Find the shade before you buy the seats.

It started with a ticket for my in-laws: a summer afternoon game at Dodger Stadium. I wanted seats where they'd actually enjoy it, not sit in the sun for three hours. The ticket sites showed me the view from every seat. None of them showed me the sun.

Then I started paying attention at games, and noticed how hot they really get. A few sections over can be the difference between a great day and a long one. So I built Shadyum to answer one question: for this game, where's the shade, and when does it move?

How it works

Shadyum uses a full 3D model of the stadium, with every seat placed in it. For every game, it works out where the sun is every four minutes, from an hour before first pitch to the last out. Then it checks, for every seat, whether that seat can see the sun: at head height and at lap height, with the overhangs, the decks and the hills around the park all in the way.

The sun's position comes from the same method NOAA uses. The hills around Chavez Ravine come from USGS terrain data; in the last minutes before sunset, they matter too.

Weather and the schedule

Within a week or so of a game, the forecast comes from the National Weather Service. "Usually" comes from NOAA's daily records for downtown LA (1995–2025), and from the temperature at past Dodger home games, from Retrosheet. The schedule comes from MLB. When a start time isn't set yet, Shadyum uses the usual time for that day of the week and says so.

The information used here was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by Retrosheet. Interested parties may contact Retrosheet at www.retrosheet.org.

How sure we are

I set one goal from the start: if Shadyum says a seat is in shade, you should be in shade. So the shortcuts that make it fast are tested against the slow, exact way. Out of 20,000 random seat-and-moment checks, 99% agree. Where they don't, it's almost always a seat on the very edge of a shadow, off by a minute or two.

I'm doing my best to get every seat right, and I'll keep improving it. But Shadyum is a model of the stadium, not the stadium itself, so treat it as a good guide, not a guarantee. If a seat turns out sunnier than promised, I'm sorry, and please tell me which one.

What it can't know

• The weather. Clouds and haze change everything. Shadyum shows clear-sky sun, and warns you when the forecast has clouds.
• Things that come and go. Banners, umbrellas, a new video board.
• The person in front of you. Or the hat they're wearing.
• The heat. Shade is cooler, not cool. On a hot day, bring water either way.

Privacy

• No ads, and no tracking across sites. Shadyum sets no cookies of its own. Page counts come from Cloudflare Web Analytics, which doesn't use cookies.
• Forms. What you send through Report a seat or Suggest a stadium is stored so I can read it. Your email is optional, used only to reply, and never shared.
• Spam checks on the forms use Cloudflare Turnstile.