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October 25, 2024

Bridegrooms and Bums: How the Dodgers went from Brooklyn’s darling to Los Angeles’ colossus

When New York Yankees second baseman Gleyber Torres faces the first pitch of the 2024 World Series on Friday, he will have traveled roughly 2,500 miles to be there.

There was a time, though, when any Yankees player on his way to face the Dodgers could have walked.

Long before the likes of Shohei Ohtani, Clayton Kershaw or even Fernando Valenzuela, real estate magnate Charles Byrne put an ad in the New York Clipper, looking for “men of intelligence and not corner-lot toughs who happen to possess some skill as a player but whose habits and ways make them unfit for thorough team work.”

It was 1883, and Byrne was forming a baseball team – one which would eventually go on to be known as the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Big spenders

Baseball teams had been competing out of Brooklyn as early as 1849, but Byrne meant business with this venture.

Having convinced his brother-in-law Joseph Doyle and casino owner Ferdinand “Gus” Abell to help him finance a team, Byrne spent $32,000 (nearly $1 million today) to build Washington Park, so called because a stone house in the area had been used by General George Washington during the Battle of Long Island in the Revolutionary War.

The team, known at first as the “Grays” owing to the color of their uniform, joined the minor-league Interstate Base Ball Association and began playing at a decent but unspectacular standard.

But, when the first-placed Camden Merritts disbanded midway through the Grays’ first season in 1883, Byrne snapped up the franchise’s best players on hefty salaries and won the pennant at the first attempt.

It was a trick which Byrne would repeat many times over. In 1885, having joined the American Association – then a major league alongside the National League – the Grays took advantage of the misfortune of the Cleveland Blues, acquiring their manager and a number of their players as the franchise disbanded. The New York Times called it “the biggest sensation ever made in baseball.”

In 1887, it was the original New York Mets’ turn to be ransacked – Byrne bought the entire team for $25,000 (almost $830,000 in 2024) and kept the best players. Next, he set his sights on the St. Louis Browns, paying $19,000 (roughly $630,000 today) for three of their biggest stars.

1890 saw the franchise – now known as the Bridegrooms due to six of its players getting married during or after the 1888 season – compete in the National League for the first time, once again winning the pennant at the first attempt with a record of 86-43.

The following 30 years would see Brooklyn win the NL pennant a further four times. It would also see the team become known by another name. As fans began having to dodge the electric trolleys which had become one of the primary modes of transport in the borough, the team was nicknamed the Trolley Dodgers, and later, simply, the Dodgers.

‘Dem Bums’

But with the two decades after 1920 seeing no further pennants and increasing malaise on the field, the Dodgers’ reputation shifted from winning machine to loveable losers.

In 1939, sports cartoonist Willard Mullin asked a cab driver how the Dodgers were doing. “Dem Bums are bums,” he replied, and Mullin’s subsequent “Brooklyn Bum” cartoon, which depicted circus clown Emmett Kelly’s hobo persona “Weary Willie” as a personification of the failing team, came to define the fallow period.

The following decade would see an upturn in fortunes, however. After winning the pennant in 1941, the Dodgers would win six pennants in 10 years between 1947 and 1956, spurred on by the likes of Jackie Robinson, the first Black player in the modern major leagues.

In 1955, the Dodgers – beaten by the Yankees in each of their last five World Series appearances – finally claimed revenge over their city rivals and became world champions for the first time.

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