The Dodgers have turned the drive to the ballpark into a second ticket, and this week the fans finally called the bluff. Dodger Stadium, in the middle of the National League Championship Series against Milwaukee, hosted a playoff game in front of a crowd that looked about half full. You can blame a cold lineup, or a manager getting beaten on the margins, and you'd be right about both. But the quietest villain in that empty building was the parking booth.
The numbers come straight from the Dodgers. General parking climbed to somewhere between $70 and $75 for the NLCS, up $10 from the NLDS round, when it ran $65. That's the mechanism: the Dodgers run a $10-per-round escalator, so every time the team advances, the privilege of putting your car on their asphalt gets more expensive. Win a series, pay a tax. Win another one, pay more.
Compare that to the regular season and the grift comes into focus. Advance general parking in the regular season is $40. The postseason markup on a single parking space is bigger than the entire everyday price of the thing. For one car. Before a single beer or a single ticket.
This isn't new. For Game 3 of last year's World Series against Toronto, general parking ran around $80, with oversized vehicles up at $150. The direction of travel is one way, and it's up.
Fans are being priced out, and the Dodgers can read the evidence in their own seating bowl. A team playing for a trip to the World Series couldn't fill its own stadium for a home playoff game. When a team this good and this popular stares at empty concrete in the NLCS, the problem is the toll you have to pay just to get through the gate.
Some lots around a stadium are privately run, and a private operator charges whatever a desperate market will bear. That's true in general, but it doesn't explain this case. The official stadium lots, the ones with the $10-per-round escalator, are set by the Dodgers themselves. This is a pricing decision made by people who answer to the Dodgers, aimed at people who already bought a ticket. Own it.
There are escape routes, and the Dodgers will point you to them. They offer offsite parking in Lots 13 and 14 on Stadium Way for $5 at the gate. Five dollars. The same Dodgers who want $75 for the close lot will take a crisp handful of singles if you're willing to park down the hill and hoof it. A $5 option sitting next to a $75 option shows the $75 price was always about how much they think they can squeeze before you walk away.
This week, enough people walked away that you could see it on the broadcast. Milwaukee is a win from the World Series, the Dodgers are reeling, and the home crowd that's supposed to carry a team through a moment like this stayed home in droves. Some of that is the baseball. A lot of it is a front office that treats its most loyal customers like an ATM and then acts surprised when the room echoes. Charge people like marks and they'll stop showing up. The Dodgers just found out the hard way, in their own ballpark, on the biggest stage they've got.
