COLUMN ONE : Take Them Out of the Ballgame : Spectators have become notorious for leaving games at Dodger Stadium early. Fear of traffic may be as much to blame as the congestion itself.

From the canyon parking lot hideaway at Dodger Stadium--known to the less romantic as Lot 39--the 48,804 fans attending a recent game appear motionless. Only an occasional roar of the crowd, a rotating ball atop the resident gas station and that incessant voice on the radio break the stillness that surrounds the 14,000 cars, trucks and buses.

But then, it’s only the fourth inning, much too early for Dodger fans to be leaving. Some have just arrived.

Then the game reaches the seventh inning, and a frenzy begins to take hold. Stadium exits suddenly look like the start of a race-walking event. Soon, the parking lot looks like an anthill.

By the middle of the eighth inning, half the crowd is in the lot. By the end of the game about a quarter of the crowd remains.

This lemminglike phenomenon is indigenous to Los Angeles and happens to some degree at every game, regardless of the team on the field, or the score.

Fans in other cities are baffled by it; visiting television broadcasters make fun of it, showing die-hard fans back home a sea of taillights that provokes sarcastic play-by-play banter.

One of those cars may even belong to Dodger President Peter O’Malley, who has said that he occasionally leaves early, not because he does not care about the outcome of the game but because he has to be back so early the next morning. When O’Malley leaves, he can easily say good night to former Brooklyn Dodger great Roy Campanella, who sits in his wheelchair in the season seat area outside of O’Malley’s private box on the club level. Along with his wife, Roxie, Campanella stays until the final out of every game that his health allows him to attend.

Rarely, though, do fans stay past the game to savor a victory or mourn a defeat. When Jack Clark hit a home run off Tom Niedenfuer in the top of the ninth to put St. Louis in the World Series in 1985, it may have stunned the crowd, but not enough to keep them from bolting for the exits even before Clark’s ball hit the ground.

“I was sitting there thinking this is a sad moment. How can these people be thinking about traffic?” said Ruth Ann Taylor, a fan who attended the game.

Now there is renewed interest in this bizarre Dodger fan syndrome, even outrage. During a recent Dodger series against the Montreal Expos, thousands of fans left early during two magnificent pitching performances by the Montreal Expos--Dennis Martinez’s perfect game and a nine-inning no-hitter by Mark Gardner that he lost in the 10th.

In baseball, it does not get any better.

The Panic Theory

On the surface, the reason Los Angeles fans leave early is to beat the traffic. But befitting a metropolis that keeps so many psychotherapists employed, it is really more complex.

It is a psychological problem. Wherever Angelenos go, they think about getting out before the next person, says Jack Woody, a book publisher who splits his residence between Pasadena and Santa Fe, N.M.

“The game is completely secondary. People start to panic in the fifth inning and they just crack in the seventh,” he says. “Others are sitting there composed, thinking about what a great game it is, a possible no-hitter, and how they are going to try to make it till the end. But when they see these other people break and run, it breaks their concentration, and they go, too.”

Among supporters of the “panic theory” is Todd Collins, who runs a Dodger souvenir stand. He listens to fans as they leave and hears them talk about beating the traffic, even when there isn’t any.

“About the sixth inning tonight,” Collins said, “a man said to his son who stopped to look at the merchandise, ‘C’mon, we’re going to get caught in the traffic.’ So I peeked out to look at the lot, and there weren’t even any cars out there yet.”

The traffic excuse is reserved for those who depart after the fifth inning. Those who leave earlier often come up with something more creative.

“Slow, dull, boring game,” said one man taking flight at the close of the fifth inning, after Darryl Strawberry had singled in the go-ahead run for the Dodgers. At that point, there had been 15 hits in the game, including a home run by Strawberry.

There are plenty of other reasons for early departures: long commutes, long days, long games, early morning alarm clocks. All of which were seemingly without validity for the thousands who left early during Martinez’s perfect performance.

That game, played on a Sunday afternoon, started at 1:05 and lasted only 2 hours and 14 minutes. It was only the 15th perfect game in the history of major-league baseball.

The question of those who left, wrote Donald H. Camph of Culver City in a letter to The Times, is: “Are these people too stupid to know or too ignorant to care what is transpiring in front of them?

“Did it occur to any of these folks . . . that an alternative (to traffic) would be to remain to the end, and then some, to savor the beauty of the game or just to enjoy being out on a sunny afternoon?”

