Biggest Crowd Ever to See the Dodgers Lose

Baseball returned to The Coliseum in Los Angeles yesterday for a special one-off exhibition game between the Dodgers and the Red Sox:

LOS ANGELES — The Dodgers used a five-man infield against the Boston Red Sox. Too bad they weren't allowed to put a player or two in the Los Angeles Coliseum stands.

Kevin Cash and Kevin Youkilis hit cheap homers off Esteban Loaiza to account for five runs in the first three innings, and the Red Sox beat the Dodgers 7-4 Saturday night before an announced crowd of 115,300 — largest ever to watch a baseball game.

The previous record of about 114,000 attended an exhibition between the Australian national team and an American services team during the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.

This exhibition game was part of the Dodgers' 50th anniversary celebration of their move west from Brooklyn in 1958. They played at the Coliseum for four years before making Dodger Stadium their permanent home in 1962.

In the last baseball game played at the Coliseum, on Sept. 20, 1961, Sandy Koufax pitched all 13 innings in a 3-2 victory over the Chicago Cubs before a crowd of 12,068.

The Coliseum was built for track and football, not baseball.

Routine fly balls, even popups, soared over a 42-foot high screen in left field, where the distance from home plate to the foul pole was just 251 feet. Meanwhile, drives to right and center of more than 400 feet were easy outs.

The distance to the left-field foul pole for this game was 201 feet and the screen was 60 feet high. And the fences around the rest of the field were far closer to home plate than in the old days.

That's the most people ever to witness a Dodger loss. In accordance to Dodger tradition, when the game started up again after the 7th inning stretch there were 39 people left in the stands, all Red Sox fans.