Woodward clearly never saw baseball at Los Angeles Coliseum
On Sunday, the Yankees defeated the Rangers when Gleyber Torres blooped a ninth-inning homer into the short porch that constitutes Yankee Stadium’s right field stands. Embittered Rangers manager Chris Woodward reacted by calling Yankee Stadium “a Little League park” and fumed that Torres’ shot would have been a routine fly to the outfield in “99 percent” of the other parks.
A day later, Woodward apologized for his comment, noting that Statcast determined the drive would have been a home run in 26 of the 30 major league parks. But he didn’t take back his suggestion that the Yankees play in a Little League park.
That caused me to wonder. I couldn’t help but wonder what colorful language Woodward would have employed if he had ever seen baseball in the Los Angeles Coliseum.
I’m certain he never saw the place because the last baseball game played there happened 15 years before he was born. But for four years the Los Angeles Coliseum stood as a monument to how ridiculous baseball could get. It was probably the only time in history that a major sport made a mockery of its own game. If a man like Woodward had ever been the losing manager in that place, he might have added a few new curse words to the dictionary.
Honestly, the Los Angeles Coliseum is a magnificent structure, capable of holding 100,000 spectators. It was built for the 1932 Olympic Games and subsequently hosted the 1984 Olympics as well. It has served as the home grounds for three NFL teams and two major college programs and was the site of the first and seventh Super Bowls. Several major soccer matches have been played there, and during the Cold War a dual track meet between the United States and the Soviet Union was staged there. Only last February it successfully hosted a NASCAR exhibition event.
No other sporting venue in the world can match that resume, but the resume doesn’t stop there. For four years it was a major league baseball stadium. There were even three World Series games played on its turf. The stately old structure was made to look ridiculous trying to be something it could not possibly become.
The absurdity came about in 1958 when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants abruptly pulled up stakes and transplanted themselves on the West Coast. Both teams knew they would have to construct new stadiums but that would take a few years. In the meantime they would need temporary facilities.
That didn’t seem to be a problem. After all, the Pacific Coast League was the most successful minor league in baseball and, consequently, there were serviceable ballparks in both cities. The Giants set up their operations in San Francisco’s Seals Stadium even though its capacity was slightly less than 23,000.
Wrigley Field in Los Angeles was roughly the same size, but Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley thought that was too small — especially when there were two gigantic facilities (the Coliseum and the Rose Bowl) sitting idle during the summer months. Never mind the fact that there was no practical way to fit anything close to a standard baseball surface inside either of them — O’Malley wanted the extra seats. He settled on the Coliseum and designed a facility in which the left field foul pole would be 251 feet from home plate.
If Commissioner Ford Frick had a standard-issue backbone he might have directed O’Malley to get serious and find a real baseball stadium. But Frick knew that his predecessor, Happy Chandler, had become a one-term commissioner primarily because he had dared to suspend a Dodgers manager. He probably feared that if he challenged O’Malley he would soon follow Chandler out the door. He told the Dodgers they would need to erect a high screen above the left field fence but, otherwise, made no move to prevent the farce.
The Dodgers put up a screen that was 42 feet high and began playing major league baseball in front of it.
Parabolic fly balls that would have been routine outs elsewhere settled behind the screen for home runs. Screaming line shots went straight into that screen and were fielded on the rebound by outfielders who were usually able to limit the batter to a single. After all, second base wasn’t very far away.
At first it appeared that the Dodgers were the victims of their own joke. They were only two years removed from their last National League pennant but their stars were aging. Shockingly they spent much of their first Los Angeles summer in last place before eventually finishing seventh in an eight-team league.
However, O’Malley had exactly what he wanted. He had lots of seats and people filled them. The 1958 Dodgers drew more than 1.8 million fans.
After the season, Frick ordered the construction of a second screen 333 feet from home plate, with a ground rule stating that a ball had to clear the second screen to be ruled a home run. A ball dropping between the screens would be a double. The city of Los Angeles, however, voided that plan, ruling that such a screen would the city’s earthquake-conscious building code.
Thus, the offseason reconstruction focused entirely on improving the team. The Dodgers made a few changes including the acquisition of right fielder Wally Moon, a left-handed hitter who developed an inside-out swing that lobbed fly balls over the screen — balls that the local press soon dubbed “moon shots.”
Why not? The whole season seemed like some sort of moon tune when the Dodgers went from seventh place to first. They drew more than two million fans for the regular season and an additional 93,103 who turned out for a charity exhibition game against the New York Yankees in May. Another 55,105 came out in August when Major League Baseball decided to tap the turnstile gold mine by scheduling a second All-Star Game to be played it in the Coliseum. If there was money to be made, nothing was too crazy or too undignified.
And when it was all over, there were the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago White Sox flying pennants from their respective leagues. For the first time in 11 years, a World Series would be played with no games in New York. And, for the first time ever, some of the games would be on the West Coast.
And, yes, those West Coast games would be played in a ballpark with a 251-foot foul line and a 42-foot screen. Hollywood’s most creative script writers could only observe with envy. They had only one question to answer:
Was this a slapstick comedy or a horror film?
Amazingly it turned out to be neither. Pitching was the strength of both teams and three games played in Los Angeles were low-scoring battles that looked like real baseball. When the White Sox lost the Series, they didn’t blame the ballpark. In fact, none of them even took a verbal swipe at the place.
Maybe it was because they were busy doing some dollars-and-cents calculations in their heads. Every player’s share depended on the attendance and all three games drew more than 92,000 customers. The third game, on a Tuesday afternoon, attracted 92,706 — a World Series record that still stands.
Curiously, even that crowd did not quite match the size of the throng that had turned out the previous May to witness an exhibition game that featured the Yankees.
We’ll never know how many people would have jammed into the place if the World Series opponent had been the Yankees instead of the White Sox.
What we do know is that the American League noticed the attendance numbers and decided that the National League shouldn’t be getting all the loot. A year later the AL chose to expand from eight to 10 teams. Instead of merely looking for new markets, the AL owners insisted that one of the new teams be placed in Los Angeles. They even agreed that the new team would play in Wrigley Field for the first year.
The people in Los Angeles finally got to see major league baseball played on a real baseball field.