Coliseum daze

Tonight I will be at the Coliseum to commemorate the Dodger’s 1958 move from Brooklyn. I will be with my friends Phil and Erica, and her dad (Major League profile) will be working the game.

On May 7, 1959, the most fans ever to gather for a baseball game – 93,103 – filled the Olympian bowl of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to witness one of the most heart-rending scenes in Dodgers history. It was one baseball record that figured to stand the test of time. Steroids and our modern, retro-intimate stadiums couldn’t touch it.

Associated Press A crowd of 115,000 is expected for the Dodgers-Red Sox game tomorrow at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

AP File Photo The Dodgers played their last game at the Los Angeles Coliseum against the Cubs on Sept. 20, 1961. The next year they were in Dodger Stadium.

Roy Campanella, the Dodgers’ exuberant catcher from their “Boys of Summer” days in Brooklyn, was paralyzed and in a wheelchair after a car accident the winter before the Dodgers moved out West. He’d never laid a spike on the Coliseum’s floor.

Yet when former teammate Pee Wee Reese pushed “Campy” out to home plate on Roy Campanella Night that spring evening, and they turned out the lights for full dramatic effect, thousands of tiny flames flickered in the night. The darkness hid everyone’s tears.

“I don’t know if I ever wept at a ballpark before,” recalled one of the most popular Dodgers of that time, Wally Moon, “but I did that night.”

The Dodgers won the World Series in ’59, but they never cleared that attendance high bar. Neither, since then, has any team.

Until tonight.

The masters of promotions and anniversaries, the Dodgers could find a way to commemorate a Tommy Lasorda meatball dinner, but they’ve come up with a true blockbuster. For the 50th anniversary of their arrival in L.A., they spent $500,000 retrofitting the Coliseum to reproduce the bizarre, quirky field that was their home in their first four seasons before their move to Chavez Ravine.

To add to the luster, the Dodgers got the World Series champion Boston Red Sox to be their exhibition opponent. (It was the Yankees who came across the country for Campanella.)

The Dodgers first put 90,000 tickets on sale, and when those were snapped up in a few hours, 25,000 more – many for standing-room-only – were made available. So a crowd of 115,000 is expected today – nearly three times what Petco Park holds.

Traffic and parking aside, it should be a wondrous, nostalgic evening. At least a dozen of the old Dodgers, all in their 70s and 80s, will be there, including Moon, Fallbook’s Duke Snider, Don Newcombe, Tommy Davis, Norm Sherry, Ed Roebuck and Carl Erskine. Missing, sadly, will be Campanella, who died in 1993.

“I feel like this is a huge dividend on the tail end of a long-past career,” Erskine, 81, said.

Gathering the old-timers at Dodger Stadium would have been nice, but the return to the Coliseum is an inspired play because it brings back all the memories from a magical time for Southern California baseball, played out in one of the strangest of all ballparks.

“It was not, or ever will be, a baseball stadium, even though baseball was played there,” Snider said this week.

To fit the field into the bowl, the Dodgers jammed it into one side, at the opposite end of the Olympic peristyle. Foul territory on the right side amounted to a few feet, while there was yards and yards of expanse on the left. The left-field fence was only 251 feet from the plate, while center was 425 and right-center was a cavernous 440.

Incredibly, the Dodgers players didn’t see the Coliseum field until hours before their home opener in ’58 against the other West Coast newcomers, the Giants. Snider, a Los Angeles-born lefty who had used the cozy confines of Ebbets Field to slug 40 home runs for Brooklyn in ’57, was aghast.

“We’d come off a parade, too late for batting practice,” Snider remembered. “Willie Mays is standing there, looking at the right-field fence, and he says, ‘Duke, they killed you,’ and starts laughing.”

Sure enough, Snider homered only 15 times in ’58. There were 193 home runs launched at the Coliseum that first year – eight to right, three to center and 182 to left. That short shot to left had all of baseball abuzz.

The left-field fence was 40 feet high, composed of a series of cables and girders covered with see-through wire mesh. A line drive didn’t carom off the mesh; most of the time the ball fluttered to the ground as if it had hit a shower curtain.

Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, worried that pop-ups going for homers would be an embarrassment, originally asked the Dodgers to build a second fence 333 feet from the plate. If a ball cleared the first screen, it would be a ground-rule double; if it cleared the second, it was a home run.

But the state’s earthquake laws barred construction of a second screen, and the result was that hitters changed their swings just for the Coliseum, and pitchers did a whole lot of cussing.