While old-timer Brooklynites will still grouse about Walter O’Malley and the Dodgers’ flight to LA 50 years ago, on the other coast, fans are celebrating five decades of baseball in sunny California. Variety, the entertainment industry’s leading trade publication, published its Los Angeles Dodgers 50th Anniversary issue this week. Organized by Dodger Thoughts writer Jon Weisman, the Hollywood-centric baseball special contained two pieces by Alex Belth, one on the top ten baseball movies and one on ten movies that used baseball as a plot device. And for the nostalgic Bums among us, check out Weisman’s piece on what Brooklyn’s long lost team now means to LA.
The House that Ruth (Maybe) Slept In up for landmark consideration
New York’s Landmarks Preservation Committee denied an effort to save the House that Ruth Built a few years ago, but they may be willing to save a house that Babe Ruth may have slept in. The committee is investigating tales that Ruth may have spent some of his retirement at 114-07 175th Street in the St. Albans’ Addisleigh Park section of Queens.
Building a winner: Yankees 1990-1994
A comment in Paul’s insightful guest post got me thinking. The idea was comparing the 1990 team to the 2008 team. Clearly, there is a huge flaw in this. The 1990 team wasn’t nearly as talented as its 2008 counterpart. The 1989 team did not win 94 games and make the playoffs. And the 1990 team didn’t have a handful of future Hall of Famers.
But this did get me thinking. How did we go from the bottom of the AL East in 1990 to dominating in the strike-shortened 1994 season?
Now, this is not as deep a look as we can take into this matter. I’m not going to be able to comment on the environment in baseball at the time, because I don’t remember it as vividly as I’d like. But we can at least take the moves as they happened, and show how a last place team became a first place team, in just the fourth year after dwelling in the cellar.
When the Yanks had a mascot
While I absolutely love the Phillie Phanatic, I can’t imagine a mascot of that ilk having much of a role in the Bronx. Yankee fans just wouldn’t tolerate it. It seems, however, that for parts of a few seasons in the mid-1980s, the Yankees tried to convince the public that this guy would make a good Bronx mascot. As Emma Span writes on the Banter, Yankee fans wouldn’t have any part of it, and they routinely tried to beat up the Yankee Dandy. In typical New York fashion, I laughed at that.
In Ebbets Field, regret marks a lost stadium
When the Dodgers moved out of Brooklyn in 1957 and the city tore down Ebbets Field on February 23, 1960, a borough last a piece of its heart. In the ensuing 48 years, historians and Brooklyn baseball fans have spilled a lot of ink bemoaning the end of the stadium and the Walter O’Malley decision to move west.
A few weeks ago, I finished reading Bob McGee’s The Greatest Ballpark Ever: Ebbets Field And The Story Of The Brooklyn Dodgers. As Brooklyn Dodger histories go, it’s an appropriate companion piece to Michael Shapiro’s The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together.
In one book — McGee’s — O’Malley is the clear villain in moving the Dodgers; in the other, O’Malley tried to keep the team in New York, but Robert Moses was the man responsible for pushing them out of town. O’Malley wanted to build a new stadium near the current Atlantic Yards site in Brooklyn, but Moses didn’t want to use his Title I powers to build a baseball stadium. While McGee villianizes O’Malley and Shapiro gives him something of a pass, the truth is, of course, in the middle. Both men were responsible for the Dodgers’ flight to Los Angeles.
But for the sake of the Yankees, New York City stadium history is neither here nor there. McGee’s book though is relevant for another reason. When Ebbets Field was torn down, Brooklynites were visibly upset, but the team had just seen a long period of lagging attendance. They were playing in a ballpark that many — particularly the media — had deemed old and decrepit. It would have needed extensive renovations and space for parking, something not readily available in the Crown Heights/Prospect Heights parts of Brooklyn.
One of McGee’s main points is regret. Dodger fans regretted not saving the stadium; they regretted not supporting the team sooner; they regretted not doing anything about it. Fifty years after the Dodgers went west, Brooklynites — my older neighbors and my grandfather — will still speak with bitterness about the Dodgers and wistfulness about Ebbets Field.
Today, as we’re facing a Yankee Stadium whose days are numbered, I have to wonder if Yankee fans will one day in the not-so-distant future look back at the House that Ruth Built with the same sort of regrets. Sure, the Yankees are moving about 50 feet away and not 3000 miles, and sure, Yankee Stadium lost a lot of its history and charm during the renovations in the 1970s. But it’s still the iconic Yankee Stadium. It’s still seen its World Series, its Perfect Games, its parade of baseball legends.
Don’t get me wrong; the new stadium looks great from the outside and will be the standard of luxury inside. But I can’t help thinking that we don’t need this new stadium as badly as we think, and perhaps, when we all have time to dwell on what we’ve torn down and what we’ve lost, Yankee fans will come to regret not putting up more of a fight for their beloved old stadium too.
Detroit’s abandoned stadium riles up passions
While the Yankees have plans to tear down Yankee Stadium soon after their new ballpark opens next year, Detroit is still trying to figure out what to do with Tiger Stadium. The historic stadium has sat unused since Comerica Park opened in 1999, and some Detroit fans want to keep the oldest parts of the stadium. If they can raise the money soon, the stadium will stay. Check out this nifty slideshow that goes with Joe LaPointe’s article.
Levitt talks Barrow and the business of baseball
Rob Neyer today called Dan Levitt’s biography of Ed Barrow the “most important baseball book of the year,” and I’m going to read and review it as soon as I’m done with this one on Ebbets Field. But in the meantime, check out this extensive Q and A Rich Lederer of The Baseball Analysts conducted with Levitt. It is a thorough and fascinating look back at the way the Yankees assembled their first great dynasty.
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