“IS THERE LIFE AFTER THE BROOKLYN DODGERS?
Answer: If You Call This Living”
by
Jay Feldman
My first love was baseball. Hardly surprising, since I grew up in Brooklyn during the 1940s and ‘50s. It came with the territory.
Although it’s been more than six decades since the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, there are still countless numbers of the Brooklyn diaspora who haven’t gotten over the shock of the displacement and betrayal, and to this day, continue to mourn a loss that left a permanent scar, not just on us, but on the borough of Brooklyn itself.
In this age of mobility, now-elderly Brooklyn natives can be found living all over the United States, but the one thing that unites us forever is the memory of our beloved Bums. Wherever two or more ex-Brooklynites meet, conversation is almost certain to turn sooner or later to Pee Wee and Jackie, Campy and Oisk, Newk and the Duke, for the Brooklyn Dodgers were more than just a baseball team — the Brooklyn Dodgers were a way of life.
So let me tell you what it was like for me, growing up rooting for the Dodgers, and the scars it left on my tender young psyche.
First, my credentials: born and raised in Brooklyn, I was a Dodger fan from birth. On my fourth birthday — April 10, 1947 — Dodgers’ president Branch Rickey purchased Jackie Robinson’s contract from their Montreal farm club and brought to Brooklyn the first African-American major-leaguer since the earliest days of professional baseball, when the unofficial color line had not yet been drawn. A more magnificent birthday present no boy ever received. My identification with the Dodgers ran deep; ever so passionately, I lived and died with the ups and downs of the Brooks.
Now, the big picture: in the decade from 1947 to 1956, the Dodgers were more than just a great baseball team. As a result of the Jackie Robinson-Branch Rickey connection and the consequent breaking of baseball’s color line, the Dodgers were an agency of social change, an embodiment of the proposition that all men are created equal. It’s almost impossible now, in the 2020s, to recall the full intensity of the struggle, the bitterness and violence that accompanied Robinson’s arrival in the National League. The Jackie Robinson Dodgers simply changed forever the complexion of professional sports in this country, and with it, the social fabric of American life. The ballplayers who couldn’t tolerate Robinson’s presence on the team were traded, and by 1954, the Dodgers could field a starting lineup in which, when Don Newcombe was on the mound, black ballplayers outnumber white. It can be argued — and I certainly believe this — that more than any other single factor, Jackie Robinson’s coming to Brooklyn spelled the beginning of the end of racial segregation in the United States.
The Jackie Robinson Dodgers were a group of supremely talented athletes who collectively rose above sports to become a force for good in the world. Because of their pioneer status in integrating major-league baseball, the Dodgers were endowed with a spiritual quality that gave the team a particular intensity and thereby elevated it to a level beyond mere excellence. Some might call this quality charisma. I prefer the term baraka. Baraka is an Arabic word that translates roughly as “the impalpable essence of God’s blessing.” In Hebrew, the word is baruch, the first word of all prayers.
Simply put, the Dodgers were a team blessed. And, by no particular deserving virtue of our own — except the fortunate accident of being the Dodgers’ home town — the entire borough of Brooklyn, and most especially the team’s fans, were also sprinkled by the shower of baraka that rained down on the ballclub. As comedian Phil Foster, in his classic routine, “A Brooklyn Baseball Fan,” so aptly put it: “And don’t laugh at us people fum Brooklyn, ‘cause we know what we’re doin’ — da rest o’ da woild’s mixed up!” In those days, Brooklyn was a special place, and the closeness in sound of the words Brooklyn and baraka should not be lightly dismissed — on this point, more later.
But, as the rules of life tell us, you don’t get something for nothing, and so the Brooklyn Dodgers, in a bittersweet exchange for the blessing of being baseball’s first integrated team, paid a price, suffering the painful ignominy of an unequaled string of second-place finishes and World Series losses. And we, their fans, suffered with them. Being a Brooklyn Dodger fan was a postgraduate course in “How to Be a Gracious Loser.” (Woody Allen, remember, was a Brooklyn boy.) Our guiding principle was the now famous, “Wait ’til next year!”
