Spring training, major league baseball’s preseason ritual, is underway. In this 1961 photo from our Los Angeles Examiner Collection, manager Bill Rigney watches as his Los Angeles Angels warm up in Palm Springs, their spring training home from 1961 until 1992.

Many other major league teams pitched their spring training camps in Southern California, as L.A. as Subject explains at KCET.org.

November 8, 1961: Four men play a pickup baseball game on the Dodger Stadium construction site. Dodger Stadium celebrated its official opening day several months later, on April 10, 1962.

Baseball’s World Series comes to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on this day in 1959 as the Los Angeles Dodgers host Game 3 against the Chicago White Sox.

It was the first World Series ever played on the West Coast, and the only to be played in the Coliseum. (The Dodgers moved to Dodger Stadium in 1962.) The Dodgers would go on to win the series in six games.

A crowd gathers on September 19, 1959 for the Dodger Stadium groundbreaking ceremony in Chavez Ravine. The new stadium opened roughly two and a half years later on April 10, 1962.

Walter O’Malley (center) refers to a model of Dodger Stadium on this day in 1960.