Before the Boston Red Sox go to Oakland to finish up their season-opening series against the Athletics (they split the first two, played in Japan), they travel to Los Angeles to play three exhibition games against the Dodgers.
So what? They will be playing one of the games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, under most peculiar circumstances, as explained by The New York Times.
The foul pole stands only 201 feet down the left-field line. A 60-foot-high net snickers beside it, ready to entice hitters and tickle the necks of two laughably cramped left fielders.
…
“This is what they’re going to see,” Charles Steinberg, the Dodgers’ executive vice president for marketing and public relations, said last weekend as he surveyed the ridiculously tall net in left and the misshapen field’s other goofiness. “They’re going to walk in and be like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
…
But the Red Sox may feel more at home than the Dodgers — even if Red Sox Nation does not outnumber Dodgers fans, which some have predicted given the reigning champions’ booming popularity. The Coliseum is in many ways an exaggerated version of Fenway Park, with a tall-but-close left-field fence and far deeper dimensions in right.
“We pulled the left-field netting as tight as possible so that balls will bounce off it kind of like the Green Monster,” Rosenberg of the Dodgers said. “But we didn’t want to pull it too tight and be like a vertical trampoline.”
For those who have access to it, NESN will be broadcasting Saturday’s game. Unless you get to be there, that will be your opportunity to witness this particular baseball spectacle.
