Brooklyn Dodgers

Check any correct answer to the following question: What is 42? a) the number worn by Jackie Robinson when he played with the Brooklyn Dodgers. b) a movie about Robinson's courage in breaking baseball's color barrier in 1947. c) the number of games the Dodgers will win this season. Doug Thomson West Los Angeles :: Perhaps the Dodgers should just put everybody on the disabled list and call it a season. Sterling Buckingham Canyon Country :: I finally figured out what the Dodgers' motto this year means.

Check any correct answer to the following question: What is 42? a) the number worn by Jackie Robinson when he played with the Brooklyn Dodgers. b) a movie about Robinson's courage in breaking baseball's color barrier in 1947. c) the number of games the Dodgers will win this season. Doug Thomson West Los Angeles :: Perhaps the Dodgers should just put everybody on the disabled list and call it a season. Sterling Buckingham Canyon Country :: I finally figured out what the Dodgers' motto this year means.

Brooklyn Borough President Howard Golden, displaying the feistiness Brooklynites hold dear, said today he had asked the city to seek a court order declaring the name "Brooklyn Dodgers" to be in the public domain. Golden asked the city corporation counsel to take the action to head off a lawsuit filed by the Los Angeles Dodgers against two men who are using the name "Brooklyn Dodgers" on their two restaurants in the Bay Ridge and Kensington sections of the borough. The lawsuit, filed in U.S.

The integration of Major League Baseball, so heroically carried by Jackie Robinson and ingeniously engineered by Branch Rickey, occupied one spring and summer season in 1947. The boys of summer occupied the baseball seasons of the early 1950s, the boys being the stellar lineup of Brooklyn Dodgers who would win the World Series in 1955. Among them was pitcher Carl Erskine, a teammate of Robinson's, whom I interviewed for my column . “The Boys of Summer” is the title of Roger Kahn's seminal, beloved baseball book, the one he wrote 20 years after spending the long golden seasons with the team.

John "Spider" Jorgensen, 84, who played five seasons in the major leagues, three with the Brooklyn Dodgers and the final two with the New York Giants, died Nov. 6 at a hospital in Rancho Cucamonga. The cause of death was not announced. A native of Folsom, Calif., Jorgensen attended Sacramento City College before signing a pro baseball contract. He started his first major league game as a third baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers on the same day that Jackie Robinson broke baseball's racial barrier.

Jim Hughes, 78, a mainstay of the Brooklyn Dodgers bullpen in the mid-1950s who set a club record for saves that stood for 35 years, died Aug. 12 of a heart attack in Worth, Ill. Born in Chicago, Hughes pitched for the Dodgers from 1952 to 1956. In 1954 he led the major leagues with saves, recording 24, a modest total by today's more liberal standards. A relief pitcher earns a save when he protects a lead built under another pitcher and finishes the game.

Elwin Charles "Preacher" Roe, the cunning left-handed pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the late 1940s and early '50s who was selected to four consecutive All-Star teams, died Sunday of colon cancer in West Plains, Mo., according to the Dodgers website. He was 92.

Gov. George E. Pataki called on leaders of New York's business community Tuesday to present a "realistic bid" for the Dodgers to return to Brooklyn. "The Dodgers belong in Brooklyn, just as the Yankees belong in the Bronx and the Mets belong in Queens," he said. "The Dodgers' temporary stay on the West Coast should come to an end."

Tony Malinosky collected hits off Dizzy Dean and Carl Hubbell, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and after all these years remains a loyal Dodgers fan. Malinosky, days away from his 100th birthday, is baseball's oldest major leaguer. Malinosky played three months for the Brooklyn Dodgers as an infielder in 1937. He reminded an Associated Press reporter that in those days they wore a different color than Dodger blue and were often called the Kelly Greens. Today, Malinosky follows the Dodgers from his home in Oxnard.

Johnny Podres: A headline in Tuesday's California section on the obituary of Johnny Podres, who pitched the Brooklyn Dodgers to their first World Series championship in 1955, said he died in 2007. Podres died Sunday.