Camph has a suggestion for the Dodgers: time-sharing.

“Betty and Sid could occupy space from the second through fourth innings and Ethel and Fred could use the same space from the sixth through the eighth.

“The fifth inning, while the grounds crew tidies up the infield, would be the time of transition. Since the wave generally occurs in the sixth inning, there might be a surcharge for Ethel and Fred.”

The Entertainment Theory

Dodger Manager Tom Lasorda knows the fans have things to do. But it sure would be nice if they stuck it out until the end. “We like to have them there, pulling for us,” he said.

Lasorda says fans in other stadiums may trickle out early, but it is nothing compared to the numbers leaving early at Dodger Stadium.

In fact, sportswriters and baseball personnel who travel to stadiums all over the country agree that it just does not happen anyplace else. Even at Anaheim Stadium, where fans complain about traffic after the game, the early departure of fans is not as pronounced.

Dodger catcher Mike Scioscia is forgiving. “We have a unique situation here--where else do they sell that many season tickets? . . . In L.A. we have almost 30,000 season ticket holders who come to the games day in and day out, and they have their own lives to lead. Some of them may have to leave; maybe they have to be at work early the next day.”

Scioscia, who says he does not really notice when fans are leaving early, has a good sense of which ones do. Season ticket holders are the majority of those who depart, according to parking lot officials. Reserved parking areas, which are for season ticket holders only, empty out earliest.

The Dodger season ticket base is 27,000, the largest in baseball. Toronto is next with 26,000. The Mets are also high on the list, at 23,000.

But in Toronto and New York, fans can use public transportation--trains, subways and buses--to get to the stadium. Not prey to the kind of traffic fears common in Los Angeles, rarely do Toronto fans--who are on a pace to set a new attendance record in baseball this season--leave before the end of the game. Met fans who leave early are usually just those who park far from the stadium and do not want a late-night walk.

Some Los Angeles fans “come out to an event and after a couple of hours, they go home,” theorized Phil Ianniciello, the Mets’ director of ticket operations. “They look at it more as a night out--looking to be entertained--than they do as a game, where the result is secondary.”

Many of the Dodger season tickets are held by corporations, which give away tickets to employees, some of whom are not baseball fans and do not care to stick around for hours. The majority of seats occupied at the end are those sold on an individual game basis, primarily in the upper decks and outfield pavilion areas.

Dodger officials often boast that their games offer the best entertainment in town. Todd Siegle and Dave Sterling take it a step further. Both 18, they left a Mets-Dodgers game that was tied in the fifth inning--to go bowling.

To these two, a Dodger game is mostly a party.

“We come to the game, we have some beer or vodka, get smashed, then eat massive quantities of food, like hamburgers and fries, and go home,” said Siegle, who said he has only stayed to the end once.

The Vin Scully Theory

Los Angeles Times columnist Allan Malamud, who has covered sports in Los Angeles for 25 years, traces the early departure phenomenon back to when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958 and played at the Coliseum. That is when Vin Scully began earning the trust of Dodger fans with brilliant imagery and storytelling in his play-by-play radio broadcasts.

“Fans started to realize that they could listen to Scully on their transistor radios, hear the game all the way home and still beat the traffic,” Malamud said. “And they never stopped doing it.”

Dodger pitcher Jay Howell has heard that fans leave early because the radio broadcast is so good. Listening to the Dodger broadcast is just “part of the package,” Howell said.

Scully counts it his good fortune that fans listen to him, but says he does not think for a minute that fans leave early for that reason. He says Dodger fans who leave early get a “bad rap.”

“People tend to forget that a majority of these people have a considerable distance to drive to get to the stadium,” Scully said. “Someone may say, ‘Well, I live right outside West Covina.’ And you say, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ But try it sometime. When you get on that San Bernardino Freeway and hit that traffic after a long day, it isn’t fun.

“I guess I have a strong defense for the people in Los Angeles, rather than the Eastern attitude of, well, those people in La-La Land, they don’t know what they are doing.”

Scully says Dodger fans began listening to the radio immediately when the team moved here from Brooklyn. Pocket transistor radios, with corresponding earplugs, were tuned to the Dodger broadcast and could be spotted everywhere at the Coliseum, where the team played from 1958-61.

In New York, Brooklyn Dodger fans would bring larger portable radios to the games and hold them up to their ear, Scully says, but they were not listening to him or his mentor, Red Barber.

