The top deck of Dodger Stadium is far from the action but may have the best view in baseball. Straight ahead are the San Gabriel Mountains. During night games, as the sun goes down, the sky glows pink. Down below, the full choreography of the game is on display, offering a panoramic view shunned by the movie stars and moguls who fill the sections behind home plate.
And on Thursday morning, fans heading to those cheap seats passed a new addition to the ballpark: an 8-foot (nearly 3-meter) stone lantern given as a gift to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1960s by a famous Japanese sports columnist, Sotaro Suzuki. He helped draw the Dodgers to Japan for a goodwill tour in 1956, two years before the team left Brooklyn for Los Angeles.
For Kimi Ego, a longtime Dodgers fan, the lantern has a special meaning, and she cried when she saw it: Her father was a close friend of Suzuki’s. For years, before her father died in 2000, he took care of the stone lantern, which was then tucked into a hillside beyond the outfield bleachers, and trimmed the plants and shrubs surrounding it.