By Mort Zachter

Sixty years ago this month, the Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees to win their first and only World Series. Less than two years later, the Dodgers played their final game in Brooklyn and moved to Los Angeles.

For Brooklyn, the loss was immeasurable. The Dodgers were a source of civic pride—a final link to a time, before 1898, when Brooklyn was an independent city. Especially when it came to baseball, Brooklyn had always been cutting-edge, as well as quirky.

In 1862, the first enclosed baseball field ever built, the Union Grounds, opened in Williamsburg. A Brooklyn writer, Henry Chadwick, invented the box score. A Brooklyn pitcher, Candy Cummings, threw the first curve. A Brooklyn player, Dickey Pierce, laid down the first bunt. A Brooklyn manager, Wilbert Robinson, was the first, and probably the only person to try catching a grapefruit dropped from an airplane. And a courageous Brooklyn player, Jackie Robinson, became the first black man to play in the major leagues in the 20th century.

The Dodgers were also the first team to travel by plane, and in 1958 they flew off to California never to return. But they left behind a memorable history which began in the 19th century, when the Bridegrooms, a predecessor team to the Dodgers played at Washington Park, a wooden structure located near the Gowanus Canal. There, in 1912, legendary Yankee manager Casey Stengel began his playing career as a Brooklyn outfielder. Stengel never forgot the stench emanating from the Gowanus. “The mosquitos,” Stengel noted, “was something fierce.”

In 1913, the Dodgers moved to Ebbets Field, where, in 1939, a sweet-talking southerner named Red Barber became the Dodgers’ radio announcer. With his mellifluous voice and his idiosyncratic vernacular, Barber brought Dodgers games alive: fly balls were caught like an easy can of corn; fights between the Dodgers and their opponents were rhubarbs; and blow-outs produced victories sewn up in a croaker sack.

Ebbets Field never sat more than 35,000, but millions of fans listened to Barber on the radio. In the summer, before air conditioning, you could walk for blocks in Bay Ridge, Coney Island, or Flatbush and listen to a Dodgers game through the open windows without missing a pitch.

Long before radios existed, Charley Ebbets was the central figure in the history of Brooklyn baseball. Ebbets was one of the first employees of the team that began playing at Washington Park in 1883 and that would eventually become the Dodgers. He started as ticket seller, clerk, and scorecard salesman and ended up owning the team. Ebbets’ love for Brooklyn baseball transcended profits. “A man shouldn’t get in this business,” Ebbets once said, “if he’s solely interested in receipts.”

Ebbets also had a sense of humor. When asked by a Brooklyn Eagle reporter to define his responsibilities as team President, Ebbets said, “The first is to dodge people who want passes to baseball games. The next is to look pleasant and say agreeable things when I am cornered by such persons that I’ve been unable to dodge. And the third is to restrain myself from giving the requested passes. The rest of my duties are merely perfunctory. They give me no trouble whatever.”

Whatever Ebbets did, it worked. Brooklyn won the National League pennant in 1899 and 1900. The press deemed the team so good, they stopped calling them the Bridegrooms and renamed them the Superbas. Later, when the team’s manager, Ned Hanlon, attempted to gain financial control of the team and move them to Baltimore, Ebbets refused to consider taking the team out of Brooklyn. Instead, he bought out Hanlon. A few years later, Ebbets began buying land in an area of Brooklyn bound by Bedford Avenue, Cedar Place, Montgomery Place, and Sullivan Place to build a new steel-reinforced concrete stadium. Ebbets had to sell half his interest in the team to complete the project.

After the Dodgers began playing at Ebbets Field, his players rewarded Ebbets with pennants in 1916 and 1920. But Ebbets died in 1925, and by the mid-1930s, with no one person owning a majority interest in the team, the rudderless Dodgers were bankrupt and the brunt of New York Giants manager Bill Terry’s sarcastic comment, “Is Brooklyn still in the league?”

If Ebbets helped Brooklyn baseball move into the 20th century, Branch Rickey guided the team back to consistent success in the years following World War II. As general manager, Rickey was a brilliant innovator, as well as a man with a strong will. His players called him the Mahatma (after Mahatma Gandhi), “an incredible mix of Jesus Christ, Tammany Hall, and your father.”

But Rickey was a man at cross-purposes. His compensation as Dodgers general manager was tied into the team’s profitability. The less Rickey paid his players, the more money he made. “The only way to get the best of Rickey,” Casey Stengel once said, “is to listen to him talk for three hours, then when he asked, ‘Is it a deal? Yell, ‘No’ and walk out.”

