This one's for Jay:
(Extract from
LATimes):
Bummed Brooklynites Took Dodgers for Granted
By Michael Shapiro
January 29, 2004
When we hear the Dodgers are being sold, Brooklyn people like me dream of having them back. It never happens. The Dodgers left Brooklyn 47 years ago, and you would think that after all this time we have come to accept that they are gone. We have not.
Instead, we pine. We long for Brooklyn's good times, when the Dodgers played at tiny Ebbets Field and every single day for, oh, 50 years was sunny.
We can be a tedious lot; people wonder why we can't let go.
…
But lately I have been wondering whether I had missed something, that our endless rage at O'Malley and our more recent bitterness toward Moses blinded us to something even more painful: that it is our sin that cost us the Dodgers, that this unresolved hurt is, in fact, an act of divine or supernatural retribution for our collective responsibility for our arrogance, our blindness, our conceit. Did we lose our Dodgers because we did not sufficiently love them, and what they meant?
The conventional wisdom has it that by the mid-1950s Ebbets Field was empty and that Brooklyn was a changed place, and not for the better. This is not true. White people were moving to the suburbs; blacks and Latinos were moving in. But Brooklyn circa 1955 was still much as it was a decade before. This meant that perhaps 15,000 people came to Ebbets Field to see a game. Not a sellout in a ballpark that seated only 32,000, yet well above attendance averages at the time.
But O'Malley noted these numbers and then looked at the far larger crowds the Braves were drawing in Milwaukee and decided he could not compete without a new ballpark. "New" is the operative word here. In the post-Depression and postwar view of the good life, new was infinitely more alluring than old. Old was your parents' house. Old was your neighborhood. People wanted new.
So they left the row houses of Crown Heights and Park Slope and drove out along the Sunrise Highway (yes, there is a metaphor here) to split-level homes in towns with inviting names like Valley Stream and Oceanside.
They left behind friends and neighbors and relatives and the Dodgers, most of whom, it should be noted, still lived in the middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge, where boys rang their doorbells for autographs and the players' wives shopped locally.
People returned to visit their parents and maybe see the Dodgers, doing so in the belief that the team and their folks would somehow always be there. And if the new lives they had fashioned looked out on the backyard and not the street, that was OK. The street was always too loud and the neighbors too nosy. Then one day their parents got old, and the Dodgers were gone, and with the team went the last vestige of the old world that they had, in fact, abandoned. All O'Malley had done was to turn out the lights.
der Brucer (Still a Philadelphia Blue Jays fan)
