t simply watching the game from a distance; every once in a while, the game comes looking for you.

The Dodgers beat the Washington Nationals 5–3, although they seemed determined to make the ending more interesting than necessary. The game itself, however, probably won’t be what I remember most. I was glad to see Will Smith back behind the plate. They call him America’s Catcher, and I have always thought catchers deserve more credit than they receive. A baseball team can run a parade of pitchers to the mound, but somebody has to crouch behind home plate and catch all of them. During last year’s seven-game World Series, the Dodgers used plenty of pitchers, but Will Smith caught every pitch. From where I was sitting Friday night, I was close enough to watch him work, and that is one of the things great seats give you that television cannot quite reproduce. You begin noticing the work inside the game.

The best example came during the seventh-inning stretch. Tens of thousands of people were standing and singing while the Nationals took the field, but down near the Dodgers’ dugout was Mookie Betts, who was due to bat. While almost everybody else was participating in the spectacle, Betts was working. He took practice swings, settled into his stance, stretched, swung again and prepared himself for his next at-bat. With all that noise and activity surrounding him, he appeared to have blocked out everything except what he was about to do. Sitting that close, I found myself watching him prepare rather than watching the seventh-inning entertainment. We tend to notice talent when someone performs, but sometimes you have to get close enough to notice all the preparation that comes before it.

After the Dodgers finished off the Nationals, the stadium prepared for a drone show and opened the outfield so fans could go onto the field. I decided I had seen enough and started back toward Chinatown. The return walk is considerably easier because gravity is finally on your side, and I made it from Dodger Stadium to the station in 18 minutes. By then it was completely dark. The route crosses the freeway on a pedestrian bridge and winds down a corkscrew-shaped ramp that compensates for the considerable difference in elevation between Dodger Stadium and Chinatown. There was a homeless man sleeping along the way, but there were also plenty of other people making the same walk back toward the train.

When I reached the platform, something clearly wasn’t right. A train headed toward downtown was sitting motionless on the tracks with passengers aboard. Four police officers were gathered toward the south end of the platform, and then I saw another four coming from the north. One of them was a Detective III, identifiable by the insignia on his uniform. You can take the cop out of the department, apparently, but you can’t stop him from noticing things like rank insignia. Then came the announcement that train service had been stopped because of police activity.

Soon the officers divided into teams and went down onto the tracks. A police helicopter appeared overhead, followed by fire engines and additional emergency personnel. Eventually, we could see what all the commotion was about. A man was perched on one of the structures near the tracks, and initially, from the platform, the whole thing was frustrating. Everyone had someplace to go. The trains were stopped, people had just spent hours at a baseball game, and the natural reaction was to wonder why the police didn’t simply go down there and get him off whatever he was sitting on. Then it became apparent why they weren’t doing that. He was threatening to jump.

Once we understood that, the scene looked considerably different. Police officers were negotiating with him while firefighters positioned equipment nearby. A ladder truck arrived, and eventually they inflated one of those enormous rescue cushions underneath him—a giant firefighter bouncy house, for lack of a more technical description. Whatever impatience existed on the platform had to yield to the reality that, for the man down there, this was not an inconvenience or an interruption to his evening. Whatever had brought him to that pillar had brought him to the edge of something much more serious, and the police and firefighters were going to take whatever time they needed to try to bring him down safely.

For the rest of us, that meant waiting. We stood on the platform for about an hour with no real idea when the trains would begin moving again. People started arriving from Union Station because they had apparently been told that trains weren’t running there either and to walk to Chinatown. Eventually, I noticed people drifting toward a train that had originally been headed in the opposite direction. I asked what was happening and learned that they were going to reverse it and send it back toward Pomona. Since San Dimas was in that direction, that became my ride home.

By then, of course, everybody needed the same ride, so the train was packed. It also seemed to be moving extraordinarily fast. Maybe that was only my perception because I was sitting backward and watching the world rush away in the opposite direction, but it felt as though the operator had decided all of us had already waited long enough. Something else had changed during that hour on the platform, too. People were talking to one another. Many of us had just attended the same baseball game, and then we had stood together watching the same strange emergency unfold. By the time the train finally started moving, we had acquired a shared experience. Strangers who normally would have sat quietly staring at their phones were talking about the game, the delay, what had happened at the station, where they were going and how they were getting home. For much of the 45-minute ride, conversations bounced around the car among people who probably never would have spoken to one another otherwise.

