Better Sight Lines Required to Make Fans True Blue

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Alovely charm comes with the distant sound of a warning at the Los Angeles State Historic Park during Dodger games.

The park on North Spring Street – also known as the Cornfield –features pathways that wend among grassy stretches, artsy raised beds, and displays of chaparral flora, soil and rocks.

Anyone strolling the paths during Dodger games lately might have heard the public-address announcer from all the way over the hills in Elysian Park, giving out batters’ names or pitching changes.

The team’s presence in the World Series added the roar of the crowd to the chorus when the wind was right.

The phenomenon amounts to one of the pleasant counterpoints that make Los Angeles the City of Angeles. A disembodied voice of big league baseball wafting over a back-to-nature park, with bustling Chinatown and the Gold Line tracks to one side, and an industrial enclave that manages to host an artists’ colony on another.

There’s the charm – now for the warning: Strolling through a park several miles from the Dodger Stadium will be as close to a World Series game as most Angelenos will get.

Reports pegged the cheapest tickets for the series available on the after-market at $1,000 or so.

The public park might be closer than most fans get to the ballpark for most games – a family of four can expect to spend an average of more than $100 for cheap seats, parking and some food and drink at Dodger Stadium during the regular season these days.

Credit the team for making extra efforts connect with fans. A Dodger game is a relative bargain compared with most big-league ballparks these days, according to recent data.

And give credit for the investments ownership has made in the team, which have borne the favorite fruit of fans: wins.

We urge the Dodgers to keep in mind, however, that the pricey World Series tickets pair up with an ongoing standoff over cable rates that leaves regular-season telecasts unavailable for large chunks of fans in the heart of the team’s territory.

This Dodgers team is one for the ages, capable of making a generation of fans on par with all of the folks running around here talking about 1988.

But they’ll have to be able to get a better view of where the game is played if anyone expects them to become True Blue converts on par with the class of ’88.

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