HOLLYWOOD — The ballpark up the hill sits dark this time of year, its infield hidden under tarps and its lots empty enough to hear the wind move through them. No baseball will be played there for months. That has never stopped the arguing.
At a low-lit barroom off a Hollywood side street, a group of regulars treats the baseball winter as a season of its own, measured not in games but in signings, rumors, and the slow countdown to the day pitchers and catchers report. There is no scoreboard to watch, so they watch their phones, and a trade that may never happen can carry a whole evening.
“December is when the real fans show up, because there is nothing to root for and they come anyway,” said Frank Battaglia, 57, who owns the place and has kept the same corner stool open for the diehards since the Bush years. “During the season anybody is a fan. In the winter you find out who actually needs it.”
The talk this month is all roster — who might be signed, who might be let go, what a rival across the division is up to. None of it is settled, which is exactly the appeal. A season in progress hands down a verdict every night. The offseason is all argument and no umpire.
Gloria Farrow, 49, reads the transaction wire the way other people read a horoscope and admits the quiet months are harder on her than the summer’s losses.
“There is a specific loneliness to a January with no baseball,” Farrow said. “I refresh the news at breakfast like something changed overnight. Usually nothing did. But the morning it does, I want to be the first one in here to say so.”
The debates lose no heat for being hypothetical. A trade that exists only in someone’s imagination gets defended and demolished as fiercely as a blown call in July, and a regular who once guessed a signing correctly will remind the room of it for years. Nobody keeps track of who was wrong, which is probably why everyone remembers only the times they were right.
Owen Brandt, 61, has been coming since the bar had a different name, and swears the winters feel longer than they used to. He measures the calendar by a single date in February, when the equipment trucks roll toward the desert for spring training.
“The trucks leaving, that is my New Year’s,” Brandt said. “Everything before it is waiting. Everything after it is close enough to touch.”
The Dodgers give this room its rhythm without any of the players ever setting foot in it, a one-way loyalty the regulars find entirely reasonable. They will spend the winter furnishing a roster in their heads, and come spring they will complain about the real one.
By closing time the group had rebuilt the team three times over and settled nothing, which suited them. Outside, the stadium stayed dark on its hill, holding its place for a season that, for now, existed only in the argument.