The Flatbush Bums Find a True-Blue Following

It was before Magic and Michael, before the Super Bowl and Monday Night Football. Baseball was the national pastime, and its stars--Mantle and Mays and Musial, Banks and Berra, the Scooter and the Splendid Splinter--were the athletes whom young boys (and their fathers) watched and dreamed of being. The Cleveland Rams had moved here a dozen years earlier, and the Minneapolis Lakers would move here two years hence, but baseball was still king in 1958, and when the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, many saw it as the first real step this sprawling frontier city took toward acquiring the national recognition that its boosters had so long coveted.

Other major league baseball teams had previously switched cities--three of them in the five years before the Dodgers left their beloved Flatbush--but these were longtime also-rans: the Philadelphia A’s, the Boston Braves and the St. Louis Browns. The Dodgers were one of baseball’s storied franchises--the Bums who became the Boys of Summer, the team of Robinson and Reese and Campanella, of Snider and Hodges and Furillo. This was the team that broke baseball’s color line, the team that had won seven National League titles in the 17 years before moving west, the team that had won the World Series just three years earlier.

These were the mortal enemies of the lordly New York Yankees--and of the New York Giants, who moved west with the Dodgers, decamping to San Francisco, transporting their inter-borough rivalry 3,000 miles to capitalize on an equally natural rivalry between the self-styled city of sophistication and class in Northern California and its rapidly growing but still rough-around-the-edges younger sister to the south.

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Although New Yorkers would never forgive the Dodgers (and their owner, Walter O’Malley) for abandoning them, Los Angeles quickly took the new team to its collective bosom. The Dodgers finished next to last their first season here, and before moving into their own Dodger Stadium in 1962, they played four seasons in a grotesquely remodeled football field--the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a stadium originally built for the 1932 Olympic Games. But fans poured through the turnstiles in record numbers from Day 1--April 18, 1958--when they attracted a crowd of 78,672, the largest ever to see a National League game.

A year later, the Dodgers drew more than 2 million people in a season, and in 1978, they became the first team to top 3 million. They have since exceeded both marks more often than any other team, and until the last decade, when the team began stumbling through one disappointing season after another, the Dodgers generally rewarded their fans with exciting, winning baseball. Since moving to Los Angeles, they have gone to the World Series nine times and won five; the last World Series triumph, in 1988, came after a record-breaking regular-season pitching performance by Orel Hersheiser and was highlighted by Kirk Gibson’s pinch-hit home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of the first game, a dramatic, gimpy-legged swing that 5,000 local experts later voted the single greatest moment in Los Angeles sports history.

Between 1958 and 1988, there were many other stars in Dodger Blue: Maury Wills, base-stealer nonpareil, and Steve Garvey, the hard-hitting, chisel-featured all-American boy. There was Don Drysdale, the intimidating power pitcher, and Don Sutton, Mr. Reliable, both now in the baseball Hall of Fame. There was Fernando Valenzuela, the screwball-throwing sensation from Mexico, and, of course, there was Sandy Koufax, author of four no-hitters and for all too brief a time, perhaps the finest pitcher who ever lived.

But the best-known Dodger of all to most fans neither hit nor pitched, neither fielded a ball nor stole a base. Vin Scully moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles with the team, announced that very first game in 1958 and continues to be known as the best in the game after 50 years on the job. His rich voice and even richer baseball memory offer a nightly blend of poetry and humanity to a sport that--like all big-time sports--has been increasingly deficient in both in recent years.

Free agency, skyrocketing salaries and the strikes of 1981 and 1994 have radically changed baseball and its place in American culture. To a great extent, the sport has been hijacked by agents and by a new breed of owners not steeped in the hallowed traditions of the game--as most recently exemplified by the sale of the Dodgers themselves to Rupert Murdoch and the new regime’s trade of fan favorite (and likely Hall of Famer) Mike Piazza. But these events remained far in the future on April 18, 1958, as did two other events that would help Los Angeles earn national (and international) distinction--the opening of the Music Center in 1964 and the Olympic Games of 1984. That sunny spring day in 1958 was the Dodgers’ day. In 75-degree weather, behind the pitching of Carl Erskine and Clem Labine and the hitting of Duke Snider, Charlie Neal and Dick Gray, the Dodgers beat the hated Giants 6-5 and ushered in a new era for Los Angeles and for baseball in America.