Why did the beloved New York baseball team move west in 1958?
BRooklyn, New York was home to one of the most popular teams in American baseball – the Brooklyn Dodgers. But in 1958 the unthinkable happened when the longtime Brooklyn Dodgers relocated to the West Coast to become the Los Angeles Dodgers. The story of why this happened is a baseball legend who pitted two strong personalities against each other.
Brooklyn was a separate city until it became a borough of New York City in 1898. Professional baseball came to Brooklyn as early as 1883, when a team nicknamed the “Grays” for the color of their uniforms played in the American Association, the precursor to the American League. The team won the league championship in 1889 and then moved to the National League where they won the league championship the next year. The Brooklyn team became the only team to win back-to-back championships in both leagues.
Although the team was officially called the Brooklyn Base Ball Club, it was known to fans and sportswriters by a variety of nicknames, including “Bridegrooms” because of some recently married team members. The nickname that eventually caught on by 1895 was “Trolley Dodgers”. Apparently the name came about when Brooklyn’s horse-drawn streetcars switched to electric streetcars, and pedestrians routinely had to avoid them or injure themselves. The team’s name was eventually shortened to “Brooklyn Dodgers”. The names “Trolley Dodgers” and “Dodgers” were never formalized until the 1916 World Series; “Dodgers” did not appear on the team’s jerseys until 1932.
As the Dodgers continued to draw crowds to Brooklyn’s old wooden Washington Park, Dodgers team owner Charles Ebbets began exploring possible sites for a better permanent home. Over time, Ebbets bought something of a city block in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. The land included Pigtown, a stinky garbage dump that needed a thorough clean before building a new pitch.
When construction began on the new field in early 1912, Ebbets optimistically claimed that the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers would play there on September 1, 1912, but Ebbets Field was not completed until the following year. When it was finally completed, local newspapers raved that Ebbets Field was “a monument to the national game.”
The first game, played at Ebbets Field on April 5, 1913, was an interleague spectacle between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees, the American League team that would become the Dodgers’ eternal nemesis. (Another bitter longtime rival was the National League New York Giants.) The Dodgers-Yankees game drew 35,000 fans, of whom only 30,000 could be admitted.
While Brooklyn lost several early games at Ebbets Field, it was clear the Dodgers’ new home would be popular. In 1916 and 1920, the Dodgers won the National League championships. During the 1920s, Ebbetts Field was enlarged to accommodate more fans, but the 1920 championship was the last the Dodgers would win for the next twenty years. In fact, the Dodgers’ inferior, error-prone game earned them the unflattering nickname “Daffiness Boys” in the 1920s.
In the early 1930s, the Dodgers gained a new moniker thanks to sports cartoonist Willard Mullin, who referred to the team as “Dem Bums,” using very Brooklyn-esque lingo. He portrayed a Dodger ballplayer in the spitting image of famous circus clown Emmett Kelly. The nickname and visual identity caught on more than any other nickname to the extent that the character “Brooklyn Bum” began appearing in Dodger annuals in later years.
Under new ownership in the 1930s, Leland “Larry” MacPhail joined the team as general manager. MacPhail began night games at Ebbets Field and had the stadium renovated. He also got then-Cincinnati Reds sports announcer Red Barber to join as the voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
That was the start of a definite upswing for the Dodgers; They won the National League championship three times in the 1940s and four times in the 1950s. Despite this, the Brooklyn team was only able to win the World Series once: After losing the World Series five times before to the rival New York Yankees, the Dodgers eventually beat them in seven games of the 1955 World Series.
The Dodgers found fame in a different area in the 1940s. In 1947, Dodger President and General Manager Branch Rickey made the historic decision to add a black player named Jackie Robinson to the team. Despite racially charged backlash and ongoing controversy, the addition of Robinson pioneered the integration of professional baseball and he became one of the greatest baseball players of all time.
The glory of the 1955 World Series win would be relatively short-lived for Brooklyn Dodgers supporters. Walter O’Malley, who was the team’s majority shareholder in 1950, wanted to build a new, larger stadium for the high-flying Dodgers.
Ebbets Field, which held a maximum of 35,000 fans, could not be expanded and had virtually no parking. O’Malley thought he could build a domed stadium at Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, where the Barclays Center is currently located. It was then that O’Malley encountered a roadblock in the form of the powerful New York City building commissioner, Robert Moses, who refused to endorse O’Malley. Instead, Moses wanted the Dodgers to move to Flushing Meadows in Queens. O’Malley recoiled and joked, “We’re the BROOKLYN Dodgers, not the Queens Dodgers!”
Neither O’Malley nor Moses moved, so O’Malley reached out to city officials in Los Angeles, California to discuss a possible move. Meanwhile, O’Malley allowed the team to play several games at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, New Jersey, hoping it would force Moses to allow a new stadium to be built in Brooklyn. His gambit didn’t work.
With no solution in sight, Ebbets Field was sold to a real estate developer in 1956, much to the dismay of loyal fans who loved the stadium. O’Malley leased back Ebbets Field for the 1957 season and brought the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958.
Vin Scully, who had taken charge of the station when Red Barber left the Dodgers organization in 1954, moved to LA with the team. Scully was a rarity: he began broadcasting at Ebbets Field in 1950 and stayed with the team when it moved. Scully continued to broadcast game commentary for sixty-seven seasons through the end of the 2016 baseball season. He died in August 2022 at the age of 94.
Meanwhile, O’Malley was so outraged by Robert Moses’ intransigence that he convinced Horace Stoneham, owner of the New York Giants, to move his team to San Francisco after the 1957 season – so New York City didn’t lose one , but two international league baseball teams. Five years later, the fledgling New York Metropolitans (or Mets) played two seasons at the old Giants’ Polo Grounds and then moved to the new Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadows, Queens. The Mets moved to larger Citi Field, also in Queens, in 2009.
The Dodgers and Giants were gone from their original homes — but Robert Moses eventually got a National League baseball team to play in Queens.
