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The short left field dimensions, dubbed “The Chinese Wall,” at 251 feet with a 42-foot high screen were instantly ridiculed primarily by East Coast writers who thought that no home run records should count from games played at the vast Coliseum. Some 60 percent of the nation’s sportswriters polled by Associated Press felt that all “future home run records achieved with the help of the nearby Coliseum fences be declared invalid.”88
However, O’Malley explained the temporary stadium this way: “The Coliseum is a better ball park than the Polo Grounds and it’s better than Ebbets Field. There is a larger playing area here than in either of those parks. You can add up the square footage and prove it yourself. The fans are not complaining about left field. They know this is a temporary park, they accept it as such — and if I am any judge, they like all the excitement brought on by the screen.
“Furthermore, the Los Angeles press is understanding. Most of the complaints are from the eastern writers who lost National League newspaper assignments when we moved. If we had a chance to re-design the Coliseum as a temporary ball park, I believe we’d do everything the same way. It wouldn’t help to raise the screen much higher than 42 feet. For one thing, it has to be removable for football, under the terms of our contract, and it’s unwieldy enough as it is. For another thing, our screen as it stands today is 26 feet higher than the wall in the Polo Grounds. If that wall was adequate for a half century, this one ought to get by for two years.”89
He added on April 22, 1958 to Al Wolf of the Los Angeles Times, “The Coliseum, of course, is far from perfect for baseball. But it simply demonstrates the necessity for building a proper stadium, which is precisely what we want to do.”90
In Los Angeles, Examiner Sports Columnist Melvin Durslag pointed out, “You must remember it wasn’t the Dodgers’ idea to have a fence absurdly short in left field, absurdly long in right and interplanetary in center. This is what circumstances dictated. The Coliseum Commission greeted Walter O’Malley with something less than open arms. And the football tenants greeted him with arsenic over the rocks. First, the aesthetes stepped in and spoke with horror of anyone’s ‘defacing’ even a square foot of the stadium’s sacred concrete. Then the football people shuddered at the thought of a skinned area on the turf, and suggested home plate in the stadium’s eastern extremities.
“So there O’Malley stood, living at the moment outside the Coliseum and needing badly to get in. After inviting the Dodgers to Los Angeles, the city was on the doorsill of becoming a national disgrace by having our team play in Pasadena. The present playing field was a last-ditch inspiration which came to be known as ‘the 3 a.m. Plan,’ conceived at that hour only because O’Malley was immersed in his troubles instead of sleeping.”91
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