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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 3425408, member: 289"] Ebbets Field One of the early noted professional teams was the Brooklyn Atlantics, who broke the 92 game winning streak of the Cincinnati Redlegs in 1869, (in the first ever extra inning game, the fans being dissatisfied with a tie), and became one of the top teams in the loosely organized National Association of Baseball Teams in 1871. But they faded from view and there was no Brooklyn team when the National League got organized in 1876. When the American Association was formed in 1883, one of its teams was the Brooklyn Bridegrooms, (the Brooklyn teams have had more nicknames- and more colorful nicknames- than any other), who played in Washington Park near the Gowanus Canal on Third Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn. Supposedly George Washington had set up his headquarters there during the Battle of Long Island and so they named the place after him. A fire burned down this park in 1889 but the owner, Charley Byrne, rebuilt the place, increasing the grandstand capacity from 1,000 to 3,000. The team, which had become known as the “Trolleydodgers” after the trolleys that carried people to the stadium, led the league in attendance the next year while winning the pennant. Byrne then jumped to the National League the next year and won the pennant there too, an unprecedented feat. They also won the competition for the fans of Brooklyn against a hastily organized AA team and a Player’s League team, which played at a place called Eastern Park, on Jamaica Bay. After the Player’s League folded, the Bridegrooms moved into Eastern Park. One book I have says this is where the Trolleydodgers name originated. This same book, (“Green Cathedrals”), calls Eastern Park “the Candlestick of the 1890’s”. It was a cold, windy place to play and despite the larger capacity, the Bridegrooms didn’t draw as well there as they had in Washington Park. Charles Byrne died in 1898 and Charles Hercules Ebbets, who had started out as a bookkeeper when the franchise began in 1883, became president. He wisely moved the team back to Washington Park to draw more fans. He unwisely appointed himself manager, (he’d never played the game), and the team finished tenth that year, which didn’t help the attendance. He sold part of the team to Ned Hanlon, the owner/manager of the Baltimore Orioles, one of the most successful teams of the time. In those days, the league allowed “syndicate ownership”, which is not the ownership of a team by a syndicate of owners but rather the ownership of more than one major league team by a single owner or group of owners. This allowed the owner(s) to transfer their best players from one team to another and increase their chances of winning the league. They would usually use the larger ballpark for this, leaving the team with the smaller park to languish. This was eventually outlawed after the 1899 Cleveland Spiders went 19-134, (they would have finished 17 ½ games behind the ’62 Mets). But it was still OK when Hanlon took over the Bridegrooms, who were by now being called the Superbas. He transferred the best players from his Baltimore ballclub there and the results were superb. Brooklyn won the National league pennant in 1899 and 1900. After that, due to aging players and raids by the new American League, they faded out of contention. Hanlon then wanted to move the franchise to Baltimore, (his old team there having gone out of business). Ebbets refused and bought out Hanlon in 1905. By 1912, Ebbets decided the team needed a new, modern ballpark to compete with the large, concrete and steel stadiums that were then being built all over the country. To finance the project, he again sold part of the team to the McKeever Brothers, building contractors who would create the new park. But Ebbets, who had been quietly buying up a dump in Flatbush named “Pigtown” as a site for the field, insisted it be named after him and so it was. The site, just to the east of Prospect Park, was a block bounded by Bedford Avenue, Sullivan Place, Montgomery Place and a street now to be called McKeever Place. This park, unlike the Polo Grounds, actually looked like a baseball stadium. The stands encircled the field, rather than just containing it. It had an impressive façade, looking like a department store at the main entrance, (behind home plate), which had a large “Ebbets Field” sign at the top of it. The sign was not, as it sometimes looks in photographs, attached to the top floor of the building. Instead it was on a grid, with an open area behind it. Down each baseline were open stands interrupted only by a series of columns atop a high fence. Inside the main entrance was grand rotunda was “an incredible 80 foot circle enclosed in Italian marble, with a floor tiled with the stitches of a baseball and a chandelier with 12 baseball bat arms holding as baseball-shaped globes. There were 12 turnstiles and 12 gilded ticket windows. The domed ceiling was 27 feet high at its center. There was a large, beautiful bronze plaque on the