If the Jackie Robinson Dodgers had not been such a great team, their failures would not have been nearly so poignant. As Roger Kahn wrote in his groundbreaking 1972 book, The Boys of Summer, “The team was awesomely good and yet defeated. Their skills lifted everyman’s spirit and their defeat joined them with everyman’s existence…irresistible and unable to beat the Yankees.”
Consider the record:
1947 — In Robinson’s rookie year, the Dodgers meet the Yankees in the World Series. In the fourth game, with two on and two out in the ninth, Brooklyn pinch hitter Cookie Lavagetto breaks up Bill Bevens's no-hitter with a game-winning double to right. With the Dodgers ahead, 8-5, in the sixth inning of Game 6, left-field defensive replacement Al Gionfriddo saves three runs with a mad dash and a stupendous circus catch off Joe DiMaggio’s drive to the deepest part of center field in Yankee Stadium. The Dodgers win the battles but lose the war, succumbing in seven games..
1948 — Third place.
1949 — Another pennant, another Series loss (five games) to the Yankees.
1950 — Brooklyn loses the pennant to the Philadelphia Phillies on the last day of the season on Dick Sisler’s 10th-inning home run.
1951 — The Dodgers blow a 13-1/2-game lead in August to finish the regular season tied for first place with the New York Giants. In the ninth inning of the third and deciding game of the playoff series, Giants’ outfielder Bobby Thomson hits the home run heard ‘round the world, and for the second straight year, Brooklyn loses a pennant in the final inning of the season. Is this team snakebitten, or what?
1952 and 1953 — Two pennants and two Series losses to the Yanks (seven games and six games).
1954 — Second place behind the Giants.
1955 — Pennant winners and winners, in seven games over the Yankees, of Brooklyn’s first and only World Championship.
1956 — Reverting to form, the Dodgers win the pennant and lose the Series in seven games to (who else?) the Yankees. Adding insult to injury, in Game Five, Don Larson pitches a perfect game, at the time the only no-hitter in World Series history. The Dodgers' motto is revised to, "Wait ’til last year.”
On paper, the Dodgers and the Yankees were remarkably evenly matched, and yet, somehow, when the chips were down, the pin-striped juggernaut from the Bronx steamrolled their Flatbush rivals with devastating regularity. How do you figure it? How could the Yankees hold such a lopsided advantage in what should have been a fairly equal match-up? In the final analysis, what it came down to was that the Yankees had the Dodgers' number — and both teams knew it. As the Yankees’ second baseman Billy Martin so bluntly stated after the '53 Series, "The Dodgers are the Dodgers. If they had eight Babe Ruths they couldn't beat us.”
These were my formative years, and the effect on my tender, developing psyche was devastating. From being a Brooklyn Dodger fan, I learned to be perpetually prepared for disappointment. The Dodgers were a team for masochists, idealists, and quixotic diehards. On and off the field, the team conspired (or so it seemed to me), to find the most diabolical ways to break my heart.
How about the time when I was nine years old, that Roy Campanella, my favorite player, was scheduled to come to my school and speak at a PTA meeting? Wearing my full Dodgers uniform — jersey, pants, cap, and stirrup socks — with Campy’s number 39 on the back, I went off, starry-eyed, with my dad to the meeting. I waited through an endless series of boring, grown-up speeches and PTA business, pen and paper in hand, ready for my idol’s autograph. Do I really need to tell you that Campanella never showed up?
Or how about the time I was looking through my father’s collection of 78-rpm records and came upon a side titled “The Dodger Song,” by the Almanac Singers (Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, et al)? Excitedly, breathlessly, I put the platter on the turntable, only to discover that the song had nothing to do with baseball.
But the unkindness cut of all, of course, was then-owner Walter O’Malley’s decision to move the team out of Brooklyn to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. At fourteen years old, I found out once and for all how the real world operated: for money, they moved the Brooklyn Dodgers, my Brooklyn Dodgers, to the other end of the world.
