Brooklyn Dodgers
The Brooklyn Dodgers were a Major League Baseball team founded in 1883 as the Brooklyn Grays. In 1884, it became a member of the American Association as the Brooklyn Atlantics before joining the National League in 1890. They remained in Brooklyn, New York, until 1957, after which the club moved to Los Angeles, where it continues its history as the Los Angeles Dodgers. That same year, the Dodgers' longtime rival, the New York Giants, moved to San Francisco and became the San Francisco Giants.
The "Dodgers" team name is a shortened form of one of their former names, the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers. "Trolley dodgers" is a nickname for Brooklyn residents who had to avoid being hit by the city's fast-moving trolleys while crossing their lines. The Dodgers later earned the respectful nickname Dem Bums. The Dodgers played in two stadiums in South Brooklyn, each named Washington Park, and at Eastern Park in the neighborhood of Brownsville before moving to Ebbets Field in the neighborhood of Crown Heights in 1912. The team is noted for signing Jackie Robinson in 1947 as the first black player in the modern major leagues.
The Brooklyn Dodgers had an overall win–loss record of during their 68 years in Brooklyn. Eight former Brooklyn Dodgers players were elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
History
Early Brooklyn baseball
Many of the clubs represented at the first convention of the National Association of Base Ball Players were from Brooklyn, including the Atlantic, Eckford, and Excelsior clubs that combined to dominate play for most of the 1860s. Brooklyn helped make baseball commercial, as the locale of the first paid admission games, a series of three all star contests matching New York and Brooklyn in 1858. Brooklyn also featured the first two enclosed baseball grounds, the Union Grounds and the Capitoline Grounds; enclosed, dedicated ballparks accelerated the evolution from amateurism to professionalism.Despite the early success of Brooklyn clubs in the NABBP, which were officially amateur until 1869, they fielded weak teams in the succeeding National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, the first professional league formed in 1871. The Excelsiors no longer challenged for the amateur championship after the Civil War and never entered the professional NAPBBP. The Eckfords and Atlantics declined to join until 1872 and thereby lost their best players; the Eckfords survived only one season and the Atlantics four, with losing teams.
The National League replaced the NAPBBP in 1876 and granted exclusive territories to its eight members, excluding the Atlantics in favor of the Mutual Club of New York who had shared home grounds with the Atlantics. When the Mutuals were expelled by the league, the Hartford club moved in, the press dubbing them The Brooklyn Hartfords, and played its home games at Union Grounds in 1877 before disbanding.
Origin of the Dodgers
The team currently known as the Dodgers was formed in 1883 by real estate magnate and baseball enthusiast Charles Byrne, who convinced his brother-in-law Joseph Doyle and casino operator Ferdinand Abell to start the team with him. Byrne arranged to build a grandstand on a lot bounded by Third Street, Fourth Avenue, Fifth Street, and Fifth Avenue, and named it Washington Park in honor of first president George Washington.Nicknamed by reporters the "Grays" for their uniforms, the team played in the minor league Inter-State Association of Professional Baseball Clubs that first season. Doyle became the first team manager, and they drew 6,431 fans to their first home game on May 12, 1883, against the Trenton, New Jersey team. The Grays won the league title after the Camden Merritt club in New Jersey disbanded on July 20 and Brooklyn picked up some of its better players. The Grays were invited to join the two-year-old professional circuit, the American Association to compete with the eight-year-old NL for the 1884 season.
After winning the American Association league championship in 1889, the Brooklyn club moved to the competing older National League and won the 1890 NL Championship, being the only Major League team to win consecutive championships in both professional "base ball" leagues. They lost the 1889 championship tournament to the New York Giants and tied the 1890 championship with Louisville. Their success during this period was partly attributed to their having absorbed skilled players from the defunct AA New York Metropolitans and one-year Players' League entry the Brooklyn Ward's Wonders. The middle years of the decade were disappointing, a slump the Spalding Guide rather primly ascribed to management tolerating drunkenness among the players.
Over the 1890s, Charles Ebbets accumulated shares in the club, owning 80% of it by decade's end. Other shares were held by Harry Von der Horst, owner of the Baltimore Orioles team that won consecutive championships in 1894, 1895, and 1896, and Orioles manager Ned Hanlon. In 1899, Von der Horst and Hanlon moved most of the Orioles' stars from Baltimore to join the Grays in Brooklyn; Hanlon became the team's manager. The press, inspired by the popular circus act The Hanlons' Superba, dubbed the new combined team the Brooklyn Superbas. In 1899 and in 1900, they were the champions of the National League.
