The upper deck of Dodger Stadium is removed from the motion, but it surely can have the most effective view of baseball. You can see the San Gabriel Mountains straight ahead. During night games, when the sun sets, the sky glows pink. The full game choreography is displayed below, offering a panoramic view that movie stars and moguls who fill the sections behind home plate avoid.
On Thursday morning, fans heading to those low cost seats passed a recent addition to the ballpark: a seven-foot stone lantern given to the Dodgers within the Nineteen Sixties by famed Japanese sports columnist Sotaro Suzuki. He helped draw the Dodgers to Japan for a goodwill tour in 1956, two years before the team left Brooklyn for Los Angeles.
For Kimi Ego, a longtime Dodgers fan, the lantern has special meaning and she cried when she saw it: Her father was a close friend of Suzuki. For years before her father died in 2000, she cared for him stone lanternwhich was then placed on the hillside behind the pitch stands, before trimming the encircling plants and shrubs.
“Tears of joy,” said Ego, a retired teacher who has been coming to Dodgers games because the Nineteen Sixties. “My father worked so hard maintaining the garden.”
The monument is a tribute to the band’s past and present.
In December, the Dodgers signed the largest baseball star on the planet, two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani, to the richest contract in sports history: $700 million over 10 years. To make matters worse, the team signed one other Japanese superstar, pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, for $325 million over a dozen years – essentially the most lucrative contract within the history of a pitcher.
On Thursday, Ohtani’s influence was visible before he even took the sphere: New ads for Asian firms appeared throughout the stadium – airlines, retail chains, yogurt drinks and skincare products. One local anchor — in pregame coverage that began while most Angelenos were eating breakfast or stuck in traffic — compared Ohtani to Taylor Swift, saying the Dodgers were baseball’s version of the Eras Tour. A brand new addition to the stadium menu is a Japanese octopus pancake, promoted as one of Ohtani’s favorite dishes.
In a vast region connected by highways, where traffic determines the pace of every day life and where it is easy to feel disconnected, the Dodgers bring people together. The team commonly tops the key leagues in terms of attendance, with nearly 50,000 spectators gathering within the stands every evening. On the sphere, the team boasts greater than a decade of regular-season excellence, almost at all times followed by disappointment in October — with the exception of the World Series title won after the pandemic-shortened 2020 season.
This 12 months, as everyone believes, will probably be different.
“After the disappointment of last season, we were depressed about it,” said Manny Palomo, a season-ticket holder who asked his boss three months ago if he could take Thursday off. “And then we got Ohtani and it just rejuvenated the fan base.”
But this being Hollywood, there’s a dramatic twist to the Dodgers’ story. Last week, because the team played the regular season against the San Diego Padres in Seoul, news reports emerged linking Ohtani and his longtime translator, Ippei Mizuhara, to a gambling scandal.
The first shot suggested that Mizuhara had run up a multimillion-dollar debt to an illegal bookmaker and that Ohtani had posted bail for his friend. But things quickly modified, and Mizuhara was accused of stealing from Ohtani’s checking account to pay the bookmaker.
Before Ohtani played the massive game in front of his recent fanbase, Major League Baseball and the IRS announced an investigation into the matter. Then, on Monday afternoon, because the team was preparing to play a late spring practice game, Ohtani finally spoke.
He said he never bet on sports, much less baseball, and was betrayed by Mizuhara, who he said “was lying the whole time.”
“To sum up how I feel right now, I’m just shocked,” he said, reading a prepared statement before about 75 journalists, most of them from Japan, who crowded into a hearing room on the back of the stadium. . “It’s really hard to verbalize what I’m feeling right now.”
His demeanor was calm, direct, emphatic and detailed, although many questions remained unanswered. That was enough for his teammates and manager.
“I heard everything I wanted to hear and I know the players feel the same way,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.
For all his world-famousness, Ohtani, a cartoonishly powerful slugger who is also an all-star pitcher – something the sport hasn’t seen because the days of Babe Ruth – stays largely a mystery although he played six seasons with the Los Angeles Angels, a team also run within the region . The impression, perhaps a myth, of him as a baseball monk – he was known in Japan as a yakyu shonen, or baseball boy who eats, sleeps and breathes sports – has built up over time, and that popularity has followed him to America.
“Nobody knows Ohtani,” said David Vassegh, the voice of “Dodgers Talk” radio.
Baseball is about connections to the past and to one another, passed down from generation to generation. This week, hours after Ohtani’s press conference, two fathers stood within the right-field bleachers, where many of the slugger’s home run balls were sure to land.
AJ Lester, whose 8-year-old daughter MacKenzie had just been thrown a ball by a player, said that when he heard the news of the gambling scandal, he thought, “This could be really bad, right?” As if he could possibly be suspended. This could possibly be terrible.
Now he was relieved, as was his friend, Roy Cruse, a Brit who fell in love with baseball years ago after marrying a woman from Santa Monica. Cruse’s son, Ollie, 9, celebrated his birthday on the sphere.
“He seems to be so dedicated to his craft that he wouldn’t even consider pursuing that path,” Lester said. “I thought he was sincere, that he was deceived, or however you want to say it.”
So with the gambling drama behind us – a minimum of for now – it is time, as Roberts said, “to just focus on baseball.”
The sellout crowd of 52,667 roared as actor Bryan Cranston introduced Ohtani pregame as he walked past the middle field fence onto the blue carpet. (“I thought the walk was a little long, but the ceremony was well organized,” Ohtani said after the sport). Everyone was on their feet when he entered the box for the primary time at bat and made a counterattack to right field. . They cheered on his aggressiveness as he was kicked out of the sport, attempting to stretch that double digit into a triple digit.
For Dodgers fans, the day ended as spectacularly because it began: Ohtani added one other hit, ending the day 2 for 3 because the Dodgers defeated St. Louis Cardinals 7-1.
Eric Karros, a former first baseman who has hit more home runs than any Dodger because the team moved to Los Angeles and whose son is a Dodgers minor leaguer, called Opening Day a “celebration” and a “spiritual beginning” that goes beyond simply playing a game to in spite of everything, it counts within the rankings.
“It’s a start,” he said. “You’re ready to start. Everything is at zero level. This is fresh. Blank slate.
For those who love baseball or play the game, Opening Day is a time of nostalgia.
“I think it just reminds me of growing up and playing Little League,” said Palomo, an upper deck season ticket holder. “I just have to experience it again.”
Just a few levels down within the stadium, Kyle Hurt felt the identical way. Hurt, a starting pitcher for the Dodgers who grew up in Southern California, was preparing for his first opening day as a big leaguer.
“I’ll be honest with you, it feels like opening day of Little League,” he said. “Just shaking. It will make you feel like a kid again.”
For golf veteran Miguel Rojas, it was during a trip to Seoul that he fully embraced the Dodgers’ global fame. Crowds greeted the team wherever they went, from the airport to the hotel to the stadium.
“It will be different all year long,” he said, “because we will have a lot of cameras and a lot of attention.”
