Charles Ebbets’ middle name was Hercules, befitting a man who undertook prodigious labors in the big leagues. He had formidable ideas and great passions: He loved money, baseball, and Brooklyn, and though those devotions sometimes clashed titanically, they also gave birth to the Dodgers of the 20th century.
Born in 1859, at the end of the decade in which baseball in Brooklyn came to life, Ebbets made careers for himself in architecture, publishing, and politics but found his true calling in a job with the local ballclub in 1892. Understand that whatever zeal for the Dodgers you might ante up, Ebbets could probably see you and raise you—at least as far as trying to build up the overall organization. At first, he worked mainly in accounting and sales, but there were few tasks he wasn’t compelled to pursue, including manager. Often accepting stock in the franchise as compensation, Ebbets rose to become club president in 1898.
From that point on, Ebbets was frequently mortgaging his entire financial well-being to fulfill his Brooklyn fantasies. He entered into a syndicate agreement with Baltimore, a popular method of the time that allowed one franchise to plunder another for talent, and won pennants in 1899 and 1900. He emptied his bank account to buy out minority owner Ferdinand Abell in 1902, according to John Saccoman’s biographical sketch of Ebbets at the SABR Biography Project, and soon borrowed even more money so he could become majority owner. As if that weren’t enough, Ebbets then prioritized the building of a state-of-the-art ballpark, which stretched his financial situation even further.
Not surprisingly, as Glenn Stout points out in The Dodgers, this made Ebbets less than generous with player payroll, allowing the newly forming American League to make off with many of his players to an extent that undermined his end-of-the-century Baltimore talent heist and sapped the on-field product in Brooklyn for years to come. And, of course, for all the financial deep-sea diving he took, for all the aggressive ticket pricing he instituted (including raising World Series grandstand tickets to a record $5 in 1916), for all his ambitions regarding the ballpark that would eventually be named for him, he couldn’t muster the resources to create a facility that would stand the test of time. But that didn’t stop the borough of Brooklyn from finding a special connection with the team in large part through his efforts.
Ebbets passed away in April 1925—destitute neither in money nor spirit. “The Dodgers were scheduled to open a three-game series against the Giants at Ebbets Field later that day,” Saccoman writes. “‘Charlie wouldn’t want anybody to miss a Giant-Brooklyn series just because he died,’ said Wilbert Robinson. The game went on, with the crowd standing for a moment of silence beforehand and both teams’ players wearing black mourning bands on the left sleeves of their uniforms. NL president John Heydler ordered all NL games postponed on the day of the funeral, which was attended by most of the league’s magnates.”
At the funeral, acting team president Ed McKeever caught pneumonia and died days later, setting the stage for the next chapter of Brooklyn history. Replacing Ebbets would be a Herculean task.