Years later, during the Vietnam era, I had a dream in which the players, led by Robinson and Pee Wee Reese, stood on the field in uniform, looking up at O’Malley’s box with defiantly raised clenched fists, chanting, “HELL, NO, WE WON’T GO!” Another time, I dreamt that my Uncle Shaya, who as far as I know had no interest in baseball, was loudly maligning O’Malley for his perfidy. Shaya was a hot-head, who never did things half-way. “I just wanna live long enough to dance on dat momser’s grave,” he told me in the dream. “I’m gonna save enough money for a one-way ticket. Ya know why a one-way ticket? ‘Cause when I get ovah dere an’ start dancing, I’m gonna drop dead from joy, and dey’ll hafta bury me on da spot! I should only live so long!”
Not only were the Dodgers stolen from us, they were taken at the height of their prowess. The other franchises that were uprooted in the mid-‘50s were all losing ball clubs with poor attendance. The only other respectable franchise that moved was the Giants, and they were simply following the Dodgers — it’s commonly known that O’Malley persuaded Giants’ owner Horace Stoneham to pack up and head for the West Coast so the Dodgers wouldn’t be the only team on the West Coast.
The 1947-57 Brooklyn Dodgers, on the other hand, had won six pennants and a World Series in eleven years, and are universally acknowledged as one of the great dynasties in baseball history. Five players — Robinson, Reese, Campanella, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges — are in the Hall of Fame. And the last year the Dodgers were in Brooklyn, they drew over a million fans in Ebbets Field, a bandbox that seated only about 32,000.
For many years following the departure of the team, I nursed a grudge against Walter O’Malley. As a turning point in the loss of our collective innocence, for my generation of Brooklynites, only the assassination of President John F. Kennedy six years later can equal or surpass the devastating effect of the Dodgers' departure from Brooklyn.
In case you think I'm overdoing it here, let me assure you that by no means was I alone in my lingering bitterness. There are ex-Brooklynites all over the United States who still mourn the loss of the Dodgers and maintain an enduring enmity for O’Malley.
In Peter Golenbock’s 1984 book, ''BUMS: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers,'' Jack Newfield tells of the time he was having dinner with Pete Hamill. ''I said to Pete, 'Let's try an experiment. You write on your napkin the names of the three worst human beings who ever lived, and I will write the three worst, and we'll compare.'
''Each of us wrote down the same three names and in the same order: Hitler, Stalin, Walter O’Malley.’'
The disillusionment and heartbreak of O'Malley's betrayal caused me to turn away from baseball for nearly twenty years. After college, I left Brooklyn for California and graduate school in 1963, and it was only in my early thirties that I began to play and follow the game again.
But perhaps I’ve created the impression that being a Brooklyn Dodger fan was somehow unfortunate. On the contrary, I was immensely lucky to have had the chance, as a boy, to fall in love with baseball by following one of the most exciting, talented, and meaningful teams ever to play the game. I feel particularly blessed to have shared in the baraka that surrounded the team. And sometimes, they actually did come through for me. I did see Jackie steal home at Ebbets Field against Jim Hearn of the Giants. I was there on the last day of the ’54 season, when rookie Karl Spooner set a two-game record for strikeouts (twenty-seven) for a National League pitcher. Gil Hodges did show up to speak to my Babe Ruth League. And above all, there was the incomparable joy of that ’55 World Series victory over the Yankees.
But the moment I remember most clearly, the one that epitomizes the frustration of being a Brooklyn Dodger fan, is Bobby Thomson’s home run. How I wept at the outcome! I didn’t know it then, but that heartbreaking ’51 pennant loss was part of the price we paid for the baraka we received for breaking the color line in baseball. Now I know it was worth it. Still, though, the sound of that madly cheering Polo Grounds crowd remains forever embedded in my mind’s ear as a reminder of the bittersweet nature of life.
And speaking of sound, recall, if you will, my earlier point about the close similarity of baraka and Brooklyn. Now, remember the man chosen by destiny to throw the pitch that Bobby Thomson hit out? The man on whose shoulders came to rest the unenviable burden of being forever counted among the greatest goats in sports history? The man who more than any other Dodger player up to that point paid the collective price for Brooklyn’s baraka? Of course — number 13, Ralph Branca.
THE END
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