6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

More reason to love Sons of Steve Garvey: this marketing campaign that has since turned into an unintentional joke. Also, don't miss SOSG's big post yesterday on how the parking fiasco meshes with the general McCourt-era problems created by stubborn and willfully obtuse management. Speaking of Dodger management, I got an e-mail yesterday from Josh Rawitch regarding my public pillorying of him; with his permission, I'm going to post the exchange, because I don't think there's much in there he could really object to.

Also, we heard from public nuisance T.J. Simers today. Once in a while he says what needs saying, and today was one of those times.

I had received tons of e-mail from irate Dodgers fans, and just thought a service-orientated business such as the Dodgers might make the owner available to soothe the disenchanted.

"What could he say?" a Dodgers spokesman asked, and "sorry" might have been a good start.

Apparently employees were made to park outside the park, and the shuttle buses stopped running, possibly because they couldn't navigate traffic. As a result, employees ended up walking to their cars in an offsite lot through parking lots that famously aren't built to deal with pedestrian traffic at the exits; one tripped and fell, necessitating a visit to the hospital.

Simers interviewed some fans, and without insulting them, too:

PATTY HAYES: "I complained to a Dodger executive about increased prices and decreased benefits (a while back) and said the Dodgers appear to no longer appreciate season-ticket holders. He said, 'Oh, we appreciate you, we just don't show it.' I had ample time to contemplate the truth of that statement during my 1 hour and 50 minute exit from preferred parking on opening day."

[...]

TIM KEELER: "Some friends avoided the lots by parking outside the stadium. After the game, Frank McCourt and his entourage walked down the street…. I bet he decided to walk out of the parking lot and catch a cab to Beverly Hills."

[...]

W. THOMAS: "I'm canceling my season tickets next year if they don't fix it, and I'll be selling all of the remaining tickets for this year if it's not fixed soon."

[...]

JOSE CRISTOBAL: "As I sat in the morass that was the post-opening day Dodger Stadium parking lot, Vin Scully sat there too. As he crept along, one of the human beings hired with my extra $5 for parking realized it was Vin and offered him the chance to use a closed lane. But in a gesture that has defined his career, Vin chose to forgo the special treatment and sat among us regular folks. Now if only the Parking Lot Attendant and the Screaming Meanie could take a page out of Vin's book of class. [It's not clear here where the quotation marks should end; I've never seen anyone besides Simers refer to Jamie McCourt as "the Screaming Meanie".]

"I checked with Vin, who said with a laugh, 'I love traffic,' while continuing to take the high road. 'I'm no noble hero or anything like that; I wanted to go right and the closed lane wouldn't have helped.'

Ah, Vin Scully. I should throw in as a final thought that, as Jon did today in his clever post on yesterday's game, that it's still possible this will all work out. But I'm less than impressed so far, and it's amazing the disconnect between those responsible for the situation, and those paying to be in it.

Update: Matt Welch, in the pages of the Times' editorial section (hat tip: LA Observed):

ACCORDING TO "The Wisdom of Crowds," a 2004 book by James Surowiecki, pluralistic markets of non-specialist individuals tend to arrive at conclusions and predictions that are reliably more accurate and efficient than those made by experts. Another way of putting it — and I'm talking to you, Frank McCourt! — is that baseball fans already knew how to park at Dodger Stadium.

In L.A., where no intelligence is more coveted than knowledge of optimal driving routes, the masses have long developed their own idiosyncratic strategies to cope with such logistical squeeze plays as going from Venice to Hollywood at rush hour, Las Vegas to Los Angeles on a Sunday evening — and to and from Dodger Stadium on opening day. Some routes are better than others, but the net result of group experimentation is that a bad situation doesn't get much worse.

Enter the Dodgers' pratfall-prone owner. McCourt (who made a fortune in parking lots in his native Boston) decided in the off-season that the way to improve Chavez Ravine's car-crunch was to eliminate the one thing keeping it from being a real nightmare: human choice.

Welch, who actually attended opening day festivities, "managed the two-mile- plus post-game commute to work in a cool 90 minutes, and even that doesn't do justice to the horror."

Update 2: Jon Weisman interviewed in a Times story:

"I don't think anyone expects the Dodgers to eliminate stadium traffic entirely," he said. "That being said, given that the Dodgers have increased the basic cost of parking 50% from last year, fans have a right to expect significant improvement, and many are pessimistic that the Dodgers can deliver."

And: have urban planners ever been right about anything?

"Longtime Dodger fans have systems they've worked out," said Richard Willson, professor of urban and regional planning at Cal Poly Pomona. "They're used to strategically choosing parking spaces in this first-come, first-served method. You can't expect introducing a new system to work perfectly the first day."

Maybe the best thing to come of this will be to convert a few Dodger fans who favor central planning to a more "wisdom of the crowds" point of view...

Labels: dodger stadium, dodgers, parking