Despite his penny-pinching, Rickey was at the forefront of the integration of major league baseball. The Mahatma knew that racially mixed Brooklyn was the right venue for his plan to integrate major league baseball, which he did by signing Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella, two of the Negro Leagues’ best players. In his induction speech at the baseball Hall of Fame, Jackie Robinson said the honor “could never have happened without three people—Branch Rickey, who was like a father to me; my wife, and my mother.”

Another memorable figure in Brooklyn baseball history was Leo Durocher who was the team’s manager when Branch Rickey joined the Dodgers in 1943. Durocher would do anything to win. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I never had a boss call me upstairs so that he could congratulate me for losing like a gentleman. ‘How you play the game’ is for college boys. When you’re playing for money, winning is the only thing that matters. Show me a good loser…and I’ll show you an idiot.”

To win, Durocher schooled his pitchers in the art of throwing at opposition batters, not just to back them off the plate, but to hit them. When one opposition manager screamed at Durocher after a Brooklyn pitcher hit his player in the wrist, Durocher screamed right back, “What are you crying about? It’s lucky it didn’t hit him in the head.”

Durocher once assaulted a fan named John Christian, who had been heckling him. After a security guard brought Christian behind the stands at Ebbets Field, Durocher hit him with a blackjack. Christian was hospitalized with a broken jaw and Durocher was charged with second-degree assault. Durocher testified that Christian’s broken jaw was the result of his slipping and falling down. A loyal but misguided, Brooklyn jury acquitted Durocher. Appropriately, Durocher is best remembered for saying, “Nice guys finish last.”

When I was growing up in Brooklyn in the 1960s, Gil Hodges was the only Dodgers star player who still called
Brooklyn home. He lived on Bedford Avenue just a few blocks from where I grew up. You could see him buying groceries on Nostrand Avenue or picking up his kids at Our Lady Help of Christians parochial school at Avenue M. During his playing career, Hodges was a terrific fielding first baseman, an outstanding power hitter, but also a nice guy, the type Durocher assumed would finish last. Hodges played an integral part not only in Brooklyn’s 1955 World Series victory and also in the 1959 World Series, the first won by the Los Angeles Dodgers.

When Hodges died in 1972, he left a rich legacy to baseball and to Brooklyn. In May of 1963, a little league ballpark opened on McDonald Avenue. It was a tiny jewel with concrete stands that could seat 1,250, a clubhouse with showers, and a playing field with sprinklers and a drainage system. Hodges was instrumental in getting it built. “Nothing,” he wrote, “has given me the same degree of pride that I get every time I see that field.” Opening day was memorialized in a photo that appeared in in the NY Times showing an amused Hodges reaching down to shake hands with one of the little leaguers, seven-year old Nicky Lipariti. Nicky stares up at Hodges open-mouthed, revealing several missing teeth. Decades later, when Lipariti grew up and had his own family, his son Ciro also played his little league ball there. Back then the sign overlooking the ballpark still read “Gil Hodges Field.” Today, that sign is gone, replaced with a sign advertising the field’s current sponsors. But unlike the Union Grounds, Washington Park, or Ebbets Field, that little league park remains. And on warm summer days, beneath the roar and clatter of the F train on the elevated subway line above McDonald Avenue, you can still hear the sound of children playing baseball.

Indeed, Brooklyn has long been as a haven for amateur baseball. In 1868, the Parade Grounds, a 40-acre plot adjacent to Prospect Park, was set-aside as a public area for Civil War Veterans to conduct military exercises. Afterwards, it became a place for recreational pursuits. By the end of the 19th century, baseball was the sport most often played there. “It is a glorious sight to see the hundreds of young men and boys enjoying themselves to their hearts content as they do at the Prospect Park Parade Grounds every afternoon during the summer,” wrote Henry Chadwick.

Playing at one of the 13 diamonds at the Parade Grounds became a right of passage for talented baseball players growing up in Brooklyn. In the 1950s, Sandy Koufax and Joe Torre played there. But players of all ages utilized the Parade Grounds. As Vincent “Cookie” Lorence, the director of the Parade Grounds League for over 60 years, was fond of saying, “They come to us as kids and stay with us until their wives tell them to quit.”

The Dodgers are gone, but the Brooklyn Cyclones, the class A minor league affiliate of the Mets, now play their home games in Coney Island. And when you walk into their ballpark on Surf Avenue, you pass a statue depicting Pee Wee Reese, a white man from Kentucky, embracing his Dodgers’ teammate Jackie Robinson, a symbol of humanity for future generations of Brooklyn residents.