The Night Los Angeles Will Become Baseball’s World Capital

In 2028, an Olympic baseball medal will be decided at Dodger Stadium for the first time. The city has been building toward that night for more than half a century.

By Richard Awni, Senior Olympic and Sports Correspondent

Family First News Desk  |  Where Sports and Education Go Hand in Hand

Dodger Stadium is scheduled to welcome Olympic baseball when the sport returns to the program at LA28.

Wide view of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, the planned LA28 Olympic baseball venue.

Baseball returns to the Olympic program in 2028, and when it does, the medal games will be played at Dodger Stadium.

That is a bigger moment than it sounds. Dodger Stadium, which opened on April 10, 1962, hosted baseball at the 1984 Olympics only as a demonstration sport. In 2028 it will be the first time an Olympic baseball medal is actually decided there.

For a city that helped make baseball part of its identity, it is a long-delayed arrival.

The stadium sits at the center of a larger Los Angeles story. LA28 is built on existing venues, from the Coliseum to SoFi Stadium to Intuit Dome. Dodger Stadium is one of the most recognizable of them, and one of the few where the global audience will see the Games and the city at the same time.

But the most important part of the baseball story may be what happens away from the stadium.

The LA84 Foundation, created from the 1984 Olympic surplus, has a long-running partnership with the Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation. LA84 helped fund the refurbishment of youth diamonds across Southern California, including partial funding for nineteen Dodgers Dreamfields. Those fields exist because an Olympic Games chose to put part of its profit back into neighborhoods.

That is the right model for 2028. A great stadium can host a medal game. A great legacy gives a child in a neighborhood a field, a coach and a reason to keep playing.

When the first Olympic baseball medal is awarded at Dodger Stadium in 2028, the ceremony will belong to the athletes. What the city should ask is simple: how many more children will have a place to play because the Games came to town?

Disclosure: Family First Foundation publishes Family First News Desk and runs youth sports and education programs in Los Angeles. Richard Awni is the Foundation’s founder.