POSTCARD FROM BROOKLYN: Fantasy Baseball

BROOKLYN, N.Y.—The sprawling complex just minutes away from my Lefferts Manor home might be the world’s most famous housing project. This is hardly a result of its physical virtues—the orange brick façade and the green balcony ledges stand out only as eyesores, striking examples of an architectural period my friend’s mother once dubbed “Early Ugly.” But a sign on the Bedford Avenue side reveals the site’s significance to the uninformed: Ebbets Field. There used to be a ballpark here.

Ebbets Field was introduced to the bulldozers shortly after the Brooklyn Dodgers bolted for Los Angeles in 1957, leaving behind a less-than-spectacular apartment building and a million broken hearts. Brooklyn had loved its baseball team’s players, certainly—champions like Jackie Robinson, Pee-Wee Reese and Duke Snider as well as the more comical figures of earlier, more futile years.

But the Dodgers had also represented Brooklyn’s unique identity. Decades ago, Manhattan’s dominance in almost every realm that mattered—money, political power, press—enabled it to exert an almost tyrannical influence on what once had been the nation’s fourth largest city. This supremacy extended to the diamond, where the Yankees and Giants won pennant after pennant. In the Dodgers—a team that embraced Brooklyn’s underdog role and uniquely represented a borough rather than a city—Brooklynites found a metaphor for their municipal existence and rooted like mad for “Dem Bums” to outshine their pretentious Manhattan neighbors. When the team left, Brooklyn’s spirit of resistance perished, and it soon became just another borough. The word “Brooklyn” had originally come from the Dutch word for “Broken Land,” but only became appropriate once the Dodgers left.

Now, for the first time since The Exodus, professional baseball has returned. The New York Mets recently moved their Single-A minor league affiliate to a new Coney Island facility and renamed it the Brooklyn Cyclones. Memories of the Dodgers have prompted an incredibly warm reception for the low-level club. Three-fourths of the season sold out in three weeks. Cyclones merchandise is flying off shelves all over the region. Brooklyn fans are calling up local sports radio programs to curse the name of Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers owner who orchestrated the infamous move. The Borough of Churches seems alive with pride again—a combination of nostalgia for the “good old days” and excitement over baseball’s return “back where it belongs.” I can only share in the enthusiasm so much—at 20, I hardly know what I missed.

I came home late one night to watch the end of the first home game on TV with my father. My dad had been robbed of his destiny as a Dodger fan just as I had, having immigrated from Aruba a decade after the move. At one point during the bottom of the ninth inning, he turned to me and asked, “Couldn’t they have gotten us at least a Triple-A team?” I smiled; this was a typical New Yorker’s reaction. The absence of Dodgerdom hadn’t stunted Dad’s acculturation.

But not having Ebbets Field around had undoubtedly changed things for us. I have spent hours lately thinking about how different life would have been as a Dodger fan instead of a Mets fan (probably a lot better this summer). I wonder what it would have been like to walk a few blocks to the stadium, and how a tradition as pure as that of baseball in Brooklyn would have survived the various corrupting influences of modern professional sport. I wonder if the days of walking down Flatbush Avenue and hearing Dodger broadcasts blaring from a million windows would have lasted through those four lost decades. Aging fans now exult at the sight of a Brooklyn ballpark and relive old memories; I wonder what my memories would have been.

And, as one must do when thinking about the Dodgers, I wonder about the greater life of the borough. The Dodgers had been a unifying force for Brooklyn at several stages of its history—from its consolidation into Greater New York in the 1890s to the civil rights movement and Robinson’s smashing of the color barrier. Who knows what else the Dodgers could have steered Brooklyn through? Who’s to say that we wouldn’t be better, happier people with Ebbets Field still standing?

“Brooklyn, Brooklyn, I’m sick of hearing it,” legendary sportswriter Jimmy Cannon wrote in the New York Post in 1952. “The way they talk, you think it was a whole country with an army and a king or something. All they got is a ball club.” Maybe Cannon was right, but it couldn’t have been just any ball club. Not with the way the borough’s identity vanished in ’57 and the way the current revival has moved some aging baby-boomers to tears. And certainly not with the way a young fan who missed the team by decades can still stare at the Ebbets Field Apartments from across Bedford Avenue and soulfully ask, “What if?”

Martin S. Bell ’03, a government concentrator in Winthrop House, is associate sports editor of The Crimson. He’s sold his soul to corporate America this summer in order to avoid becoming a different sort of

“Brooklyn Bum.”