"God built me to last," Jackie Robinson says at one point in "42," and, thankfully, his remarkable story is built the same way. It would have to be to survive the full-dress Hollywood biopic treatment it gets in this film, which is unabashedly subtitled "The True Story of an American Legend. " And survive it does. You almost can't blame writer-director Brian Helgeland for taking an old-fashioned, earnest-to-a-fault approach to the genuinely heroic narrative of the Brooklyn Dodger who in 1947 - in a move masterminded by team General Manager Branch Rickey -- broke the Major League Baseball color barrier, led the Dodgers to the National League pennant and won rookie of the year honors.

Vin Scully has been a Dodgers broadcaster since 1950, when the team was in Brooklyn. The current players have grown up listening to his unique voice and many even recall the first time  they heard the broadcasting legend say their name. In the video above, the players talk to The Times about what Scully means to the team - and America. Said Andre Ethier: "Just to hear him talk in person gives you chills every once in a while. " Said Adam Kennedy: "Vin Scully to me is not just California baseball, but baseball in general.

With a stiff grin, wavy hair and old-fangled steel-rimmed glasses, a brass image of Tom Schieffer greets fans as they stream through the front gate of Rangers Ballpark, the Texas-size cathedral to major league baseball. The wall plaque proclaims the stadium, built in the mid-1990s with ample taxpayer support, as the "lasting legacy" of the former Texas Rangers president and co-owner. A more modest monument to the solace Schieffer has always found in baseball lies a few miles west.

Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella Neil Lanctot Simon & Schuster: 516 pp., $28 He was a three-time National League most valuable player, an eight-time All-Star, and played in five World Series, but Roy Campanella was something else when the Dodgers began playing in Los Angeles in 1958. He was a quadriplegic, his body broken in a tragic automobile accident after the 1957 season. Few Dodgers fans in Los Angeles ever had a chance to fully appreciate the Hall of Fame catcher in action, but Neil Lanctot's rich new biography, "Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella," should change that.

Cliff Dapper, 91, a former Brooklyn Dodgers catcher who was traded in 1948 for future Hall of Fame announcer Ernie Harwell, died in his sleep Feb. 8 at an assisted-living facility in Fallbrook, Calif., said his son, Curtis. Dapper had a brief career with the Dodgers, batting .471 in eight games during the 1942 season. He was playing for the Dodgers' minor league team in Montreal in 1948 when he became part of an unusual trade with the minor league Atlanta Crackers for their broadcaster, Harwell.

Danny McDevitt, who left his imprint on baseball history by pitching the last game for the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field in 1957, died Saturday, two days after his 78th birthday. McDevitt, who lived in Social Circle, Ga., died at Newton Medical Center in nearby Covington, a hospital spokeswoman confirmed. The cause was not given. McDevitt was a rookie left-handed pitcher who had spent six seasons in the minor leagues for the New York Yankee and Dodger organizations before he was called up to the majors in June 1957.

The Brooklyn Dodgers bought the Los Angeles Angels and Wrigley Field for an estimated $3 million. The purchase spurred hopes that Los Angeles soon would have a major league baseball team. One year later, the Dodgers defeated the Giants, 6-5, in their first home game in the Coliseum.

Cal McLish, who pitched in the first major league baseball All-Star game played in Los Angeles, has died. He was 84. McLish died Thursday at his home in Edmond, Okla., after a long battle with leukemia, said a spokesman for the Matthews Funeral Home. His best major league season was in 1959, when the right-hander was 19-8 for the Cleveland Indians and pitched for the American League in the All-Star game at the Coliseum. The Dodgers had moved from Brooklyn the previous season.

Bobby Thomson, who hit the legendary home run dubbed "the shot heard round the world" for the New York Giants and inspired perhaps the most famous broadcasting moment in baseball history, has died. He was 86. Thomson, who had been in poor health for several years, died Monday night at his home in Savannah, Ga., according to various media reports. The Brooklyn Dodgers were two outs from the 1951 National League championship when Thomson hit his dramatic home run, sending the Giants to the World Series and sending broadcaster Russ Hodges into hysteria as he repeatedly screamed into his microphone: "The Giants win the pennant!