The 1890 Brooklyn Bridegrooms.
I couldn't find a picture of the 1883 Brooklyn Grays.
May 9, 1883: The Brooklyn Grays beat the Harrisburg Baseball Club of Pennsylvania, 7-1 at the Parade Ground in Brooklyn, in front of 2,000 fans. They soon moved into Washington Park, and played the Inter-State Association of Professional Baseball Clubs season there.
In 1884, the Grays were invited to join one of the 2 major leagues, the American Association. In the off-season of 1887-88, 8 of their players got married. Sportswriters began calling them the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, or the Grooms for short.
In 1889, they won the Pennant. In 1890, they joined the National League, and won their Pennant. In 1899, Ned Hanlon, who had managed the Baltimore Orioles to 3 NL Pennants, became their manager. Because of a famous circus troupe named Hanlon's Superbas, the team became known as the Brooklyn Superbas. They won the Pennant again in 1899 and 1900.
There was another nickname. In 1892, the trolleys in Brooklyn were switched from horse-driven to electrical power. This made them faster, and more dangerous. Brooklynites began to be known as "trolley dodgers." The name began to be applied to the ballclub in 1895. In 1911, it was made official: They became the Brooklyn Dodgers.
In 1914, Wilbert Robinson was named their manager, and they were renamed the Brooklyn Robins. They won the Pennant in 1916 and 1920. Robinson was fired after the 1931 season, and the Dodger name was restored.
They were bad, nicknamed the Daffiness Boys and, in the Brooklyn accent, "Dem Bums." But they got good again, winning the Pennant again in 1941. Now, "Dem Bums" became a term of endearment. In 1947, team president Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson, and baseball was racially desegregated. This gave the Brooklyn Dodgers a historical distinction that no other team could claim.
They won Pennants in 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953. But they lost the World Series every time they got in it, all the way back to 1916. And had painful near-misses for the Pennant in 1942, 1946, 1950 and 1951.
The only one of New York City's 3 Major League Baseball teams to use their Borough as their geographic identifier, you didn't have to be from Brooklyn to love the Dodgers. (My grandmother was from Queens, and a huge Dodger fan.) But nothing brought Brooklynites together like the Dodgers: Differences of race and religion were set aside to root for the team that had represented their Borough more, and better, than anything ever had. No team in the history of baseball -- not the New York Yankees, not the New York Giants, not the Boston Red Sox, not the Chicago Cubs -- has been a part of a local culture as deeply as the Brooklyn Dodgers.
In 1955, the Dodgers finally won the World Series, beating the Yankees in 7 games. The party on the streets of Brooklyn was the biggest since V-J Day. They won the Pennant again in 1956, losing the Series to the Yankees.
But Ebbets Field, their ballpark since 1913, was too small (31,497 seats), and had hardly any parking (750 spaces). And, unlike Yankee Stadium (the Major Deegan Expressway) and the Giants' Polo Grounds (the Harlem River Drive), there wasn't a major road going past it, either. With the G.I. Bill having allowed many Dodger fans to leave Brooklyn for the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey, automobile access became more important, and Ebbets Field just couldn't provide it.
So Walter O'Malley, who had taken over majority ownership of the team after the 1950 season, wanted to build a new stadium, the Brooklyn Sports Center. It would be the 1st domed stadium in North American sports. The site he chose was across from the Long Island Rail Road's Atlantic Terminal. (Roughly where the Barclays Center arena is now.) This would eliminate the need for a lot of parking: Fans on Long Island could drive, or even walk, to their local LIRR station, take the train in, and walk across the street to the ballpark.
But Robert Moses, who controlled several City of New York and State of New York agencies, was in charge of construction and demolition for the City. O'Malley was willing to spend his own money to construct the stadium. All he needed was for Moses to approve the demolition of the buildings on the land, and relocate the businesses there. Moses refused.
O'Malley has been called a "visionary." If he was truly a visionary, he would have found a way around Moses, and gotten the Sports Center built. Instead, he decided to look elsewhere. Being greedy, he took the best offer. It came from Los Angeles.
On September 24, 1957, the Dodgers beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 2-0 at Ebbets Field. They played 3 more games in Philadelphia, and then, the Brooklyn Dodgers were no more. They have been the Los Angeles Dodgers since 1958. After 4 years of using the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum as a stopgap facility, Dodger Stadium opened in 1962, and it has now hosted baseball longer than Ebbets Field did.
The Dodgers have won the Pennant in 1959, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1974, 1977, 1978, 1981, 1988, 2017, 2018 and 2020. They have won the World Series in 1959, 1963, 1965, 1981, 1988 and 2020. Those titles could have been won in Brooklyn. They were not.
The move of the Dodgers broke Brooklyn's collective heart. There is a nostalgia for them that there simply isn't for any other moved sports team, not even the Giants, who moved to California at the same time, going to San Francisco to keep the NL's biggest rivalry going.
The Philadelphia Athletics don't have that kind of aura. Nor do the Washington Senators. The closest any sports team comes to the Brooklyn Dodgers' level is the Baltimore Colts.
The arrival of the New York Mets in 1962, bringing together the fans of the Dodgers and Giants, who once hated each other, didn't get rid of the nostalgia for either. If anything, it was a "marriage of convenience" for the children of those fans, who would now have a single team to root for.
In 1971, Roger Kahn published The Boys of Summer, looking back on his childhood as a Dodger fan, remembering his time covering the Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune in the 1952 and '53 seasons, and meeting them again as they all hit middle age. Without a year of the book's publication, Jackie Robinson and Gil Hodges would be dead.
In 2012, the NBA's New Jersey Nets moved into the Barclays Center, becoming the Brooklyn Nets. They have restored a bit of pride, but they haven't taken the Dodgers' place in Brooklyn's collective mind. The only real way that place will leave is by the aging and dying of the Dodgers' remaining fans. Like the ballad of the old soldiers, the memories of the Brooklyn Dodgers will never die, they will just fade away.
*
May 9, 1883 was a Wednesday. The original Brooklyn Grays were a minor-league team. These major league games were played that day:
* In the National League, the Detroit Wolverines beat the Chicago White Stockings, 17-7 at Lakefront Park in Chicago. The Wolverines went out of business after the 1888 season, while the White Stockings became the Cubs in 1903.
* In the American Association, the New York Metropolitans lost to the Pittsburgh Alleghenys, 18-3 at Exposition Park in Pittsburgh. These Metropolitans were called the Mets for short, and the later NL team would be named, in part, in tribute to them. They went out of business after the 1887 season. That was the year the Alleghenys joined the NL, and they became the Pirates in 1890.
* Also in the American Association, the Baltimore Orioles beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 15-7 at Oriole Park in Baltimore. Neither of these teams survived to the 20th Century, and both would have their names adopted by teams in the American League.
This was also the birthdate of the Spanish writer and philosopher José Ortega y Gasset.
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