Rotunda interior wall.” The book this quote is from, “Green Cathedrals”, doesn’t tell what the plaque said. Whatever it said, the new stadium was surely quite a change from “Pigtown”. The double-decked grandstand curved around home plate and all the way down the right-field line. However, in left field, it extended only 30-40 feet past third base down that line. There were no stands in left or center field when the park opened, making for a rather large playing field. The left field fence, 20 feet high, was 419 feet from the plate down the line. In center the same fence was 450 feet away, almost the distance in the Polo Grounds. However, it was only 301 feet down the right field line and 352 to right center, where the wall was 9 feet high. The capacity was 25,000 people. Unfortunately the original building did not contain a pressbox, an oversight Ebbets made up for by removing two rows of seats behind home plate and roping them off. That wasn’t the only oversight. Nobody brought the key to open the park on Opening Day and it had to be sent for. Then the flag-raising ceremony was basically ruined by the fact that nobody had remembered to bring a flag, either, (they eventually found one). The Dodgers had good success in this new park, winning pennants in 1916 and 1920 although they lost the World Series to the Red Sox and the Indians. In those days, they were often called the “Robins”, after their manager, Wilbert Robinson, Hanlon’s old catcher from his Baltimore Orioles days. Just as another ex-Oriole, John McGraw, became the long time, (1902-32), manager of the Giants, Robinson lent his image and personality to the Robins, (1914-31). After 1920 they fell into a sort of comical mediocrity. They were a second division, (5th-8th) team 14 times from 1921-38, before Leo Durocher was named their manager. They became famous for their comical ineptitude, just as their successors, the Mets would decades later. Their star, Babe Herman once supposedly had a fly ball bounce off his head, (he spent his life denying it). In a 1926 baserunning disaster, three Robins wound up on third base at the time, causing many a vaudeville comedian, when told that Brooklyn had three men on base, to ask “Which base?” The team became noted for its fans, including Abie the truck driver, who patrolled the upper deck along the left field stands, calling the players “bums”. Robinson offered a free season’s pass to Abie if he would stop his heckling but after a couple quiet days, he could stand it no longer and returned the pass, saying “They’re still bums!”. The team had another nickname. Then there was Hilda Chester, who rang a cowbell constantly from the center field stands. Eddie Battan rooted for the Dodgers in his white pith helmet and Jack Pierce released balloons with his favorite player’s names on them. But the most famous fans were Jack, “Shorty” Laurice, Jerry Martin, Jo Jo Delio, Paddy Palma and Phil Cacavalle, who made up the Dodger “sym-phoney”, a lovably awful band that played throughout the game. Their music has been described as “a herd of elephants with whooping cough”. It was said they made up for their lack of talent with their enthusiasm. Opposing teams might not agree. At one point, the actor John Forsythe was the PA announcer but the most famous Ebbets Field announcer was John “Tex” Rickard, who was famous for his malapropisms, such as “A little boy has been found lost”. Once, when fans put their brightly colored coats over the left field railing, batters complained it was a distraction. Rickard announced: “Will the fans behind the rail in left field please remove their clothing?” Then there was Gladys Gooding, the organist who played show tunes, (when she could be heard over the sym-phoney), that seemed to punctuate the action. She played “Follow the Dodgers” when the team took the field, “Mexican Hat Dance” to get the fans clapping and “This Nearly Was Mine” after a loss. She both played and sang the national anthem before each game. She later became the answer to another great sports trivia question, being the only person who played for the Dodgers, the Knicks and the Rangers. It was also said she played for the Dodgers for 17 years and never made an error. In 1926, the grandstand was extended around the left field foul line and in 1931 all the way to center field. This turned the place into a “bandbox” type park, with the outfield distances now became 348 down the left field line, 365 to left center and 389 feet to center field, probably the shortest center field fence in major league history. The right field fence was rebuilt, allegedly because Babe Herman, the Dodger slugger of the time, broke too many windows across Bedford Avenue. It was now 297 feet down the line, with a huge scoreboard that jutted out 5 feet from the fence and a 38 foot wall that was concrete for the first 19 feet and screening the top 19 feet, with a ledge at the top of the concrete. Besides that, the bottom section was “bent”, rising on an incline for 9.5 feet before going straight up. The Dodgers’ first right fielder was none other than Casey Stengel, who 40 years later