Dodger Stadium

About Dodger Stadium

From a hilltop in Chavez Ravine, two miles north of downtown Los Angeles, Dodger Stadium looks out on the San Gabriel Mountains framing the outfield, with the downtown skyline behind you if you are sitting up in the top deck. At 56,000 seats, it’s the largest ballpark in Major League Baseball, and on a clear evening, with the light going orange over the mountains, there’s no better seat in sports.

Home to the Los Angeles Dodgers since 1962, the stadium is the third-oldest active MLB park behind Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. Only two are older. Unlike those intimate pre-war venues, Dodger Stadium was purpose-built for the automobile age, carved into a hillside with layered parking lots that let fans walk directly to their seating level without climbing stairs. Revolutionary in 1962, and still working.

Walter O’Malley privately financed the $23 million construction, making it the first owner-funded major league ballpark since Yankee Stadium in 1923. Architect Emil Praeger, whose firm Praeger-Kavanagh-Waterbury drew the plans, created a modernist bowl with clean sight lines and a cantilevered roof that shades the upper deck. The stadium underwent a $100 million renovation in 2019-2020 that added the two-acre center-field plaza, new dining options, and improved accessibility.

Dodger Stadium has hosted 12 World Series, two MLB All-Star Games (1980, 2022), a 1987 papal Mass, Olympic baseball in 1984 (and again in 2028), and concerts from the Rolling Stones to Elton John. The Dodgers won back-to-back titles in 2024 and 2025, their eighth and ninth championships overall.

Getting to Dodger Stadium

Public Transit

The Dodger Stadium Express is a free bus service operated by LA Metro that runs on all game days. It’s by far the best way to avoid the infamous stadium traffic.

You need a valid game ticket to board the Dodger Stadium Express. The ride from Union Station takes about 10-15 minutes depending on traffic.

Driving + Parking

Dodger Stadium is accessible from multiple freeways, but post-game traffic on the narrow exit roads is notorious. GPS users should enter “1000 Vin Scully Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012.”

Parking prices change by event and by season, and 2026 reporting put general prepaid parking around $40, with a premium for paying at the gate and more again for the preferred lots nearest the entrances. Buy in advance from the Dodgers rather than relying on a number from anywhere else. Arrive early, the lots are tiered into the hillside, and getting settled before the crowds makes a real difference.

Rideshare

Uber and Lyft have a designated pickup and drop-off area near Lot 1, entering through Gate B. After the game, expect 20-40 minute waits and surge pricing during the immediate post-game rush.

Pro tip: Grab a Dodger Dog at the center-field plaza after the final out, let the initial wave clear, then order your ride. You’ll save money and time.

From the Airport

Watching a Game at Dodger Stadium

The first thing to know about a seven o’clock start is which side of the bowl the sun is on. Home plate points north-northeast, which puts third base on the western side and first base opposite, so the low evening sun drops behind the third-base stands and shines straight into the seats along the first-base line and the right-field pavilion. Those are the ones that squint through the early innings. A noon game is fine. Third base is the shaded side, and the compensation for everyone arrives about an hour later, when the light goes orange over the San Gabriels beyond center field.

The second warning is the stairs. Walter O’Malley’s great innovation was terracing the parking into the hillside so that you enter on the level your seat is on, and that part still works exactly as intended. Once you are inside the top deck, though, the rake is severe and the steps are steep enough that fans caution each other about them in earnest, particularly for anyone uneasy with heights. Take it slowly, and think twice about the very top rows with small children.

Then there is the scale, which does not read from photographs. This is the largest ballpark in baseball by capacity and fans who have worked through other parks say the top deck here feels farther from home plate than anywhere else they have been. The upside is that those distant corner seats are cheap when they are sold at all, since the wings often stay closed for anything short of a marquee game, and the view down the length of the field with the mountains beyond is the one people photograph.

The food question has one obvious answer and it is not really up for debate. The Dodger Dog is the thing, eaten at least once, and the arguments among regulars are about grilled versus steamed rather than whether to bother. Beyond that, the two-acre center-field plaza added in the 2020 renovation turned the outfield into somewhere you can actually spend an hour before first pitch, which the stadium conspicuously lacked for its first fifty-eight years.

Construction & Design

Building Dodger Stadium meant moving a mountain. When Walter O’Malley brought the Dodgers west, the city handed him roughly 300 acres of rugged land in Chavez Ravine, or 315.86 once the lawyers had finished stipulating the number, and turning those hills into a ballpark took nearly three years and about eight million cubic yards of earth, graded and shifted into a level field ringed by terraced parking. The architect Emil Praeger drew the plans, William Simpson and Associates engineered the structure, the Vinnell Corporation built it, and O’Malley paid the $23 million bill himself, the first privately financed big-league park since the original Yankee Stadium in 1923.

