Very interesting indeed. Whatever they do downtown with a sports team I hope that the new trolley makes a stop near there as part of the route. It would make it so much easier for folks coming in from Union Station to get there and make mass transit all the more appealing.

Agreed. Even if the Dodgers stay in Chavez Ravine, there should be rail or streetcar service to the stadium. If such a swap did take place, I would hope this would be part of that new construction.

I’ve never heard the argument that it was some sort of “injustice” to face the stadium toward the beautiful vista northward instead of against a downtown skyline that people seem to conveniently forget was in the early ’60s still not much more than a scraped-clean Bunker Hill History Destruction Project with the tallest building being City Hall. Who is it that makes such a case that it was some sort of intentional slight?

Regardless, I’ll be sentimentally blunt: fuck moving Dodger Stadium. Build a football field downtown. Leave Dodger Stadium alone.I went to my first game when I was five years old and my most recent one yesterday. I don’t want to — and won’t — go see them anywhere else in the city.

As to dreams of all that pre-kickoff woo-hooing atop Elysian Park, any such notions of tailgating at a new football stadium built upon the rubble of a destroyed Dodger Stadium readily clashes with the reality that such alcohol-fueled activities before baseball games is ACTIVELY prohibited and I’m pretty sure would be no less restricted for football games, too.

Ballparks face north or east so the sun is never in the batter’s eyes. If the stadium faced south toward the city, you couldn’t play day games.

That’s why lefties are called southpaws – in an east-facing ballpark (which the majority of parks are), a left-handed pitcher/fielder’s left hand is the bare (non-glove) hand.

…which hand, of course, faces south (wish I could edit these comments!)

So many things wrong with this idea.

-Traffic – The only reason NFL downtown would work is because the games are generally on Sundays, when no one is working downtown. Imagine 40-50 thousand people trying to get to a baseball game downtown at 6:00 when most people are trying to leave work. And this would be just about every weekday in the summer time; not just 1-2 weekdays per week with Laker/Clipper/Kings games (which only accommodate 20K people, BTW).

-Dodger Stadium facing downtown would work for the reasons outlined above, and also because Dodger Stadium was built into the hillside to reduce construction costs. If you wanted to turn the stadium around, you would have to level the ground, then build support for the bleachers behind home plate, instead of just building into the hillside. Besides, a lot of people go to Dodger games to get away from the city and look toward the SG Mountains.

-A subway/trolley/whatever to Chavez Ravine makes no sense, either. The Dodger Stadium Express (street buses) work perfectly, as there are no infrastructure costs and the buses only run when they need to. If we built tracks to the stadium, they wouldn’t be used for half of the year, and when they are used, they’d only be used for about 5 hours out of the day. We should use that money to accommodate people that can actually take public transportation to work or school. We have public transportation to Dodger Stadium now, and it’s free; but for whatever reason, people still want to complain about this.

*wouldn’t work…

I went to *my* first baseball game at Dodger Stadium when I was five years old. I went to my latest game on Wednesday. And you never seem to see Will and I in the same place at the same time. Hmm…curious.