3rd Base, Dodger Stadium

December 29, 2008

Ry Cooder's song "3rd Base, Dodger Stadium" rewards a careful listen. The repeated chorus

And if you want to know where a local boy like me is coming from: 3rd base, Dodger Stadium

might lull you into thinking it's an ode to youthful memories of attending Dodgers home games. Actually the speaker is mapping a personal past onto the public space of Dodger Stadium.

The song begins with the buttonholing of someone arriving at the stadium by a guy who "works nights parking cars." The speaker goes on to elaborate his memories with a high level of specificity: "2nd base, right over there/ I see grandma in her rocking chair." By the end of two stanzas like this we can imagine the person who has come just to watch a ballgame getting fidgety; it has all gotten too personal. And the speaker acknowledges this at the start of the final stanza: "Hey mister, you seem anxious to go."

The setup is remarkably similar to that of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Famously the story-telling Mariner stops "one of three" to elaborate his great tale of destruction and redemption:

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone :
He cannot choose but hear ;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.

In "3rd Base, Dodger Stadium" the ancient mariner is replaced by a guy working nights at Dodger Stadium, and the wedding guest by a fan arriving to see a game. The tale related by the narrator is not that of a fantastic journey to the southern seas, but a trip back in time.

The past is evoked by the visionary night worker through a series of details laid out on top of the current topography of the stadium:

Back around the 76 ball, Johnny Greeneyes had his      shoeshine stall.
In the middle of the 1st base line, got my first kiss,      Florencia was kind.
Now, if the dozer hadn't taken my yard, you'd see the      tree with our initials carved.
So many moments in my memory. Sure was fun,
'cause the game was free.
It was free.

If you wonder what the "76 ball" refers to, take a look at the photo at the top of this post.. and out there in left field you can see the red ball advertising Union 76. The other spots mentioned in the song, like the middle of the 1st base line, are more easily located.

While the exact placement of these personal sites may be fictional, Cooder is drawing on a real event: the eviction of a small Hispanic community that once lived at the site where Dodger Stadium was eventually built. It was a village of rural character right up until 1950 when residents received notice that their homes would be seized by eminent domain. The original idea had been to build a public housing project, but that was put aside and finally the Dodgers moved into Chavez Ravine.

click here for a slideshow of old Chavez Ravine

The song by Ry Cooder has a haunting quality with its description of the past. We can imagine Palestinians or any other expelled group looking at their past with similarly resigned eyes.. and with a similar mania for getting the details right: "this is where that happened."

Cooder offers no hope of getting back to this place of memory:

Just a place you don't know, up a road you can't go.

And that is unfortunately the fact of our modern world: Dodger Stadium is not coming down. The best we can do is learn to look out on our world with the kind of eyes that can see the layers of history underneath the concrete of the present. That means learning to listen to the odd voices that speak of the past.. and using technology (a product of the modern world) to preserve the world that once was here. We can yet see these places and travel those roads in our imaginations.

photo by Flickr user Rafael Amado Deras, used under Creative Commons License

slideshow link from webpage for documentary Chavez Ravine: A Los Angeles Story