HOLLYWOOD — The game is on in the back room of a bar on Cahuenga, and almost no one is watching it the way you’d watch a movie. It’s on the way a fan is on in July — running in the background, steadying the room, keeping everyone company without demanding much.
The neighborhood sits a good half hour from the stadium in the kind of traffic that is never not there, so for most people here the season happens somewhere other than the ballpark. It happens in bar back-rooms, on a bedsheet tacked up in a garage, on a phone leaned against a napkin holder at a taco counter, in a radio call drifting out of an open window on a warm night.
“I don’t change the channel from April to October,” said Sonny Beltrán, who tends bar at a place off Selma with a single television in the back and a loyal group who prefer it to the loud rooms up front. “People come in, glance up, ask the score, go back to their conversation. Then something happens and the whole room turns at once. That’s the rhythm. Most of the game is just being on.”
A few blocks up, Wesley Odom, 47, has spent three summers running games off a projector aimed at the back wall of his garage, door rolled up to the alley, folding chairs for whichever neighbors wander over. He bought the projector for movies and found he mostly uses it for this.
“It’s not a party, it’s a hang,” he said. “Kids ride bikes in the alley, somebody brings a cooler, the game’s up on the wall the size of a door. Nobody’s paying full attention and nobody’s missing anything. If it’s close late, the bikes stop.”
For an older set the season is still a sound before it’s a picture. Ofelia Cruz, 80, listens on a kitchen radio the way she has for decades, and says she prefers it. “The television shows you everything and tells you nothing,” she said. “On the radio a good announcer paints it, and you’re at the park in your own kitchen. I’ve worn out three of those radios. This one’s held up.”
The stakes, on any given night, are low. The team is good enough that a June loss is forgotten by breakfast and a June win doesn’t get anyone off the couch. That is, in a way, the appeal — a long season asks nothing of you on a Tuesday and gives you something to check on anyway.
There is a harder truth underneath the ease, which the regulars raise without much heat: tickets to the stadium have drifted out of reach for a lot of the people who grew up going. Watching from a back room or a garage is partly choice and partly arithmetic. Beltrán, who last sat in the stands “before the parking got worse than the tickets,” said the bar is where the neighborhood keeps the team without paying stadium prices to do it.
By the ninth in the back room on Cahuenga, the score was settled and half the crowd had drifted out. Beltrán left the game on for the ones who stayed, and for the room, and for tomorrow, when it would be on again.