Bring Back 'Dem Bums! 2007-04-11 00:59:59 | By: Troy Somero 
Ten blocks from my apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn is an address
called 55 Sullivan Place. 55 Sullivan Place is an essentially empty plot of
grass and garbage in a lower-middle-class section of Brooklyn's poor Crown
Heights neighborhood. On its surface – other than the constant threat of
nighttime crime and enduring poverty - there is nothing that truly separates
this address from many other similar plots that surround Flatbush Avenue
southeast of Prospect Park. In spirit, 55 Sullivan Place is home to one of
the most famous and infamous sports landscapes in the United States. 55
Sullivan Place was once the address of Ebbets Field.
In an article that appeared Tuesday on ESPN.com, columnist Wright Thompson chronicled the recent history of this address, an address that was at one time on par with 4 Yawkey Way and 1060 West Addison Street in baseball lure. Since Ebbets Field was demolished on February 23, 1960, this address that has personified a diverse Brooklyn spirit that has been fashioned, challenged and altered over the last 100 years. Prior to the destruction of Ebbets, when the Dodgers played at 55 Sullivan Place, the address brought a mixture of races, ethnicities, and classes to a singular focal-point in the King's Borough. No date is more emblematic of this than April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson played in his first major league game for the Dodgers at 55 Sullivan Place. However, at present-day 55 Sullivan Place stands one block away from Prospect Park, a dividing line of racial and ethnic diversity that was exhibited most game days in the post-Robinson era. North and west of the park are neighborhood such as Flatbush, Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, high-poverty and high-minority neighborhoods that are known as some of the most crime-ridden areas of New York City. South and east of the park are neighborhoods such as Park Slope and Bay Ridge, family-oriented, upper-middle-class neighborhoods with much smaller minority representations than Brooklyn as a whole. Despite the separation of different groups of people into different areas of the borough, Brooklyn, like any other borough in New York City, has an indomitable spirit that yearns to be represented as a single, unifying force. Manhattan has the Knicks and the Rangers, two teams born and raised in the borough with celebrity and spotlight appeal that play to the 24-7 glitz and glamour that encompasses the city's most alluring borough. The Bronx has the Yankees, the most raucous and vivacious baseball team ever assembled in one of the most raucous and vivacious neighborhoods in the country. Queens has the Mets, a blue-collar, working-class team that has played second-fiddle to the Yankees since the early 1960s in a blue-collar, working-class borough that has always played second-fiddle to Manhattan. Staten Island has no professional sports team, but the fact that it is an island accessible only by car or ferry makes it perhaps the most close-knit community of the five boroughs. That leaves Brooklyn, perhaps the most ethnically, socially and economically eclectic borough in the city. Brooklyn residents, like their former major league team, are hard-working, fun-loving and worldly in their approach to daily life. During the first sixty-odd years of the last century, the Dodgers were the voice of this group of people. The franchise of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella and Pee Wee Reese was a franchise that all Brooklyn residents rallied around during the great Dodger years of the 1940s and 1950s. However, as Wright Thompson brushes upon in his article, once owner Walter O'Malley decided to move the team to the west coast in 1957, this Dodger spirit that was present throughout the squad's last two decades in Brooklyn disappeared with them. History gave way to infamy; what was once hallowed ground in Brooklyn has now because haunted ground, where current residents fight to keep both thugs and developers out of their historical neighborhood. Phrases like "Boys of Summer", "Wait 'til next year", and Billy Joel's lyric, "Brooklyn's got a winning team" were born from Ebbets Field. Brooklyn is a borough with 2.5 million residents. If it was an independent city, Brooklyn would rank as the third most populous city in the United States. Despite this, Brooklyn lacks a true sports identity. Sure, the Nets plan on moving to the borough before the end of the decade, but the Nets have no real ties to the borough. Brooklyn is first and foremost a baseball community – it always has been and many Brooklynites hope it always will be. The list of great baseballers that grew up playing in Brooklyn speaks for itself: Larry Corcoran, Bob Ferguson, John Franco, Sandy Koufax, Paul LoDuca, Dave Martinez, Dave Orr, Dickey Pearse, Ric Petrocelli, Phil Rizzuto, Joe Torre, Mickey Welch, Ed Yost. When the Dodgers came to Queens for the NLDS last October to take on the Mets, there was something special in the air. Seeing sextagenerians wearing Dodger blue and white at Shea Stadium ushered in the National League feeling of what New York City must have experienced in the 1950s when great Dodgers and Giants teams faced off in Brooklyn and Harlem. Although the Dodgers had a poor showing, many people left Shea saying, "What if?" What if the Dodgers came back to Brooklyn? What if the Dodgers never left Brooklyn? While the Dodgers are gone, they are not forgotten. If the Senators can return to the not-so-baseball-hungry Washington D.C. as the Nationals, why shouldn't Dem Bums return back where they came from – their real home? Clearly the Los Angeles Dodgers are having trouble maintaining interest in their current home city, between fans leaving in the fifth inning to avoid traffic and the team's management treating the bleacher seats like a Sizzler all-you-can-eat buffet. Remember, Walter O'Malley claimed he moved the team to Los Angeles first and foremst because of a lack of community support for the team at large (due to the fact that Brooklyn's muiciple government would not approve a new stadium, despite the fact that several major league stadiums older than Ebbets Field were still in use at the time). The Dodgers' original move to California was a seminal event for Major League Baseball, as up until 1957 the St. Louis Cardinals were the westernmost team at the time and this move ushered in future decades of baseball's western expansion. Now, nearly 50 years later, baseball has suffered from over-expansion. One needs to look no further than Montreal, Tampa Bay and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim debacles to see that Major League Baseball needs to return to its roots. Baseball's roots lie in New York State, and New York City's baseball roots lie deep in the Brooklyn soil. In his article, Wright Thompson focuses on the sorrowful state of Brooklyn's Flatbush region since the Dodgers left in 1960. However, the major focus of the article should be on the Brooklyn community at large and its state as a metaphor for America's pasttime. Where baseball lies, therein lies the American sentiment of community spirit. That sentiment lies in the Bronx, Queens, Chicago (times two), Los Angeles (time two, sort of, if you include the Angels), San Francisco, Detroit, Cleveland, Tampa, Phoenix, and Washington D.C. It's about time that this municipal baseballspirit returned to the place of its greatest growth in first half of the twentieth century: Brooklyn.
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