I finally walked through my front door about seven minutes after midnight. I had left at 4:30, so I had been gone almost eight hours for a baseball game. Yet when I thought about the evening, there wasn’t much to complain about. I had found a terrific field-level aisle seat for $100, taken the train for practically nothing, walked through Chinatown and up the hill to one of America’s great ballparks on a beautiful, cool Southern California evening, eaten a Dodger Dog with peanuts and a draft beer, watched Will Smith work behind the plate and Mookie Betts prepare for an at-bat, and watched foul balls sail into the seats around me. The Dodgers won 5–3, and then getting home became an unexpected adventure of its own.

That may be part of why I have gone to nearly two dozen baseball games this year instead of simply watching them on television. Television gives you a better view of almost every pitch, along with replays, statistics and commentators explaining what you missed. What television cannot give you is everything around the game: the train ride, the walk, the people you meet, the retired cops you talk to on the hill, the woman beside you who paid almost twice as much for her ticket, the kid hoping a foul ball comes his way, or the chance to notice Mookie Betts quietly taking practice swings while nearly 50,000 other people are singing. It certainly cannot give you an unexpected hour on a Chinatown train platform followed by a midnight ride home with a car full of strangers who, because of what you have all just experienced together, aren’t quite strangers anymore.

None of that was part of the plan when I bought the ticket. I thought I was going to Dodger Stadium to see the Dodgers play the Nationals, and I did. But somewhere during this season of ballparks, trains, long walks and baseball games, I think I have begun to understand that the game is only part of why I keep going. There is something to be said for leaving the house, going somewhere, and allowing the evening to become whatever it is going to become. Sometimes you get a great seat, a cool night and a Dodger victory. Sometimes the train home gets stopped for an hour. Sometimes you spend the ride back talking with people you didn't know two hours earlier.

You buy the ticket for the baseball. The rest is the adventure.

The Chinatown Walk

Most Dodger fans know how to get into Dodger Stadium. Getting out is another story.

I took the train to a midweek day game against the Tampa Bay Rays. The trip in was easy enough. Fifty-four minutes on the train, a twenty-minute wait for the Dodger Express bus at Union Station, and another twenty minutes riding up the hill to the stadium. I met a fellow Dodgers fan on the train, and we spent the ride talking baseball. By the time we arrived, the trip felt less like commuting and more like part of the game-day experience.

The Dodgers won, though not without drama. In classic Dodger fashion, they tried to give the game away in the ninth inning, loading the bases before finally escaping the jam. The crowd exhaled, the final out was recorded, and thousands of people began the familiar migration toward the exits.

That's when I decided to try something different.

Anyone who regularly attends Dodger games knows that the Dodger Express bus can be a blessing before the game and a curse afterward. Getting to the stadium is smooth. Leaving can feel like standing in line at an airport after every flight has been canceled. Thousands of fans converge on the same buses at the same time, and no matter how many buses Metro sends, there's only so much pavement and patience available.

Instead of joining the crowd, I turned toward the parking lots.

My destination was Chinatown Station.

The walk is about 1.2 miles from the stadium. Leaving from the lower seating area, I headed out through the terraced parking lots, passing through Lot O and eventually toward Stadium Way. The route is mostly downhill. The afternoon sun was mild, and the temperature was comfortable. There was no rush. No traffic. No line.

What surprised me most was what didn't happen.

No bus passed me.

By the time I had left the stadium and was walking down Stadium Way, the Dodger Express buses were still loading passengers. Thousands of people were waiting while I was already moving toward downtown Los Angeles on foot.

Eventually I noticed signs pointing toward Metro's A Line. I hadn't expected them, but there they were, guiding pedestrians away from the stadium. The route crosses a pedestrian bridge over the Harbor Freeway. It feels slightly odd standing above six lanes of Los Angeles traffic while wearing a Dodgers cap and carrying a scorecard, but the path is safe and clearly marked.

Then comes the spiral.

If you look at the route on a map, it appears to loop in circles for no reason. The explanation is simple: a long circular ramp winds down from the bridge into Chinatown. Walking it feels like descending from one world into another.

A few minutes later I was on Yale Street.

The sounds changed. The traffic noise faded. The smell of food drifted from nearby restaurants. Chinatown isn't what it was decades ago, but it still has its character. The architecture, the signs, the storefronts, and the restaurants create a neighborhood unlike any other in Los Angeles. For a brief moment, the trip home became something more than transportation.

It became a walk.

Twenty minutes after leaving the stadium, I was standing on the platform at Chinatown Station.

Had I taken the bus, I estimate I would have spent at least an hour getting to Union Station. Instead, I had already gained forty minutes and reached a station that was actually closer to my route home.

The train ride back was uneventful. So uneventful, in fact, that I fell asleep for about thirty minutes.

The true measure of success came later.

