Baseball Back in the LA Coliseum!

In honor of the 50th anniversary of their move to Los Angeles, the Dodgers are going to play the Red Sox in an exhibition game on March 29 in the historic Los Angeles Coliseum, which was originally built for the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics and was the home of the Dodgers for four seasons from when they moved to LA in 1958 until Dodger Stadium opened in 1962.

Baseball games at the Coliseum are of course famous for having a ridiculous short left-field line. It was 258 feet back in the 1950s, and is going to be even shorter than that this time around. Back in the day, they had a 42 foot mesh screen out in left field to compensate, but even so, it was still pretty easy to hit homers, and lefthanded Dodgers outfielder Wally Moon famously adjusted his swing to poke inside-out homers down the short left-field line, which became affectionately known as “Moon Shots.”

One hundred percent of proceeds from the game go to “ThinkCure,” a new charity founded by the Dodgers to fund cancer research, and modeled after the Red Sox’ Jimmy Fund, continuing the McCourt’s quest to turn the Dodgers into Red Sox West. Still it is a good cause, and the McCourts are going to match donations up to $1 million dollars, so I can’t really say anything bad about this event.

We get to see baseball in the Coliseum again after all these years, it’s Dodgers-Red Sox, and all the money goes to charity. Now that is just cool all around.