This year's World Series has been billed as a spiritual rematch of the 1916 World Series between the Boston Red Sox -- OK, that part's easy to track -- and the Brooklyn Robins, who had once been named and were later re-re-named the Brooklyn Dodgers, who became the Los Angeles Dodgers in a historic relocation that changed the baseball landscape. Got all that?
The Red Sox beat the Robins that time, four games to one, and are in line to repeat the feat over the current incarnation of the Dodgers after capturing Game 1 by an 8-4 final on Tuesday night. Game 2, with Boston's David Price opposing LA's Hyun-Jin Ryu, is set for Wednesday night.
The Dodgers moved to the West Coast following the 1957 season, and with the Giants, who were transplanted from upper Manhattan to San Francisco that same winter, it established major league franchises west of the Mississippi River for the first time -- a harbinger of the modern, cross-continental sport.
Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley wanted a gleaming new (and profitable) stadium for his team of lovable losers -- Dem Bums, in the parlance of Brooklyn, had lost eight World Series in the 20th century, including five between 1947 and 1956, set against a lone triumph in 1955 -- and he was obliged by the city of Los Angeles, which gave O'Malley 300 acres of land in Chavez Ravine in the northeast of the city.
First, there was the matter of the people, mostly low- and middle-income, mostly Spanish-speaking, who already lived there. The inexorable process of buying them out, pressuring and displacing them to make way for a cultural behemoth, is the story of American real estate in microcosm.
Re-shaping the natural topography to make a literal level playing field also took some doing. Dodger Stadium, which opened in 1962, was built into the hillside -- in some cases, the tops of the surrounding ridges were removed and the earth used to fill in the ravines -- and there are terraced entrances to the six different seating levels.
It's an engineering marvel as well as a visual one. Dodger Stadium, now the third-oldest park in MLB, always has been one of its most picturesque, overlooking downtown Los Angeles to the south and opening up onto vistas of the San Gabriel mountains beyond the outfield to the north.
For a late-afternoon local start time, as there will be for Friday's Game 3, which has first pitch scheduled for 8:09 p.m. Eastern, the hills glow red in the distance as the sun slowly sets behind home plate. The forecast is 75 degrees and sunny, with an 80 percent chance of Rob Lowe (that's compared to low 50s and cloudy in Boston -- and Brooklyn).
With 56,000 seats, Dodger Stadium remains the biggest baseball stadium in the world -- ahead of the Tokyo Dome and Havana's Estadio Latinoamericano -- and therefore the most challenging in the world to fill up, if you're wondering why there are still empty seats for the first pitch (or in the third inning).
It will be the 10th World Series hosted at Dodger Stadium, which owns a share of baseball history to go with the natural splendor: Sandy Koufax, Fernando Valenzuela, Kirk Gibson. Sixty-one years since a dream of baseball heaven started in a pile of Los Angeles soil, California is waiting for its next championship hero.
