The opening sentences of a piece like this inevitably always begin with something like: “with the crisp fall air…” There is a reason for this, as baseball is a game of hope, repetition and reconciliation. Over the course of a six-month season, baseball fans go from hope springs eternal to there’s always next year.

Few teams experienced more “there’s always next year(s) than the Brooklyn Dodgers during the middle of the 20th century. Having lost four in a row during the late 1940’s and well into the 1950s, proved to be agonizing for the residents and fans of Brooklyn borough. This futility would also spawn a secondary nickname that was rather unflattering, The Bums.

In spite of an extended track record of losing, Brooklyn fans stuck by the Dodgers year-after-year and showed up in droves to the stadium in Flatbush. The Dodgers took their name, which eluded to pedestrians “Dodging” the many streetcars of Brooklyn in 1911. Owner Charles Ebbets began buying up lots along Sullivan St. in 1908 with plans to build a stadium on the site with construction beginning in 1912. The park at its largest iteration held only 35,000 fans, small by today’s standard.

We will no doubt revisit Ebbets Field and the Brooklyn Dodgers in future posts.