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Los Angeles Memorial
Coliseum / Los Angeles Dodgers / 1958-1961
When the Los Angeles Coliseum was constructed for the 1932
Olympics, no one ever envisioned that it would be used as a
baseball stadium. But when Walter O'Malley moved the Brooklyn
Dodgers to Los Angeles after the end of the 1957 season, he
decided that the Coliseum would be a great place to play
baseball while Dodger
Stadium was under construction. Why? Sheer capacity.
O'Malley must have drooled at the prospect of cramming 90,000
paying customers into a stadium to see the Dodgers. And while
Wrigley Field (the former home of the Pacific Coast League's
Los Angeles Angels) or even the Rose Bowl would have made a
more appropriate home for a baseball team, they lacked the
sheer capacity that the Coliseum had.
On April 18, 1958, the Dodgers
played their first game the Coliseum, defeating the Giants
6-5 before 78,672 fans at the Coliseum. On that day the
Coliseum became the largest stadium ever in major-league
baseball -- a record that still stands. The size of the
stadium allowed the Dodgers to set the all-time single-game
attendance record on May 7, 1959: a crowd of 93,105 showed up
to see former Dodger great Roy Campanella honored during an
exhibition game between the New York Yankees and Dodgers.
In 1958 the Dodgers
drew over 1.8 million fans (good enough for second in National
League attendance -- the Milwaukee Braves drew over 1.9
million fans to County Stadium), and in 1959 and 1960, the
team drew over 2 million fans -- records at the time. It
wasn't a bad run for the Dodgers in the Coliseum -- the team
won a World Series while playing there, and interest in the
Dodgers certainly was whetted by the Coliseum's enormous
capacity. The
Dodgers finished their occupancy on September 21, 1961, and
then moved to Chavez Ravine for the 1962 season. Over the years the Los Angeles Coliseum has been the home
of the University of Southern California (USC) football team
(still to this day, as a matter of fact) as well as the NFL's Los Angeles Raiders and Los Angeles Rams.
The Los Angeles Coliseum also did duty as a baseball
stadium in 2001, representing other ballparks in the HBO movie
61, Billy Crystal's account of the home-run race between
Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle in 1961. To look like
Baltimore's Memorial Stadium, new fences were put in the
outfield, dugouts were planed in the infield, a facsimile
scoreboard was erected, and an infield was cut out of the
existing sod. We put the fences exactly, the old scoreboard,
and cut an infield. A "Green Monster" was then erected in left
field to mimic Boston's Fenway Park, while another wall and
repainted dugouts represented Washington, D.C.'s Griffith
Stadium.
Seating:
93,000 (1958), 94,600 (1959)
Original cost: $954,000 (1923); $950,294 (1958 retrofitting
for baseball)
And so began the great
experiment. Some basic work was done to make the Coliseum
appropriate for baseball: dugouts, three banks of lights and a
press box were added. Because of the orientation of the
diamond, there was a ton of space in foul ground down the
left-field line, but very little space between the right-field
line and the bleachers. The baseball diamond was crammed into
one end of the stadium, resulting in a left-field line
measuring only 250 feet. A 40-foot screen was constructed to
counter the intimate dimensions, but it didn't do that much
good: the balls flew out of the park because of the intimate
dimensions. In fact, the disparity between home runs hit to
left and home runs hit to right field was staggering. In 1958,
193 home runs were hit in the Coliseum -- 182 to left, 3 to
center, and 8 to right. SABR's
Hugh
Mechesney describes the the two soft fly ball home runs
over the left field screen by Pee Wee Reese that ended up as
home runs -- and probably would have been routine outs
anywhere else.
The main entrance to the stadium was at the
opposite end of the stadium from home plate (the main entrance
was where the concrete columns are located; in the picture
below, Sandy Koufax is near the infield and the main entrance
was behind him). Since the stadium was only one tier, there
were some pretty bad seats located far, far away from the
action -- oldtimers recall that they considered themselves
barely in the stadium when sitting in the outfield bleachers.
STATS
| Dimensions | |||||
| Year | LF | LC | C | RC | RF |
| 1958 | 250 | 425 | 425 | 440 | 301 |
| 1959 | 251.6 | 417 | 420 | 375 | 300 |
| 1960 | 251.6 | 417 | 420 | 394 | 300 |
| 1961 | 251.6 | 417 | 420 | 380 | 300 |
| Year | Attendance | Average | Rank in League | Record | Standing | |
| 1958 | 1,845,556 | 23,968 | 2nd out of 8 | 71-83 | 7 | |
| 1959 | 2,071,045 | 26,552 | 1st out of 8 | 88-68 | 1 | |
| 1960 | 2,253,887 | 29,271 | 1st out of 8 | 82-72 | 4 | |
| 1961 | 1,804,250 | 23,432 | 1st out of 8 | 89-65 | 2 |
Related Books
True Blue: The Dramatic History of the Los Angeles Dodgers
The Stadium: Architecture of Mass Sport
The Ballpark Book : A Journey Through the Fields of Baseball Magic
Blue Skies, Green Fields: A Celebration...
Take Me Out to the Ballpark: An Illustrated Guide to Ballparks Past and Present
Storied Stadiums: Baseball's History Through Its Ballparks
Baseball Parks (Sports Palaces)