Dodger Stadium is in limbo. A proud and once trend-setting venue, it has fallen on hard times in terms of being able to provide a truly first-class viewing experience. The good news is that Dodger owners Frank and Jamie McCourt recognize this and have published plans to make it right. The bad news is that they hate each other. Something about an affair, Frank firing Jamie, rumor, innuendo, TMZ.com, blah blah blah. The really bad news is that the lawyers have the family checkbook under lock and key until the two lovebirds can hammer things out in court. So fans are left with a 48-year old stadium and a “renovation” that was sort-of started in 2005, with an updated completion date that will coincide with hell freezing over (give or take).

No matter – Business 101 offers the following solution to companies that find themselves simply unable to invest in improving the physical product: Overwhelm the customers with service. And I was more than happy to be the recipient, for this was to be an historic night. My buddy The CO was with me to observe my observing of the St. Louis Cardinals – the only Major League Baseball team that I had yet to see play in person. Having checked off the Phillies and Marlins in Philadelphia the previous evening, I stood on the precipice of achieving the probably-very-precedented 30 for 30. So Dodgers, bring it on – shamelessly pamper us! We can take it!

And bless their hearts, the Dodgers game day staff was there for us. At no additional charge, we received the following enhancements to the game day experience:

• Fleeting eye contact with the parking lot attendant.
• Entrance queue management that necessitated climbing over just half the usual number of cars to join the dozens of people milling about aimlessly searching for the two Upper Reserved gates that were actually open.
• A full grunt from the ticket taker at the gate.
• A concessions menu that had been expanded to almost a dozen choices, including, get this – a Super Dodger Dog!
• A concession line wait that was now slashed to just one full inning instead of the standard “could grow a beard in the time it takes to get popcorn” time frame. AND a television monitor that you could watch while in line (20/15 vision not included).

OK, maybe I’m being a little hard on the Dodgers (maybe), but having just attended a game in a ballpark which had been specifically engineered to delight its patrons (Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia), the comparisons are both unavoidable and incredibly stark. And this contrast helped me to unearth the secret of the legendary late-arriving L.A. crowd: you simply can’t leave your home or office at 5:00 and get into your ballpark seat by 7:05 from pretty much anywhere in L.A. other than right down the street. Setting the well-known traffic issues aside, there’s virtually nothing remotely streamlined about the process of parking, entering the stadium, grabbing some food and drink, and settling into your seat.

And once seated, the comparisons continued to flow – none of them particularly flattering to the Dodgers. After being in Citizens Bank Park, which was clearly designed to create an environment of community, Dodger Stadium seems cavernous and cold – and not necessarily from a Fahrenheit standpoint. I started to notice that it literally takes an extra half-second or so for sound in the right field stands to travel across the playing field to us in the left-field stands. It’s like the delay on a bad cell phone connection. So much for the close-knit feeling of community.

With the largest seating capacity in the majors at 56,000, Dodger Stadium always looks lethargically half-full on TV, even though they draw pretty well. Other stadiums manage to look vibrant, even with thousands less on hand. Why? Because like water seeking its own level, baseball fans are genetically programmed to identify and ultimately inhabit better seats than the ones they hold tickets to. Gradually and inexorably, at virtually any non-sold out game the fans in the stadium will start to coalesce closer to the field. Think about it – if you’re running a team playing in a stadium that’s two-thirds full (especially a BIG stadium that’s two-thirds full), don’t you want the television cameras to capture a packed field level in which fans are communally involved in the action? In contrast, Dodger Stadium projects a “sprinkled” look, in which fans are scattered throughout a monolithic structure. The visual screams out “indifference”.

The obvious question…are Dodger fans not possessed of the same DNA that drives other baseball fans to better seats like moths to a flame? The answer…they absolutely are, and by most measures are as passionate as fans of any baseball team anywhere.

The real answer lies in the design of the stadium. There are separate entrances for separate parts of the ballpark, and once inside, you are captive to your environment. And of particular note, the time-honored tradition of the Voluntary Upgrade is only a remote possibility, since the lower bowl is inaccessible from anywhere else in the stadium without presenting a ticket to an elevator attendant. You can’t simply wander down to the lower level seats and make use of unproductive real estate. Sure this keeps the riff-raff (i.e. anyone with a net worth of less than seven figures) out of the prime seats, but seriously – have you ever heard of any kind of ugly incident stemming from a baseball fan just wanting to be closer to the action that they love? This is pure mosquito-killing with a machine gun stuff.

I am able to share the above with you because in the interest of research and pseudo-journalism, The CO and I decided to see if we could successfully abandon our perch in the nosebleed section of the stadium and warm two of the hundreds of empty seats in the lower level. We did this for you. And failed. For the one area of the game day staff that the Dodgers invest heavily in is the elevator attendant that guards the gates of the good seats. And so having slunk back to our own mostly empty section, I was able to compile this game report:

The Dodgers jumped out to 4-0 lead, powered by a first inning two-run home run by Manny Ramirez – only his 5th in this post-steroid year. The Cardinals (aka “Team 30”) countered in the top of the fourth with a three-run home run by Ryan Ludwick. That was it for scoring. The Dodgers kept threatening to blow it open, eventually leaving 10 runners on base in their eight at-bats, but could never quite pull it together to push another run across. As for Team 30, that one home run was pretty much their offense until a ninth-inning uprising. With Albert Pujols forced to stop at third when a ball hit by Yadier Molina bounced over the wall for a ground-rule double, Randy Winn grounded out to end the game.

The game ended at 9:50, easily making the 24-hour cut-off between the end of the Phillies-Marlins game and this one (assuming you choose to use the creative accounting provided by three time zones). Mission accomplished. I had achieved the Bi-Coastal Checkmark Doubleheader. History was mine – more or less because nobody else wanted it. And as Kyle (or is it Stan?) points out at the end of virtually every episode of South Park, I think we’ve all learned a valuable lesson here. If you are going to attempt this feat on your own, begin at Dodger Stadium and finish at Citizens Bank Park. You’re welcome.