ドジャースタジアムは、みんなバラバラに楽しんでた。── 甲子園に通ってる僕が見たLAの野球

🇬🇧 English

I’m not a Dodgers fan.

I watch baseball at Koshien. And over here, my team is the Astros. Houston. Wrong league, wrong city, and — recent history being what it is — not a name you say out loud in Los Angeles.

This isn’t my first time at this ballpark, either. But I’ve never once turned up in their colours. What I turn up for is the two Japanese players — you don’t have to support a team to want your countrymen to do well, and I very much do.

And it’s still one of the best places I’ve ever watched sport. Nothing to do with the Dodgers. It was what fifty thousand people in Los Angeles do with an evening.

First, you queue — for a basketball player’s bobblehead

Bobblehead night. Free figurine at the gate, first come first served, and when they’re gone they’re gone. So: early.

My first photo is stamped 4:44 PM. Night game. A bit keen.

And the thing we queued for, at a baseball stadium, was a bobblehead of Luka Dončić. Slovenian. Basketball. Lakers. Different sport entirely.

Nobody found this odd. Dončić jerseys and Dodgers jerseys in the same line, everyone pleased. Los Angeles seems to have decided its teams are one team and is not taking questions.

Under the sign, numbers 17 and 18

The address on the sign is 1000 Vin Scully Avenue. He called their games on the radio for sixty-seven years, so they gave him the street. That’s a good way to remember someone.

Then I looked at the backs walking under it. YAMAMOTO 18. Next to him, OHTANI 17.

Not a tour group. Just Friday in Los Angeles.

The field is called Uniqlo

Big blue sign inside the gate. I read it twice.

WELCOME TO UNIQLO FIELD AT DODGER STADIUM.

The field is called Uniqlo Field. It’s painted on the grass down the third base line, big enough to read from the top deck. I came all this way to Southern California and got welcomed by a clothing shop from Yamaguchi.

Not a complaint. Just what happened.

The hour only the early people get

Turns out the reward for queuing is an hour with the place almost empty.

It sits in a bowl in the hills. From the upper deck you look over the outfield straight into the San Gabriel Mountains. Empty blue seats, cut grass, palms around the rim, mountains behind. August, five in the afternoon. The light was absurd.

Batting practice down below. Cage over the plate, tarp on the infield, a couple of players hitting into an empty park.

Nobody mentions this part. It was my favourite hour of the night, and the game hadn’t started.

A Dodger Dog, and nachos in a helmet

The Dodger Dog is the famous one. Long, thin, well past both ends of the bun. Tastes exactly like a hot dog at a ballpark and no better than that. Which is right. Nobody wants a clever hot dog at a baseball game.

The nachos come inside a plastic batting helmet. Chips, cheese, jalapeños, loaded into a mini helmet you rinse out and take home. Snack in the middle, souvenir on the outside.

Whoever thought of that, well done. My bag home was heavier by exactly one helmet.

And that night, sake

A blue tent on the concourse with a queue in front of it. I went over.

HAKKAISAN.

Sake. Niigata. Free, in little cups, to a line of people in Dodgers jerseys.

I don’t think this is a permanent fixture — it just happened to be there that night. Some days there’s a tasting, some days there isn’t. We got lucky.

Stood there holding the cup a bit longer than necessary. The street name. The jerseys. The field. Now sake.

Didn’t come for any of it. Got all of it.

The game

Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Six and a third, five hits, two runs, nine strikeouts.

From up here he’s a white dot on a brown circle. You can’t really follow the ball, so you follow the noise instead. Every time he got to two strikes the sound came up about half a second before anything happened.

Ohtani. Leadoff. A walk, then he stole second in the seventh. A line drive single to centre later on.

But the line score isn’t the thing. The thing is that fifty thousand people make a specific noise every time he comes up, and it starts before he’s out of the dugout.

The part I keep thinking about

Here’s the bit I keep thinking about, and it’s got nothing to do with who was playing.

Nobody was cheering together.

