It’s a Different Ballgame for Neighbors : Baseball: For those who live near the stadium, it’s the Dodger blues. Season opener means the start of a new season of maddening traffic, noise and blocked driveways.

That wasn’t Dodger Blue that Rudy Alejo was experiencing Monday afternoon outside Dodger Stadium as the annual rite of spring known as the season opener unfolded around him.

That was the Dodger blues.

Despite the outpouring of nostalgia over the return of the national pastime and the end of last month’s brief baseball lockout, there was a contrary view Monday along Elysian Park Avenue, where Alejo has lived for 18 years.

Alejo watched glumly as shouting ticket scalpers darted among five lanes of honking cars crawling slowly past his house toward the stadium. Then he belted out a pair of triples.

“I don’t like the traffic. These guys selling tickets are too noisy. And baseball is boring,” he said.

“Every year it gets worse. People block my driveway and I have to call the police to get out. I’d rather have a basketball arena up the street--I’m a basketball fan.”

Alejo wasn’t the only one living within walking distance of Dodger Stadium who was singing “Take Me Outta the Ball Game” instead of the more traditional version on Monday.

“The traffic bothers me,” said neighbor Cheng So, who has watched game-day traffic jams from her apartment balcony for the last 10 years. She said she has never been inside the stadium: “I’m not interested in going.”

Down the street, ticket scalper Rob Rich of Hawthorne scrambled to unload the 200 opening day ducats he and his friends had invested in. The tickets, with a face value of $7 and $9, were going slowly at $20 each.

Rich ended the game with a handful of unsold tickets, even though the game was technically a sellout with a paid attendance of 48,686. “Dodger fans let you down,” Rich sighed.

Brenda Huddleston watched the traffic with alarm from the Elysian Park Avenue house she has rented for four months. She was wearing a 1988 Dodgers World Champs shirt.

“Not because today’s opening day,” she quickly explained. “This was the first clean shirt that didn’t need ironing that I found this morning. I’m just worried that my husband will be able to get into the driveway when he comes home this afternoon. We knew the stadium was close. But not this close.”

Dodger Stadium is even closer to Trudie Barrett’s home. The stadium parking lot partially wraps around Shoreland Drive.

The outfield is clearly visible from Barrett’s window. When the cast of “The Phantom of the Opera” sang the National Anthem at the start of Monday’s opener, Barrett could have heard every word.

If she’d been listening.

Barrett said she closely follows the Dodgers’ home schedule. But she doesn’t pay any attention to Dodgers games.

“We get the program to find out when the games are going to be played,” she said. “Sometimes on game days we can’t get out of our own house because of the traffic. I’m not a fan. I did watch on TV whatever it was they won, whatever year that was.”

Next door, the thought of the 1990 season was dismaying to Geneva Williams, who has lived in her white clapboard house since 1935.

She had a grandstand seat in 1959 when Los Angeles officials used eminent domain laws to evict residents from the neighborhood known as Chavez Ravine so the site could be used for the stadium.

“I violently opposed the stadium when they first announced plans to build it. It was a very poor deal for the city, in my view. Five hundred families were forced out. Since they built it, every house up here has been vandalized and burglarized.”

But Williams acknowledged that not everyone in her household shares her view. Her husband, Gene, and their son, Bob, attended Monday’s opener. And although their house is within feet of the parking lot, the pair drove.

In the middle of the game, Geneva Williams received a knock on the door. It was Kathy Matthews, a former neighbor who moved two years ago to Oregon and was stopping in for a visit.

Matthews said she returned to Los Angeles this week to see relatives, not to celebrate the start of the baseball season.

“We moved to get away from L.A.’s traffic and congestion,” Matthews explained. “Driving up here today was just like it was the 2 1/2 years I lived up here. It was pure hell.”