took a young Mickey Mantle out there and explained how to play a ball off a concave fence. Mantle seemed amazed that he knew anything about it: had Casey ever played the game? Stengel grumbled to reporters: He thinks I was born 60!” There was an even more vexing problem in deepest center, which was often in play due to its short distance. The stands did not quite fit together there, resulting in a little three-sided cubbyhole. There was almost no foul territory because the stands were built so close to the field. The bullpens were simply a pitcher’s mound and plate along the right and left field lines. Unlike the Polo Grounds where the pitchers could warm up in relative safety because they were 455 feet from home plate, here they were perhaps 250 feet from home plate and an extra player was sent down there with them, (besides the catcher), to stand behind him and warn him if balls were being hit his way. Eventually, in 1929, a permanent press box was built under the upper deck behind home plate. The park was also famous for its many colorful billboards, the most famous of which was for Abe Stark’s tailor shop at the base of the right field scoreboard. It read “Hit Sign, Win Suit”. Stark rarely had to pay off as it was at the base of the wall and first Pete Reiser, then Dixie Walker, then Carl Furillo protected the front of it, all great fielders. Columnist Dick Young mentioned that those fellows had saved Abe a lot of money over the years and maybe Stark should make Furillo, the current resident of right field a suit. Stark made good on that request, in exchange for a half dozen autographed baseballs. Stark became so famous through his sign that he eventually got elected Borough President of Brooklyn. The there was the Schaefer Beer sign at the top of the scoreboard indicated hits or errors by having the “h” or the first “e” light up. That scoreboard had a large clock above it. On May 30, 1946, a drive by Bama Rowell of the Braves broke that clock. Brooklyn native Bernard Malamud later incorporated a similar event in his book, “The Natural”. In the early 40’s Lonnie Frey of the Reds hit a ball that hit the screen in right and rolled down to the top of the concrete fence, where there was that small ledge. It kept bouncing around while the poor right fielder, (probably Walker), waited for it to roll off the top of the fence so he could field it. It never did and Frey got an inside the park home run. Pee Wee Reese got a similar four-bagger on 10/1/50 in the game against the Phillies that would decide the pennant, (Dick Sisler hit a homer in extra innings to win it for the visitors). They say that if you are number two, you try harder. When you are #3, (in stadium size and initial success, at least), you try even harder than that. The Dodgers were the first New York City team to broadcast their games over the radio, (hiring Red Barber in 1938), the first to have night baseball, (the night of Johnny Vander Meer’s second no-hitter for the Reds that year), and the first to televise a game, (Barber doing the commentary), in 1939. A less successful innovation was yellow baseballs, which supposedly could be easier seen than white. But the players and fans disliked them. The ultimate innovation, of course, came when the Dodgers singed Jackie Robinson to break the color line in 1946. Several of the early black stars of the major leagues played in Brooklyn, including Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe and Joe Black. The Dodgers swiftly became the favorite team of the nation’s blacks. Meanwhile, Ebbets Field, located in the “Borough of the Churches”, became known as “The Cathedral of the Underdog” These innovations were the ideas of two magnificent egoists who got control of the ballclub. Larry McPhail came over from Cincinnati in 1938 and was replaced by Branch Rickey when McPhail entered the Army in 1942. Perhaps McPhail’s biggest innovation was giving Leo Durocher his first managerial job, (he was also their starting short stop until Pee Wee Reese showed up in 1940). Under Leo’s guidance, the Dodgers won their first pennant in 1941with 100 wins. The next year they finished second to the Cardinals but won 104 games, the second most the Dodgers have ever won, (the Cardinals went 106-48, the Dodgers 104-50). After the war, they lost a playoff to the Cardinals in 1946, won pennants in 1947 and 1949, lost to the Phillies in the final regular season game in 1950, lost the playoff to the Giants on Bobby Thompson’s home run in 1951. They then won pennants in 1952 and 1953, winning a franchise record 105 games the latter year. But all those pennant winners played the Yankees in the World Series and all of them lost. The Dodgers finally broke through with a win over the Yankees in 1955 but lost to them again the next year. Durocher had left the team after a suspension for accusing McPhail, who as now a co-owner of the Yankees, of associating with gamblers, (“Conduct Detrimental to Baseball). Burt Shotton replaced him, Charley Dressen replaced Shotton and then Walter Alston replaced Dressen. All were successful, each winning at least one