“In New York there were three baseball teams, so the fans would bring radios to hear the scores from the other games, the Yankees and the Giants,” Scully said. “But in Los Angeles, the Dodgers were playing in a football stadium, so a number of the fans sat far away from the game and listened to the broadcast to hear what was going on. Also, I think Southern California fans knew the superstars, like Willie Mays and the older established Dodgers, but they didn’t know the rank and file players, so they brought their radios to the games to learn and it became a habit.

“It just happened to be my good fortune to arrive at the same time.”

Now those transistors have been replaced by fancy Walkmans and radio headsets, although there are not as many. Perhaps the decrease is because the Dodgers broadcast the radio play by play over speakers in the walkways behind the seats and show the games on television monitors at concession stands. Perhaps it is because fewer fans are interested in the game.

Or as Scully suggests, Los Angeles is “now a baseball city; we have won pennants, World Series, lost heartbreakers. We now have a mature baseball city.

“I really don’t think people leave the games because of Vin Scully and the radio. Maybe they will say, ‘Well, we’ll get a jump on the traffic and listen to the rest of the game on the radio.’

“But when I am dead and buried they will probably do the same thing. They’ll say, let’s leave and listen to John Brown.”

Tips for Getting Out

Fans may leave other sporting events early, but not as early or as regularly as Dodger fans. Only Laker fans are on a par, leaving games in the fourth quarter.

But early leavers have something to say in their defense.

“I just got a letter from a guy defending himself for leaving early,” Malamud says. “He says too many people park where they aren’t supposed to, blocking the passageways, and it makes it murder if you wait until the end of the game to leave.”

It takes about 45 minutes to an hour to empty the stadium after an average crowd of 42,000, according to Bob Smith, the Dodgers’ director of stadium operations. Of course, that’s if everybody stayed--which they only do at playoff and World Series games.

Many people believe that Dodger Stadium’s parking lot is poorly designed, leading to congestion at the end of games. But Dodger officials say most fans use only a couple of the marked exits.

There are ways fans can get out faster.

There is parking for 16,000 cars in 21 lots, with five marked exits. What few know, however, is that there are two lots that have their own unmarked exits--Lot 33 and Lot 39. Both are unreserved.

“The exit gates in both these lots are open after every game,” Smith said. “Both exits dump out on Academy Road. You take a right to get to the Pasadena Freeway and a left to get to the Golden State.”

Another reason it takes so long to get out is that most fans use only two exits: “C” behind left field between lots 29 and 33 and marked as the exit to the Golden State Freeway, and “E” behind right field and marked for College Street and the Pasadena Freeway, south and north. Of these two exits, C--which exits on Academy Road and is closest to the Golden State Freeway--is the most congested. Parking supervisors say that after all the other exits have cleared, this exit is still backed up.

Drivers can get to the Golden State Freeway by taking the marked exit before it, Exit D, or the private exits out of lots 33 and 39.

In addition to the Pasadena and Golden State freeways, nearby roads provide access to the Glendale and Hollywood freeways.

At the Dodgers most recent home game, Frank Torrez, traffic supervisor, was making the rounds in the parking lot, dropping the chains on the exit gates that stay closed until about 90 minutes after the game begins.

Blocking the exit at Lot 39 was a large van. It was only the fifth inning, but Torrez knew he had to get the van towed away quickly. At any time, even those who park in this little hideaway may return for a quick exit.

“They come in the third inning and leave in the seventh,” Torrez said matter-of-factly.

“That’s the way it is.”

The Secret Exits of Dodger Stadium After every game, traffic can be snarled for a long time around Dodger Stadium. However, two relatively unused exits that are open only after the fifth inning can help spectators beat the traffic crunch. The Lot 33 Exit From the outer ring. follow the signs to Exit C and Lot 33 and bear right at its turnoff.

Turn right into Lot 33. At its back, there is a partially concealed fire road.

The road comes to a fork Stay to the left and continue down the hill.

The road ends at Academy Rd. to the left is the Golden State Fwy., and to the right is the Pasadena Fwy.

The Lot 39 Exit Pass the gas station on the outer ring and be in the right lane.

Immediately after the station, turn right into the first inlet.

Drive straight across the kidney-shaped Lot 39 to the small access road.

The access road will end at Academy Rd. Turn left to go to the Golden State Fwy. and right to the Pasadena Fwy.