Baseball and the subway

For reasons I can't begin to comprehend, the baseball fan in me suddenly awoke from hibernation this winter, just in time for the debut of MLB TV. I swear, between that and Fox Soccer Channel, I've hardly been watching anything else.
So what's baseball got to do with trains? As you'll see, plenty.
For starters, living in Los Angeles, my favorite baseball team is the Dodgers. And watching all that programming on the MLB channel, I've learned a whole lot in a short period of time. One of the more pertinent factoids I've picked up is the origin of the name "Dodgers". Seems that about 100 years ago when the Dodgers were still located in Brooklyn, they had a few names before the Dodgers: the Bridegrooms and the Superbas among them. But their old neighborhood of Brooklyn was known for having lots of trolley lines crisscrossing the borough, and Brooklyn baseball fans would have to cross at least one trolley track on foot to get to Ebbets Field to watch the team play ball. Since the team's fans had to "dodge" all those trolleys to get to and from the park, they earned the nickname "trolley dodgers". Soon enough, the name was applied to the team, and it stuck.
And that got me wondering how many modern ball parks have rail access? It turns out, all but one in California.
One of the more recent examples is AT&T Park in San Francisco, home of the Giants. The park was opened in 2000 as a replacement for the rightly maligned Candlestick Park, and from the beginning was designed with easy access in mind. It's located in the Embarcadero, at the edge of downtown, and has a MUNI rail line passing right in front of it. (The park also features a bicycle garage, the first of its kind, but I digress.)
Another baseball park that has terrific rail access is Angles Stadium in Anaheim. You can get there via Amtrak or Metrolink (both lines share the same tracks), and it's a short walk across the parking lot to the stadium. Also, the Oakland Coliseum has long had easy rail access via BART's East Bay line. I used to take BART occassionally to see the A's play when I was a boy, and it was fun to be able to hop on the train, exit at the Coliseum station, and walk across the elevated walkway straight to the stadium entrance. The Athletics web site promotes public transport access to their park; the Angels site doesn't.

So Dodger Stadium is the only Major League park in California with no direct rail access. To address this shortcoming, the Dodgers organization partnered with the City of Los Angeles in 2008 and created the Dodger Trolley: one of Metro's older GMC coaches with an old-fashioned, cartooney trolley decal on the side. These buses have traditionally been put to a variety of uses in LA, shuttling people to places like the Hollywood Bowl and Griffith Observatory. The Dodger Trolley leaves Union Station every ten minutes starting 90 minutes before games, and runs for up to an hour after games to take riders back to Union Station.

It's a quick and dirty solution, but I have to say it's pretty clever: the City of Los Angeles has found yet another way to re-purpose some older buses, and the Dodgers have found a way to capitalize on Dodger history. And it's something I'm looking forward to trying out this baseball season.

But there needs to be a more permanent alternative to driving to see the Dodgers play. (Here are a couple of nuttier ideas.) I sincerely hope that with Frank McCourt's ambitious renovation plan of Dodger Stadium, he manages to convince the City of Los Angeles to provide that permanent solution: a spur rail line from Union Station. Now that Measure R has been passed into law, maybe it's more likely than ever. Maybe I'll try asking Mr. McCourt myself.