Exorcising the Brooklyn Dodgers -- New York Magazine

Exorcising the Dodgers

Ironically, in terms of community building, Atlantic Yards has already been a rousing, unintentional success, even in its infancy—it’s become Brooklyn’s best excuse for daily conversation in decades. It’s the anti-Dodgers, bringing people together in anger. And it looks like it will provide the borough with a basis for outraged chitchat for at least as long as the Dodgers dominated the National League.

But sports, recent history has taught us, can transcend even the deepest cynicism—which is why it’s such a powerful tool for professional cynics. The Mets, for instance, were created and marketed in the early sixties as the shadow Dodgers: a socially engineered, faux-populist, TV-era stand-in for a phenomenon that had been (more or less) organic and communal. The Mets’ early lineups were stocked with washed-up ex-Dodgers, and their uniform colors were built out of Dodger blue and Giant orange. (The Giants, who radiate about 3 percent of the Dodgers’ nostalgic wattage, also left New York in 1957.) And thanks to the anesthetizing magic of baseball, it totally worked. By 1969, many old Dodger fans—including even the jaded Rabbi Kushner—were cheering on the Mets’ underdog championship run.

I asked Kushner, after his lament about the soullessness of corporate sports, what he thought about the idea of the Brooklyn Nets—surely one of the more brazenly corporate exploitations of a fan base in the history of corporate exploitation, a second dose of O’Malleyism on his home soil. But very suddenly, I found that I was the only cynic at the table: Kushner’s nationalism trumped his reason.

“It all depends on one thing,” he answered, “and one thing only. If they call themselves the New York Nets, I couldn’t care less. If they call themselves the Brooklyn Nets, I’ll go to their games. Then they’re my team. For the first time in my life, I’ll become a basketball fan.”

Since O’Malley’s betrayal, Kushner won’t say the word “L.A. Dodgers.” “It’s like Voldemort. My kids know never to say the name in my presence.”

Fifty years later, we are witnessing the baseball gods’ final taunting of the Dodgers. O’Malley left because the New York powers refused to condemn the site—at the time a decaying meat market—on which he wanted to build the team’s new geodesic dome. But today the city has gone stadium-crazy, dispensing left and right the kind of sweetheart deals that would have kept the Dodgers local forever.

Mets’ ownership is now trying to replicate some of Ebbets’s intimate magic: Citi Field is smallish and old-timey, designed exclusively for baseball, and will feature a giant knockoff of Ebbets’s famous rotunda. (Marty Adler has already spoken with management about setting up a permanent Dodgers memorabilia display inside.) But the stadium, however well designed, will always lack at least one essential component of the Ebbets mystique: Instead of being integrated into a neighborhood, it’s isolated by a big tangle of Moses’s roads. The Dodgers, meanwhile, have played for 46 years now in L.A.’s Dodger Stadium. They played for only 45 in Ebbets.

Fifty years later, all of New York City’s fault lines—race, class, identity, urban planning, the status-jockeying of the outer boroughs—still intersect at Ebbets Field. But it’s not easy to find. In its absence, the park has become the official mascot of America’s Field of Dreams sentimentality. It is everywhere sampled and remixed: in the expensive new wave of major-league imitations (Citi Field, Miller Park in Milwaukee, Safeco Field in Seattle), in rumors of an Ebbets-based themed Florida hotel, in a company that sells vintage hats and jerseys on the Web under the name Ebbets Field Flannels. But Ebbets is unrecoverable. Baseball and the city have changed too much.

On every significant Dodgers anniversary, a squadron of reporters trek out to the Ebbets Field Apartments to note the ironic (or sad, or racist) disjunction between the site’s old holy status and its modern state, as if the Dome of the Rock had been replaced by a 7-Eleven. A few weeks before the 50th anniversary, like a salmon to the spawning ground, I headed out to Crown Heights. I brought my very own relic: a small block of decaying wood that Marty Adler had given me, which he said had been cut from an Ebbets Field seat. It was roughly the size of a cell phone, lined like an old elephant’s skin, with a thin layer of scuffed blue-gray paint on one side. As soon as I held it, something odd came over me. Although I am not from Brooklyn, and I have no personal connection to the Dodgers, over the next several weeks I carried this wood around like a piece of the True Cross. I wore it in my shirt pocket to the grocery store and on children’s playdates and to dinner parties; I left it on my desk while I worked. And occasionally, while strangers milled around me in Grand Central or Washington Square Park, I would reach up and tap it, like an obsessive-compulsive person, and, knowing it was stupid, imagine I was feeling a little ghostly surge of community. (Results were mixed.) I carried it with me, as an experimental talisman of brotherhood, to modern Crown Heights.