February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
It’s politics, most Brooklynites told themselves, gamesmanship and grandstanding. O’Malley was simply holding out for the best deal possible. At the end of the day, they assured themselves, he’d never do it. He wouldn’t dare.
Like much of early professional baseball, the history of the early Dodgers is covered with Irish American fingerprints. In 1883 Charles Byrne, Joseph Doyle, and a third partner established the team as a franchise in the Interstate Minor League. One year later it jumped to the majors by joining the American Association. In 1890 the team moved to the elite National League.
The Brooklyn nine took their name “Dodgers” from the reputation of Brooklyn’s residents for skillfully dodging the city’s many streetcars. But team names in those days were more nicknames than official monikers, so the boys from Brooklyn were also known as the Atlantics, Grays, Bridegrooms (after a spate of player marriages in 1889), Superbas, and Robins.
Whatever their name, Brooklyn fielded some great teams in those early years, including National League champions in 1890, 1899, and 1900. The 1899 team was stacked with Irish American players, beginning with manager Ned Hanlon. The starting rotation featured Jay Hughes (28-6 record), Jack Dunn (23-13), Doc McJames (19-15), and Brickyard Kennedy (22-9). Starting position players included Duke Farrell (C), Dan McGann (1B), Tom Daly (2B), Doc Casey (3B), Bill Dahlen (SS), and Joe Kelley (OF).
The Dodgers moved into what was to become their famed stadium, Ebbets Field, in 1913. The team enjoyed success in the coming decade, winning pennants in 1916 and 1920, but in a prelude of their coming futility, they lost both World Series’. From the mid-1920s to the late 1930s the Dodgers consistently fielded teams that were best described as fair to middling, with none finishing better than third place.
The glory years of the Dodgers began in 1938 when the team hired a new general manager, Larry MacPhail, and manager, Leo Durocher. MacPhail soon built a contender by bringing in young and talented players like Pee Wee Reese and Pete Reiser. In 1947 the team defied baseball’s color line by putting Jackie Robinson on their roster.
The team’s improved talent did not, however, lead to the promised land. In the 1940s and 1950s the Dodgers were baseball’s perennial “also-rans.” Through in the mid-1950s they won National League pennants in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, and 1953, but lost in the World Series every time to the hated cross town rivals, the Yankees. They also finished in second place in 1942, 1946, 1959, 1951 (courtesy of Bobby Thompson’s “shot heard round the world” homer), and 1954.
Despite this record of agonizing, always-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride futility, the people of Brooklyn loved their Dodgers. The team seemed to embody Brooklyn’s never-say-die attitude and optimistic outlook on life. Fans took “Wait Til Next Year” as their mantra and dubbed the team affectionately “‘dem bums.” That sobriquet, incidentally, came courtesy of the legendary Irish American sports cartoonist, Willard Mullin who often depicted Dodger players as lovable, disheveled fools.
Brooklyn’s eternal optimism was finally rewarded in 1955. The men in blue bolted to a 22-2 record to start the season and never looked back on their way to the NL pennant and the inevitable clash with the Yankees.
This would be the time the baseball gods smiled on Brooklyn. They dropped the first two games to the Yankees, but won game three behind the unheralded Johnny Podres. Brooklyn went on to win the next two to take a 3-2 series lead. Whitey Ford shut them down in game 6, leading to a decisive showdown on October 4. Podres again took the hill and delivered a 2-0 shutout victory. The bums had finally done it.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her wonderful memoir, “Wait Till Next Year,” described the euphoria that swept over Brooklyn that evening.
“No one wanted the night to end. When my father turned up to ask my mother how she was holding up, she replied she felt twenty again. He led us to the foot of Montague Street, where a promenade overlooking the East River offered a view of the Statue of Liberty and the lights of Manhattan. Ever since the day in 1898 when Brooklyn had given up its independent status to merge with New York City, Brooklynites had lived in the shadow of Manhattan. Each new slight — including the demise of the famed “Brooklyn Eagle” earlier that year — only reinforced the perception of second-class citizenship. But this night was Brooklyn’s night. This night, Brooklyn, not Manhattan, was the center of the world. Never again would Dodger fans have to wait till next year.”
Brooklyn’s optimism regarding the team’s quest for the World Series had been rewarded with victory. Certainly the same would be true in the case of the stadium dispute and rumors that O’Malley planned to move the team to California. New York Times sportswriter John Drebinger captured the mood when he wrote that evening that, “Far into the night rang shouts of revelry in Flatbush. Brooklyn at long last has won a world series and now let someone suggest moving the Dodgers elsewhere!”
To be continued next week…