That land did not come free, and not only in dollars. Through the 1950s the city had cleared the Mexican-American neighborhoods of Chavez Ravine under eminent domain, originally for public housing that was never built. The episode, remembered as the Battle of Chavez Ravine, displaced families who had lived there for generations, and the ballpark that rose on the site has never fully shed that history. It is part of the place, whether the scoreboard mentions it or not.

The design itself was ahead of its time. Praeger terraced the parking into the hillside so fans could enter near their seating level instead of climbing ramps, and he cantilevered the grandstand so almost no seat sits behind a post. The outfield pavilions wear a wavy, zigzag roofline that became a signature, and the symmetrical outfield opens to the San Gabriel Mountains beyond center field. For a stadium built for the automobile age, it has aged remarkably well.

The capacity has stayed frozen at 56,000 by design. A conditional-use permit ties the number to the parking, so whenever the team adds premium seats down low, it removes seats up top to hold the line. That quirk has kept Dodger Stadium the largest ballpark in baseball for sixty years. A roughly $100 million renovation in 2020 added a two-acre center-field plaza and reworked the pavilions without ever touching that number.

Dodger Stadium Beyond Baseball

A ballpark on a hill with 56,000 seats and its own road system turns out to be useful for a great many things that are not baseball. Two Olympic Games, for a start. A pope, and six decades of touring bands.

The stadium hosted Olympic baseball during the 1984 Summer Games, though the sport was a demonstration event then rather than a medal one. That changes in 2028, when Dodger Stadium stages the Olympic baseball tournament proper, gold and bronze medal games included. Softball, the sport most people assume travels with it, goes to Devon Park in Oklahoma City instead, part of a small Oklahoma subsite that also stages canoe slalom. Every site is mapped in our Los Angeles 2028 Olympics guide.

Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass here on September 16, 1987, before a congregation of about 63,000. It was his second Mass in as many days: the night before he had drawn 103,854 to the LA Memorial Coliseum across town, by that venue’s own count.

The concert history reads like a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot: the Rolling Stones, Elton John, and the Beatles on August 28, 1966, on what turned out to be their final tour. The center-field plaza added during the 2020 renovation has made the stadium a year-round destination, not just a game-day venue.

History of Dodger Stadium

When Walter O’Malley moved the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957, he needed a stadium. He did not have one. For four seasons the Dodgers played in the LA Memorial Coliseum, a track and field bowl so ill-suited to baseball that left field sat 251 feet from home plate behind a 42-foot screen. A stopgap, and it showed. The city offered roughly 300 acres of hilly land in Chavez Ravine, O’Malley hired architect Emil Praeger to design a modernist ballpark carved into the terrain, and construction began on September 17, 1959, requiring workers to move eight million cubic yards of earth and rock to reshape the Stone Quarry Hills.

• Opening Day (April 10, 1962): The Dodgers played their first game before 52,564 fans. The stadium cost $23 million, entirely privately financed.
• World Series Titles (1963, 1965, 1981, 1988): Sandy Koufax dominated in the ’60s, and Kirk Gibson’s walk-off home run in Game 1 of the 1988 Series became one of baseball’s most replayed moments.
• All-Star Games (1980, 2022): The 2022 Midsummer Classic brought renovated Dodger Stadium back to the national spotlight.
• Seat Replacement and Color Restoration (2005-06 offseason): Every seat was replaced and the original 1962 palette restored, yellow, light orange, turquoise and sky blue running level by level up the bowl.
• $100 Million Renovation (2019-2020): Added the two-acre center-field plaza with new concessions, a Dodgers museum, improved accessibility, and gathering spaces that opened the stadium up beyond the seating bowl.
• 2024-2025 World Series Titles: The Dodgers beat the Yankees in five games in 2024 for their eighth title, their first won at Dodger Stadium since 1988. The 2020 championship in between does not count against that, because the pandemic sent that World Series to a neutral site at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. They repeated in 2025 for a ninth, back to back.
• 2028 Olympics (upcoming): Dodger Stadium hosts the Olympic baseball tournament, medals included, sixty-six years after it opened. Softball is not paired with it: that goes to Devon Park in Oklahoma City.

Sources & Further Reading

• Wikipedia entry on Dodger Stadium: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodger_Stadium. Construction, the Chavez Ravine history, the design, and renovations.
• Ballparks of Baseball, Dodger Stadium: ballparksofbaseball.com. A detailed ballpark reference and timeline.
• SABR, Dodger Stadium: sabr.org. The Society for American Baseball Research profile.
• Los Angeles Dodgers official ballpark page: mlb.com/dodgers/ballpark. Events, tickets, and visitor information.