When we hear the Dodgers are being sold, Brooklyn people like me dream of having them back. It never happens. The Dodgers left Brooklyn 47 years ago, and you would think that after all this time we have come to accept that they are gone. We have not.
Instead, we pine. We long for Brooklyn's good times, when the Dodgers played at tiny Ebbets Field and every single day for, oh, 50 years was sunny.
We can be a tedious lot; people wonder why we can't let go.
But things still feel unresolved. A few years ago, a fellow named Dan Bern wrote a song called "If the Dodgers Had Stayed In Brooklyn," in which he attributes virtually everything that has gone wrong in the world since 1957 to Walter O'Malley's fateful decision to move the team to Los Angeles. He makes a powerful argument, if a bit overdrawn in spots. Still, it is understood that there endures in the Brooklyn soul a void, a vacuum. We abhor the vacuum. We want the Dodgers back.
For the longest time we believed that this was our due -- that O'Malley had wronged us. A couple of years ago, in the course of researching a book about Brooklyn and the Dodgers -- I was 4 when the team left -- I discovered that the true villain of the piece was not O'Malley at all. It was the unelected baron of New York, Robert Moses, who stood between O'Malley and the domed stadium he longed to build in downtown Brooklyn. And so there was a new person to blame, which was useful for pumping life into this enduring tale of love and betrayal.
But lately I have been wondering whether I had missed something, that our endless rage at O'Malley and our more recent bitterness toward Moses blinded us to something even more painful: that it is our sin that cost us the Dodgers, that this unresolved hurt is, in fact, an act of divine or supernatural retribution for our collective responsibility for our arrogance, our blindness, our conceit. Did we lose our Dodgers because we did not sufficiently love them, and what they meant?
The conventional wisdom has it that by the mid-1950s Ebbets Field was empty and that Brooklyn was a changed place, and not for the better. This is not true. White people were moving to the suburbs; blacks and Latinos were moving in. But Brooklyn circa 1955 was still much as it was a decade before. This meant that perhaps 15,000 people came to Ebbets Field to see a game. Not a sellout in a ballpark that seated only 32,000, yet well above attendance averages at the time.