I arrived back in San Dimas around 4:20 p.m. I had time to grab coffee and then walk to a dinner engagement downtown. Two friends who attended the game had driven separately. They eventually arrived at the same dinner nearly an hour and forty minutes after I did.

Think about that.

I walked out of Dodger Stadium, through Chinatown, took a train home, stopped for coffee, and still arrived long before the people who drove.

For seventy-five cents.

The experience convinced me that the Chinatown Walk may be one of the best-kept secrets for Dodger fans who are physically able to make the trip. It eliminates uncertainty. It avoids the postgame crowds. It turns a frustrating exit into a pleasant walk through one of Los Angeles's historic neighborhoods.

My next experiment will be the reverse route—walking uphill from Chinatown Station to Dodger Stadium before a game and then testing the same walk after a night game.

I'll report back.

But for now, I can say this: sometimes the fastest way home isn't the bus, the car, or the freeway.

Sometimes it's a walk through Chinatown.

The Great Bobblehead Panic

There are few things in life capable of transforming otherwise rational adults into a nervous mob. Fire alarms, shark sightings, and the words "limited edition" all come to mind. On May 27th, the Los Angeles Dodgers added another item to that list when they announced a Yoshinobu Yamamoto Game Seven Final Out World Series bobblehead giveaway for the first 40,000 fans through the gates.

The problem, of course, was that Dodger Stadium holds more than 50,000 people.

Knowing it was going to be crowded, I left earlier than usual. Not just a little earlier, but the kind of early that makes you feel slightly ridiculous. I figured I would beat the crowds, grab my bobblehead, and enjoy the game. Instead, when I arrived at Union Station, I found what looked less like a line for a baseball game and more like an evacuation route.

The line for the Dodger Stadium Express stretched far longer than I had expected. Every conversation around me revolved around exactly one topic: the bobblehead. Nobody was discussing the pitching matchup. Nobody was talking about the Colorado Rockies. Nobody seemed interested in baseball at all. The only thing anyone wanted to know was whether there would still be bobbleheads left when they reached the stadium.

After about twenty-five minutes of waiting, I finally boarded a bus. The mood immediately improved. We were moving. We were making progress. The coveted bobblehead seemed safely within reach.

Then we encountered four young men on rental electric scooters.

As the bus entered the dedicated bus lane on Sunset Boulevard, we found ourselves trapped behind them. Normally, scooters move quickly enough to stay out of the way. These scooters, however, appeared to be losing a battle with the incline. Their batteries were struggling so badly that the riders were pushing themselves along with one foot, just as if they were riding old-fashioned kick scooters.

The bus driver honked.

The scooter riders looked over their shoulders.

And laughed.

That was a mistake.

Someone on the bus yelled, "They're going to make us miss the bobbleheads!"

The effect was immediate and dramatic. The entire bus erupted into panic. Suddenly everyone was shouting. People stood up and pointed. Passengers began yelling at the scooter riders, despite the fact that there was virtually no chance the riders could hear anything over traffic. The bus driver joined the effort by leaning heavily on the horn. Before long, dozens of Dodgers fans were shouting, waving, and bouncing in their seats with such enthusiasm that the full-sized transit bus actually began rocking from side to side.

At that moment, the Dodger Stadium Express ceased being public transportation. It became a crusade.

The scooter riders continued their slow uphill journey while a bus full of increasingly desperate baseball fans imagined their bobbleheads disappearing one by one.

As we approached Vin Scully Way, a Los Angeles Police Department motorcycle officer sat near a side street. The scooter riders spotted him and immediately exited the bus lane, cutting down the side street and disappearing around him. As our bus rolled past, the officer looked toward us with an expression that suggested he was trying to determine whether a riot had broken out inside the vehicle. He could hear the shouting. He could see dozens of people pointing. What he probably could not understand was that the entire disturbance revolved around collectible plastic figurines.

Unfortunately, the bus could not make the turn onto Vin Scully Way as quickly as the scooters could. By the time we finally negotiated the turn and started up the hill toward the stadium, the four riders had vanished.

As we approached the gates, the tension reached its peak. Thousands of people were streaming toward the entrances. Everywhere I looked, people were predicting disaster.

"We missed the bobblehead."

"They're definitely gone."

"No way there are any left."

Fans spoke with the grim certainty usually reserved for natural disasters.

Then we reached the gates.

And everyone got a bobblehead.

The crisis had been entirely imaginary.

The scooter riders had not ruined anyone's evening. Civilization remained intact. The Yamamoto bobbleheads were still plentiful, and the collective panic instantly evaporated.

