Baseball Games

The Dodgers' one-night return to the Coliseum has the team wrestling with a familiar problem -- parking. The Dodgers are offering round-trip shuttles from the Dodger Stadium parking lot to the Coliseum for Saturday's exhibition game against the Boston Red Sox. That wasn't an option in 1958, before the Dodgers' first game in Los Angeles.

Charitie McArthur says she bleeds Dodger blue. She thinks Vin Scully is a genius, wept with joy when Steve Finley's grand slam clinched a division title in 2004 and scored big when she got married at home plate at Dodger Stadium the following summer. But as the team returns to town this week for the new season, the 32-year-old teacher from Redondo Beach is already cringing. It's not the team's prospects that have her down, but the prospect of the bad traffic expected at this weekend's games.

The Los Angeles Dodgers' batting lineup didn't have much luck Wednesday. But the team's fan lineup in Dodger Stadium's Section 11, Row N certainly did. In the bottom of the fifth inning Glen Walker in Seat 1 caught a pop foul hit by Dodger first baseman James Loney. On the next pitch by the New York Mets' John Maine, Joe Castro in Seat 2 caught a line-shot fouled off Loney's bat. The crowd in the field-level seats between third base and home went wild.

For years, broadcaster Harry Caray waved his microphone out of the booth to lead White Sox and Cubs fans in the singing of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," a tradition still carried on at Wrigley Field with celebrity conductors. This year, the song turns 100, but it's just one of many that have become a part of the American sports soundtrack. Here are some others that are required listening, whether fans like it or not.

Jose Alvarez went all seven innings, giving up four hits and one earned run, to lead Los Angeles to the championship of the Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) World Series with a 5-2 victory over Detroit on Monday at Angel Stadium. "Jose was gutsy," Los Angeles Manager Joey Aragon said. "He's a competitor." But Alvarez and his team, the Dodgers, got off to a slow start. Detroit scored in the bottom of the first inning.

Red Sox Nation has spoken. A pending deal by Major League Baseball to put its Extra Innings pay package exclusively on DirecTV may have to be put on hold now, buffeted by an uprising involving baseball's most ardent fans, spearheaded by those who live and die with the Boston Red Sox. MLB expected to announce the deal as early as next week, but that was less certain after Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) on Thursday asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate the matter.

Robert Jacobson, president and chief executive of In Demand, met with baseball executives Friday to discuss a possible deal for cable to carry the Extra Innings out-of-market pay television package, according to a spokeswoman for In Demand. The meeting came one day after Jacobson said conditions set by baseball made it impossible for the In Demand service to offer the package. A key issue is the Baseball Channel, to be launched in 2009.

It used to be so simple. Walk up to the ticket window at the ballpark, buy a box seat. Ask for a box seat these days, and you get more options than voice mail. As seating charts evolve into color-coded mazes and teams charge an assortment of prices for the same seat, some box seats are more equal than others. The Dodgers sell 24 categories of seats, 11 with "box" in the name, with box prices ranging from $20 to $100 a ticket.

Despite a baseball-imposed deadline of Saturday, negotiations regarding the Extra Innings out-of-market pay package are continuing, a spokesperson for In Demand said. In Demand, which is negotiating on behalf of cable television, and EchoStar, the parent company for the Dish Network, are trying to retain the package. If they are unsuccessful, the package will belong to DirecTV exclusively.

The right-field bleachers at Dodger Stadium have a new identity: the "all-you-can-eat pavilion." Nicknames for the ballpark's new parking set-up aren't printable in a family newspaper. The Dodgers' home season opener Monday afternoon -- a 6-3 loss -- marked the first day of all-you-can-eat feasting and the pricier, theoretically more tightly controlled parking. The result was something like a double-header split.