How Bicycling Made Me a Dodgers Fan

Hooray Dodgers, 2024 MLB Champions!

With the holidays, it's nice to sip on lighter news, and with the Dodgers non-asterisk victory in place, I figured it could be pleasant to reflect on how my baseball fanship set sail with bicycling.

growing up - no pro sports, yes physical activity

I didn’t grow up watching professional sports. My parents weren’t into it.  As immigrants who came to the States for higher education, their focus was upward mobility through brainwork, not physical prowess. The most we'd get into sports was the Olympics, a leap-year treat. We didn’t have cable. So, 4-channel public pre-Dream Team amateurism was still a thing. Mostly, my parents weren’t entertained by physical ability with abstract rules. That was just another industry to make money with your body. Sports looked like labor. *

That’s not to say being active and healthy weren’t important. My dad has always been an avid swimmer. He grew up in Hong Kong swimming on the beach, and he taught me how to swim when I was ~7. In Irvine, he'd swim laps at the community pool early mornings.

 

My mom learned to swim at Lake Erie College back when it was all-women. They had a swimming requirement, and all her dorm-mates showed up senior year to cheer her float across the pool to graduate. I've never seen her swim. To me, she's always been a walker. One major benefit of growing up on the UCIrvine campus was that biking and walking were easy options.

 

My mom never learned to ride a bike, and she said my dad was an awful teacher. Their method for teaching me to ride was training wheels. We lived on a cul-du-sac, and kids would ride around all day, speed up to either buzz each other's tires or leave long skid marks on the road.

 

I think my dad sees my life with bicycling as a natural progression because of how much we rode when I was growing up. Even in car-centric SoCal, we'd bike around the neighborhood to school or for errands. When I was around 9, my dad broke his wrist in a pedal-scraping turn on his Aerospace Viscount. There’s a physics to bicycling and transportation, which resonates with his physicist self. When I started grad school, angling towards a future in bicycle planning, he started biking more. In 2016, he went on a guided Montreal-Vermont bike tour where he abraded his face going too fast on a downhill when a big rig passed too close. Full recovery! No apparent brain damage and the same charming smile.

 

 

  He's 85 and cruises around on an ebike. Usually, he wears a helmet.

Even though my parents didn't watch sports, I absorbed some of the culture through friends and television. I was intrigued by rules and felt the weight of the Super Bowl or the World Series. Professional sports was another vernacular, a way to relate and understand.

becoming a bicycling angelino and discovering dodger stadium

I started grad school at UCLA when I was 26. I got my own place in Koreatown, not close to campus, but central to the metro so that I could bike and explore all over. My regular geography was class in Westwood, internship Downtown, and volunteering at the Bike Kitchen in east Hollywood when it was up on Heliotrope/Melrose. My irregular geography was vast. As a grad student in Los Angeles, I didn't have a lot of cash, but I had plenty of time and space. There were days I crisscrossed Santa Monica to Pasadena, and Long Beach to The Valley, combining bikes with transit, the way I envisioned Los Angeles becoming more human and communal and fun.  

 

Shortly after arriving, friends invited me to a Dodgers Game. I'd never been, and I was curious to bike to an iconic landmark. Climbing up Chavez Ravine on a bike feels like a pilgrimage to a volcano, a classic stadium at the peak's crater. The ballpark is encircled by a vast desert of striped asphalt for excessive car parking. 

 

 

 

A bit of planning history, the ballpark is a 1950s sports-venue gentrification story. The Latine/x Palo Verde residents were bamboozled into selling their land for cheap to a federally funded public housing project that never materialized. In true LA fashion, the neighborhood was razed, bulldozing the established community of color. A decent account of The Battle of Chavez Ravine is at the beginning of ESPN's 30 for 30 Fernando Nation.

 

As I rode up, parking attendants waved me by in their efforts to hurry cars through the bottleneck of entrance booth paygates.I wasn't into baseball much at that point, and I can't remember many game details. What I remember was the lack of bike parking when I arrived, and after the game, I could see why Dodgers fans left early to avoid the gridlocked auto exodus. On my bike, I lane-split all the way down Elysian Park Ave (Vin Scully Ave) to Sunset Blvd, bypassing the late-night traffic jam, gone in 60 seconds.

 

There is a recurring feeling riding a bike around Los Angeles when you realize bicycling solves a lot of built environment problems. Everyone in their cars around you is struggling, trapped in traffic, and the bicycle is freedom. At times in places with heavy congestion, the bicycle clearly triumphs as a quicker nimbler human-sized mode while the car is a cumbersome burden, and also where walking might be impossibly slow and distant.

I enjoyed the ride so much; I began biking up to the stadium to cruise the parking lot looking for early-exiters, folks leaving in the first or second inning. Sometimes there were season ticket holders with small kids or folks with other responsibilities just dropping in. They’d hand over their stub, and I'd catch a game for free. 

any other bicycling dodgers fans?

I started going to more games. Dodgers Stadium allowed outside food, and my go-to was a burrito from a taco truck on the way up. One time I brought a whole pizza. Sitting in the stadium for free, I realized it was probably a pretty singular biking experience. Most transportation bicyclists wouldn't go out of their way up a steep hill to visit a parking lot. If you drove up, you had to pay for parking, and you either had a ticket or you'd be intent on buying one. And not many folks would walk up the steep hill on the chance they'd get into the game for free.

 

Later, when I worked in Los Angeles again, I kept biking up to games. I’d also buy mini-packages of game tickets to split with my buddy Eugene. We’d grab food in Chinatown, bike over the 10-freeway on the ped-bridge, ride up the hill, catch the game, and surf out between traffic. You could imagine people complaining about not wanting to ride up hill. But hey, you were heading to a sports event anyway, and a bit of sweat to get there was all in the fun.

 

Dodger geography reinforced my transportation identity--convenient sports entertainment for bicyclists. 

 

 

 

*Before the player-empowerment era, Sports was definitely more Labor than Entertainment. That’s why players unionized, so they wouldn’t be EXPLOITED as just labor. Talent gets paid first. My sports awareness arrived on the cusp of the player-empowerment era. And the era is beautiful…especially how it contrasts to the what came before. From Regan to today, you can’t compare.