What followed was one of the most enjoyable games I have attended in a long time. Shohei Ohtani took the mound as the Dodgers' starting pitcher and also led off the game as their first batter. In a scene that felt almost scripted, Ohtani stepped to the plate for his first at-bat and launched a home run, electrifying the stadium and setting the tone for the evening. He pitched well, the Dodgers controlled the game, and they went on to defeat the Colorado Rockies.

By the end of the night, the only challenge remaining was getting home. The line for the return bus was long, and it took about forty-five minutes to board. Yet nobody seemed particularly bothered. The anxiety, the panic, and the imaginary bobblehead shortage were behind us. Fans compared their prizes, talked about Ohtani's performance, and relived the highlights of the game.

Looking back, it was a perfect evening of Dodger baseball. I got my bobblehead. I watched Ohtani pitch and hit a home run. The Dodgers beat the Rockies. And somewhere out there, four young men on rental scooters remain completely unaware that they briefly became the most hated people in Los Angeles.

For a few unforgettable minutes, an entire busload of Dodgers fans was convinced that those four riders stood between them and happiness. As it turned out, there were enough bobbleheads for everyone, the Dodgers won, and the only thing anyone really lost was their sense of perspective.

Tales from the Pavilion

This was my third trip to Dodger Stadium this season, but the first time in decades I’d ventured back into what is now called “the pavilion.” The last time I sat out there, it wasn’t even really the pavilion yet. It was the bleachers. Wooden bleachers, at least in my memory. Whether they were actually wood or whether nostalgia has varnished them over the years, I can’t say for certain. But I remember sitting there in 1965 or 1966 with my grandfather during the golden era of promotional giveaways: Bat Night, Ball Night, Helmet Night. Back then, a trip to Dodger Stadium meant coming home with enough free merchandise to open a sporting goods store.

This time, the pavilion seats were surprisingly good. Far away, yes, but with a clean panoramic view of the whole game. From out there, you can actually see baseball unfold. You see the defensive shifts, the outfielders cheating toward the line, the way a rally develops before the television cameras even notice it. And every home run looks like it’s headed directly toward your forehead, which adds a nice survival element to the evening.

But the pavilion has its own ecosystem.

Around the second or third inning, I got up to grab something and found the corridor blocked by a medical emergency. Gurney. Paramedics. Security guards creating a human wall. It was handled professionally, though the sight of emergency personnel weaving through a stadium crowd always carries a strange combination of seriousness and inconvenience. Everyone slows down just enough to stare while pretending not to stare.

The pavilion concourse itself is fascinating anthropology. There are these huge aisleways dividing sections, and near the entrances from the main concourse are clusters of people who appear to have purchased tickets primarily so they could stand in circles drinking beer and discussing matters entirely unrelated to baseball.

At any given moment there were probably thirty or forty people gathered there, talking loudly, laughing, occasionally glancing toward the field as if surprised to discover a game was in progress. Navigating through them became a tactical exercise. I eventually adopted the safer strategy of climbing back up the stairs, walking around the crowd, and descending again like some sort of baseball stadium mountain goat.

And then came the seventh inning.

Two security guards appeared near our section. They stood on the walkway, quietly talking into radios while looking toward someone several rows below. Then two more arrived. Then four more. Suddenly there were seventeen security personnel converging on one man like the Dodgers were attempting a bullpen game with ushers.

They finally moved in, took the guy into custody, and put him in handcuffs. Right on cue, two LAPD officers showed up, including a sergeant with the old-school rocker chevrons on his sleeve—the kind of detail only former cops and people who watch too many crime shows notice.

But the true beauty of the moment was the crowd reaction.

As security escorted the man out, somewhere in the pavilion one brave soul began singing:

“Na na na na…
Na na na na…
Hey hey hey… goodbye…”

And suddenly four hundred people joined in.

The entire pavilion serenaded this poor guy as he was marched up the stairs in handcuffs. It was equal parts cruel, hilarious, and oddly harmonious. For one shining moment, the pavilion became a drunken community choir.

Honestly, it was kind of magnificent.

The crowd out there definitely skews younger. Not necessarily rowdier—Dodger Stadium has always had its moments—but younger, louder, and more social. Yet nobody blocked my view during the game, the wave originated near us several times, and the section itself never felt overcrowded.

And perhaps best of all, because attendance wasn’t packed, the trip home was easy.

The Dodger Stadium Express bus back to Union Station moved quickly, the late-night train ride was calm, and the entire public transit adventure took almost exactly the same amount of time as driving would have—except I didn’t have to fight traffic or pay forty-five dollars to park. Public transportation after a Dodger game feels slightly post-apocalyptic at 11:30 p.m., but efficient.

So yes, I’ll buy pavilion tickets again. Probably for one of the June day games.

Good sightlines. Better stories.

And apparently, free musical performances.