Nicknames
The name Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers was first used to describe the team in 1895. The nickname was still new enough in September 1895 that a newspaper reported that "'Trolley Dodgers' is the new name which eastern baseball cranks have given the Brooklyn club." In 1895, Brooklyn played at Eastern Park, bounded by Eastern Parkway, Powell Street, Sutter Avenue, Van Sinderen Street, where they had moved early in the 1891 season, when the second Washington Park burned down.Some sources erroneously report that the name "Trolley Dodgers" referred to pedestrians avoiding fast cars on street car tracks that bordered Eastern Park on two sides. However, Eastern Park was not bordered by street-level trolley lines that had to be "dodged" by pedestrians. The name "Trolley Dodgers" implied the dangers posed by trolley cars in Brooklyn generally, which in 1892, began the switch from horse-power to electrical power, which made them much faster, and were hence regarded as more dangerous. The name was later shortened to Brooklyn Dodgers.
Other team names used to refer to the franchise that finally came to be called "the Dodgers" were the Atlantics, Bridegrooms or Grooms, Ward's Wonders, the Superbas, and the Robins, named for longtime manager Wilbert Robinson. All of these nicknames were used by fans and newspaper sportswriters to describe the team, often concurrently, but not in any official capacity. The team's legal name was the Brooklyn Base Ball Club.
The "Trolley Dodgers" nickname was used throughout this period, along with other nicknames, by fans and sports writers of the day. The team did not use the name in a formal sense until 1916, when the name was printed on home World Series programs. The word "Dodgers" appeared on team jerseys in 1932. The "conclusive shift" came in 1933, when both home and road jerseys for the team bore the name "Dodgers".
Examples of how the many popularized names of the team were used interchangeably are available from newspaper articles from the period before 1932. A New York Times article describing a game the Dodgers played in 1916 starts out by referring to how "Jimmy Callahan, pilot of the Pirates, did his best to wreck the hopes the Dodgers have of gaining the National League pennant", but then goes on to comment, "the only thing that saved the Superbas from being toppled from first place was that the Phillies lost one of the two games played."
Most baseball statistics sites and baseball historians generally now refer to the pennant-winning 1916 Brooklyn team as the Robins; on the other hand, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle used "Superbas" in its box scores that season. A 1918 New York Times article used the nickname Robins in its title "Buccaneers Take Last From Robins", but the subtitle of the article reads "Subdue The Superbas By 11 To 4, Making Series An Even Break". Space-conscious headline writers still used "the Flock" during the Dodgers' last decade in Brooklyn.
Another example of the interchangeability of different nicknames is found on the program issued at Ebbets Field for the 1920 World Series, which identifies the matchup in the series as "Dodgers vs. Indians", despite the fact that the Robins nickname had been in consistent usage at this point for around six years.
Breaking the color barrier
For most of the first half of the 20th century, no Major League Baseball team employed a black player. A parallel system of Negro leagues developed, but most Negro league players were denied a chance to prove their skill before a wider national audience. Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play in MLB in the 20th century when he played his first NL game on April 15, 1947 for the Dodgers. Robinson's entry into the league was mainly due to general manager Branch Rickey's efforts.The deeply religious Rickey's motivation appears to have been primarily moral, although business considerations were also present. Rickey was a member of the Methodist Church, the antecedent denomination to the United Methodist Church of today, which was a strong advocate for social justice and active later in the Civil Rights Movement. Rickey saw his opportunity with the 1944 death of Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, an arch-segregationist and enforcer of the color barrier.
Besides selecting Robinson for his exceptional baseball skills, Rickey also considered Robinson's outstanding personal character, his UCLA education and rank of captain in the U.S. Army in his decision, since he knew that boos, taunts, and criticism were going to be directed at Robinson, and that Robinson had to be tough enough to withstand abuse without attempting to retaliate.
The inclusion of Robinson on the team also led the Dodgers to move its spring training site. Prior to 1946, the Dodgers held their spring training in Jacksonville, Florida. However, the city's stadium refused to host an exhibition game with the Montreal Royals, the Dodgers' own farm club, on whose roster Robinson appeared at the time, citing segregation laws. Nearby Sanford similarly declined. Ultimately, City Island Ballpark in Daytona Beach agreed to host the game with Robinson on the field. The team traveled to Havana, Cuba for spring training in 1947, this time with Robinson on the big club. Although the Dodgers ultimately built Dodgertown and its Holman Stadium further south in Vero Beach, and played there for 61 spring training seasons from 1948 through 2008, Daytona Beach renamed City Island Ballpark to Jackie Robinson Ballpark in his honor.
This event marked the continuation of the integration of professional sports in the United States, with professional football having led the way in 1946, with the concomitant demise of the Negro leagues, and is regarded as a key moment in the history of the American civil rights movement. Robinson was an exceptional player, a speedy runner who sparked the team with his intensity. He was the inaugural recipient of the Rookie of the Year award, which is now named the Jackie Robinson award in his honor. The Dodgers' willingness to integrate, when most other teams refused to, was a key factor in their 1947–1956 success. They won six pennants in those 10 years with the help of Robinson, three-time MVP Roy Campanella, Cy Young Award winner Don Newcombe, Jim Gilliam, and Joe Black. Robinson eventually became the first African-American elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.