Koshien has a cheering section. A brass band. A song for every player. Everyone stands at the same moment, sings the same words, claps on the same beat, sits back down together. It’s enormous and it’s coordinated and it’s closer to a festival than a game. I love it. It’s why I keep going.

Dodger Stadium has none of it.

People stand when they want to stand. One guy locked onto every pitch. Two rows down, someone hadn’t looked at the field in two innings. Someone eating. Someone dancing because the music came on. Someone with a beer in each hand, shouting something only he understands.

Nobody being led. Nobody waiting to be led.

More like a live music venue than a stadium. Everyone using their whole body, in their own way, at the same time, and none of it has to match.

Then Ohtani steps in and all fifty thousand of them turn and face the same direction at once, without anyone asking.

That’s the whole thing right there. We build the unity in advance. Here it only shows up when it actually means something — which is why, when it does, it lands like that.

The sky did the Los Angeles thing. Blue, then orange behind the light towers, then flat dark with the field the brightest thing for miles.

51,872. Three hours twenty. I looked it up afterwards because I wanted to know if it had really been as full as it felt. It had.

The one thing that was identical

One thing is identical in Osaka and Los Angeles and I want it written down.

Beer at a ballpark is the best beer.

Doesn’t matter what language the shouting is in. Doesn’t matter if there’s a brass band or a bloke dancing on his own. Cold beer, warm night, a game going on in front of you. No translation needed.

Bottom of the tenth

Tied into extras. Tommy Edman, two strikes, singles in the winning run. 5–4.

Fifty thousand people stood up at the same time — the only moment all night when everyone did the same thing — and about ninety seconds later started walking calmly toward the exits. Walk-off, then traffic.

Very Los Angeles.

Up by Lyft, back by bus and subway. Then we walked around downtown for a while. Warm night. Nobody wanted it to end.

In-N-Out, one in the morning. Red neon, palm tree out front, engines idling in the lot. I’d eaten a hot dog and a helmet of nachos five hours earlier.

Not a decision made by the rational part of anyone’s brain.

Not their fan, not a stranger either

I went in supporting the wrong team, from the wrong country, with exactly two players to cheer for.

Nobody cared. Nobody checked. There was no group to join, so there was no group to be outside of. Everyone was doing their own thing, so my own thing fit.

Which might be the answer. At home the warmth comes from everyone doing the same thing. Here it comes from nobody having to do anything. Both work. They arrive from opposite directions.

And the guy next to me, watching Yamamoto? He wasn’t thinking the Japanese pitcher. He was thinking our pitcher.

So on a Friday night in California, an Astros fan from Japan sat in a Dodgers crowd and got handed a bit of home without anyone making anything of it.

Didn’t see that coming.

If you’re going: what it costs

Ticket plus a bit of food and drink lands around $110–130 a head — about ¥18,000–21,000 at ¥160 to the dollar.

Cash is barely used — bring a card or phone payment. Tip screens come up at some counters; zero is fine for counter pickup. Tickets are mobile-only in the official app, so charge your phone and sort out data before you go.

If you’re going: getting out is the hard part

If you take one thing from this: getting out of Dodger Stadium is harder than getting in.

The Dodger Stadium Express is the answer. A direct shuttle between Union Station and the stadium.

• Free with a game ticket — the ticket is your fare
• Catch it on the west side of Union Station, on the Alameda Street side
• Runs from three hours before first pitch, every 5–10 minutes; inbound until the end of the second inning
• Back until an hour after the final out (30 minutes after the end on post-game event nights)
• Drops behind centre field; you walk to the gate from there

On Uber and Lyft: getting there by rideshare is fine — it’s up a hill, walking isn’t realistic, and it’s about twenty minutes from downtown. Getting back is the problem. Fifty thousand people leave at once, the car park is enormous, and the pickup point moves. Drivers cancel, or never arrive. Standing in a dark car park watching a map for thirty minutes is a bad end to a good night.

First time? Take the shuttle to Union Station and call your ride from there. Union Station is a normal station with a normal road and a normal forecourt, and the pickup just works.

People say you can’t use trains in Los Angeles. For this stretch, at least, they work fine.