62. When Were the Dodgers Born?

If you want to ski the black-diamond runs of Dodgers expertise, one useful tidbit to know is that the roots of the franchise predate Brooklyn’s entrance into the National League. Just make sure you don’t get lost among the several other baseball clubs calling Brooklyn their home.

In The Dodgers, Glenn Stout traces organized baseball in Brooklyn back to the mid–1850s:

“By 1857,” Stout writes, “Brooklyn sported no fewer than four well-organized, formal baseball clubs. One year later they were invited to join an association of clubs in Manhattan to create what can be considered the first baseball league, the National Association of Base Ball Players.”

Brooklyn was the home of the man generally acknowledged to be baseball’s first star player, Jim Creighton, who brought the wrist snap to pitching and began its transformation into an art form. Creighton was also the game’s first martyr, dying at age 21 of internal injuries said to have been suffered during a game.

But it’s between then and Brooklyn’s 1890 NL debut that the Dodgers franchise as it’s known today was born. The 1890 Brooklyn Bridegrooms, who won the NL pennant in their first season, were brought over by co-owner Charles Byrne from the American Association, which was foundering with the establishment of a rival confederation, the Players’ League. Previously, the same franchise had spent the 1884–89 seasons in the AA, using such other official and unofficial nicknames as the Grays (1885–88) and the Atlantics (1884). The AA, though a bit inferior to the NL in strength was nonetheless considered a major league—the top echelon of professional baseball.

And the journey back in time goes back yet one step further. Brooklyn’s arrival in the AA came after it won—under the same ownership and in the same locale—the 1883 Interstate Association title. That team came into being when, Stout writes, New York Herald night editor George Taylor, ex-journalist/real estate investor Byrne, Byrne’s brother-in-law and business partner Joseph Doyle, and Rhode Island casino operator Frederick Abell applied for an IA franchise, found a place near the Gowanus Canal to build a ballpark, and recruited 40 ballplayers from which to form a squad. That group took the first step as the franchise that today operates nearly 3,000 miles and more than 100 years away in the splendor of Dodger Stadium.

 

Touchdown, Dodgers!

More than half a century before the NFL almost came to Chavez Ravine, pigskins flew at Pigtown. From 1930–43, the Brooklyn Dodgers football team gave the borough’s World Series-starved fans something to root for in the fall. In those 14 seasons, unfortunately, the team never finished in first place.

However, like their baseball counterparts who hosted Cincinnati for major league baseball’s first telecast on August 26, 1939, the football Dodgers also have the distinction of playing in their league’s first televised game, which they won 23–14, on October 22 that same year.

After changing its name to the Tigers before a 1944 season in which it went 0–10, Brooklyn football merged with a team whose name must have been very difficult for the city’s baseball fans to swallow: the Boston Yanks. Football briefly left Ebbets Field, but in 1946, a new Brooklyn Dodgers team began play in the All-American Football Conference. In the winter of 1947–48, Branch Rickey, John L. Smith, and Walter O’Malley purchased the squad.

“Rickey told O’Malley and Smith that operating a pro football team in Ebbets Field would be both a good community gesture and, ultimately, a money-making proposition,” Lee Lowenfish wrote in his Rickey biography. Peter O’Malley recalls going as a child to the games with Rickey. But the team went 2–12 and was in the red by about $300,000 at the end of 1948, and once again, it merged into oblivion.