Homage to the stadium

Midway through a piece built around some tortured play on 6-6-06 and the Boston Red Sox, ESPN the Magazine columnist Bill Simmons admires Dodger Stadium as "one of the few redeeming things about the L.A. sports scene."

After enough beers in this place, you have trouble remembering if it's 2006 or 1979. It's an old-school ballpark, creaky and sprawling, perfectly placed in the hills on the outskirts of the city, one of those Lambeau-like venues that can take your breath away on the right night. I always judge baseball stadiums on that moment after you enter the park, when you're walking by the concession stands toward your section, and then you find it, and then you're outside, and the light hits you, and suddenly there it is -- the whole ballpark, in all its glory -- and either you get a rush or you don't.

Fenway gives me a rush every time. I have seen it from every angle, in every possible situation, and it still does it for me. It's a piece of art, a Picasso painting of a stadium. For different reasons, Yankee Stadium gives me a similar feeling -- a sense that something important is about to happen, a sense of history, a sense of something. Same for Dodger Stadium. Glance into the right-field bleachers and you can almost imagine the Gibson homer landing there. Glance past the center-field scoreboard during sunset and you can see the green hills melting into the darker sky, with nothing surrounding the stadium for miles and miles, almost like the real-life "Field of Dreams." What a place to see a ball game. Everyone should go there once.

The Dodgers come home Tuesday after losing three weekend games in Oakland. How exhausting was Saturday's 17-inning marathon? The A's pitcher who eventually beat the Dodgers, Steve Karsay, retired from baseball today.