Dodger Stadium is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. Almost 60 years old and it still looks new!  It’s a work of art. Its lines are amazing. Clean and elegant. I like to stare at pictures of it. I especially like the one my son Brian has hanging in his home office. It’s actually three pictures.

I love coming into Chavez Ravine. From every entrance, you see the stadium gradually reveal itself as you drive in. 

If you’ve been reading my comic strip Drabble for any length of time, you know that the Drabble family visits the stadium almost every summer. I never actually refer to it as Dodger Stadium, but there are little telltale signs where they are.

I’m not a great artist. And because of the shrinking space in newspapers, comic strip cartoonists don’t have a lot of room for illustration.  In my case, this is just as well. I could never do the place justice.

A couple of years ago, I took the Stadium tour during the off-season. It was fantastic! One of my favorite days away from the drawing board. It even led to some comic strip ideas! Here are a couple of strips that came from that excursion. It was easier to draw the stadium here because there are no fans in the seats. (Maybe it’s a preview to later this summer!) 

Here’s a night game from 2015. It must be Dodger Stadium because of the palm tree!

I’ve even drawn the inside of a Dodger Stadium men’s room!

The hardest thing for me to draw at Dodger Stadium is the accordion-like roofs over the outfield pavilions. So I don’t even try. I just add more palm trees.

Way back in 1994 around the time of the baseball strike, the Three Tenors (Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, and Jose Carreras) performed at Dodger Stadium. The event was televised. I mentioned it in Drabble…

When that strip ran in the paper, I got a letter from Peter O’Malley’s office. He asked if he could buy my original artwork from that strip! I was absolutely thrilled that he had even seen it, much less wanted to buy it! I said I would like to give him the strip as a way of saying thank you for all the enjoyment the Dodgers and their stadium had given me. He insisted on paying for it. I was not surprised that he was such a gentleman. He said that the strip would be framed and on display somewhere in the offices.

When we went on the Stadium tour, I asked the guide if he had ever seen a  framed comic strip hanging in any of the offices. He had not. Hopefully it’s still with Mr. O’Malley. That was the only minor disappointment that day. The rest of it was fantastic. I’ll never forget seeing the inner workings of the stadium, the old visitor’s locker room, the Vin Scully Press Box, the dugouts, and just standing on the field. A brief visit to baseball heaven!

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