pennant. Integration and the farm system Rickey built up, on the Cardinal’s model, kept fueling the Dodger’s success. Walter O’Malley had taken over the ownership in 1950 and fired Rickey. His Dodgers continued to have great success on the field but, despite the reputation of the wildly devoted Brooklyn fans, attendance at the old park declined throughout the 50’s. The reason was the increasing reliance on the automobile. The park had been built where it was because no less than 9 trolley lines could bring people to that location. But when people started suing their cars to go places, the stadium became obsolete. O’Malley actually tried to resolve the problem by getting a new stadium built. One proposal, by Buckminster Fuller, was a 55,000 seat domed stadium at Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, north of Prospect Park. That would have been a quantum leap from cozy little Ebbets Field. But that fell through and so did every other proposal to save the Dodgers. Eventually, O’Malley decided to move the team to Los Angeles and convinced Horace Stoneham to move the Giants to San Francisco. Both teams played their last games in their old stadiums in September, 1957. Ebbets Field was demolished to make way for the Ebbets Field Apartments in 1960 and the Polo Grounds followed four years later. The most interesting views of Ebbets Field in “Summer at the Ball Park” can be found on the following pages: On Page 24, a cop is chasing a gate crasher through the concourse behind the stands at Ebbets Field during the 1947 World Series. He never caught him, according to the caption. Page 47 shows the main entrance with the Ebbets Field sign above the rotunda and the columns down the right field line, behind the stands. Too bad there are no shots of the Rotunda itself. There aren’t any in any of my books. On Page 51 we see a rare shot of the area behind home plate at Ebbets, taken from the center field seats. You can see the precarious-looking pressbox hanging from underneath the upper deck. On the next page you see additional press boxes below the roof on the upper deck and along the third base line. Page 78, again, is the aerial shot showing all the parking problems. It also shows how close the fans were to the action, compared to the Polo Grounds on the next page, as well as the limited foul territory. You can make out the bullpen pitcher’s mounds with their twin rubbers in the corners, just in foul territory down both lines. You can also see the open area behind the large “Ebbets Field” sign over the main entrance. On pages 98-99 we see the many colorful billboards along the left field fence. Page 134 also has a good shot of the left field billboards. Page 100 shows the “cubbyhole”, (my term), in centerfield where the left-center bleachers, built after the rest of the ballpark, awkwardly meet the right-center wall. Note the small fenced in area on top of the second wall of the cubbyhole. It seems to have a few balls in it, along the fence, perhaps deposited there by Duke Snider, who is seen whirling like a dervish trying to keep up with the various bounces of the ball, which is presently located behind him, under the 376FT. sign. The positioning of the cubbyhole can be seen in the photo on page 166. Page 115 shows the left and centerfield stands at Ebbets but the real interest lies in the contraption in the center of the picture. This is how pitcher’s speed was measured before there were JUGS guns. Bob Feller points out that you had to throw a strike back then to get measured at all. Now you can throw it over everybody’s head and if it’s 100 miles and hour, that’s your rating. Maybe they need to bring the “cathode ray oscillograph” back. Page 131 shows the area behind home plate. Note what appears to be a plate behind the catcher’s head. With a magnifying glass I was able to find what appear to be two plates- or a plate and a rubber- behind home plate along the fence on page 78. This may be where starting pitchers warmed up before the game. Pages 162 and 165 show a good view of the concave wall in right field. Page 165 also shows the scoreboard with the Abe Stark sign and the Schaefer sign, (note the different looking letters “h” and “e”). Page 164 shows a good shot down the left field line. Note how close the fans are and look at the tight little corner in left field. Page 166 has a nice shot from the roof behind the plate. The batter in the page 164 shot is Joe Adcock. You hear all the time how well Stan Musial did at Ebbets Field but even he never had a series like the one Adcock had from July 30 to August 1st, 1954. On 7/30, he had three hits: a homer a double and a single. On 7/31 he hit 4 home runs off of four different pitchers and a double to set a record with 18 total bases. On 8/1 he hit a double and then got beaned and carried off the field on a stretcher. Them was the days. Page 178 shows Ebbets Field being “fogged out” in one of its final season games. Page 188 shows the field in ruins during demolition. Page 159: The Trill of Victory. Page 105: The Agony of Defeat. [/QUOTE]

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