In 1957, the Dodgers bolted for Los Angeles and broke Brooklyn’s heart.
And the Giants? Well, yeah, they left New York, too.
In the decades since the Dodgers’ and Giants’ exodus to California, one team’s New York legacy has become more pronounced than the other’s. More revered, more famed. The Dodgers of Brooklyn are among the most romanticized clubs of any era: Dem Bums. Wait ‘Til Next Year. In all, the Dodgers seem to have a larger foothold in the consciousness of baseball fans and New Yorkers than the Giants of New York.
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“I’ve never thought about this before, but I can’t tell you off the top of my head somebody that’s going to wax nostalgic about the New York Giants, as far as somebody you identify (as),’ Oh, he was the diehard Giants fan,'” Dodgers historian Mark Langill said.
John Thorn, MLB’s official historian, had one name jump to mind, a fellow who died in 1935.
“DeWolf Hopper, maybe. The actor,” Thorn said. “Hopper became famous for reciting ‘Casey at the Bat’ the first time in public, and then did it 10,000 more times. He was a big Broadway star. All the Broadway theater performers attached themselves to the Giants, not the Dodgers.”
But being Broadway’s flame was not enough to widely sustain the Giants’ legacy. Empirically, major figures of subsequent generations have written and spoken more about the Dodgers. Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a book about them. Larry King was a Dodgers fan. Fred Wilpon, the former Mets owner, designed Citi Field as an homage to the Dodgers’ old home, Ebbets Field, not the Giants’ Polo Grounds of Manhattan.
Gary Mintz, organizer of the New York Giants Preservation Society, said that at times, the Giants’ legacy in New York absolutely feels pushed aside relative to the Dodgers’.
“Especially the stadium,” said Mintz, whose group has regular video meetings, and more than 2,500 followers on Facebook. “It’s always, ‘Ebbets Field was this.’ And then the Mets build a duplicate of it basically, and then they sit there and tell you, ‘Well, the green seats (at Citi Field) are for the Polo Grounds.’ The Giants, I think in New York as the years went by, probably considered themselves third-class citizens behind the Yankees and Dodgers.”
None of this is to say that the Giants have necessarily been wronged by popular culture or history. It’s not too hard to figure out some of the reasons the Dodgers’ legacy can lead a conversation. One team had Jackie Robinson. The other didn’t. But there’s also more to unpack than one might expect.
A lot of the conversation around the Brooklyn Dodgers ties back to scarring. Pain. Because Dodgers fans probably did suffer more than their National League counterpart in New York.
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Giants fans, of course, were grief-stricken when their team left in 1957. But the team’s departure was ultimately not as surprising.
The Dodgers’ exit was more hurtful, Thorn said, “because the Giants had descended to a second-tier ball club after the World Series of ’54. And their attendance, the minimal attendance at the Polo Grounds, was more stark than the still flourishing attendance at Ebbets Field.
“Everyone knew the Giants were dead in New York. They had a whole year to accept it, while (Walter) O’Malley’s decision to move to LA seemed rushed, even though he had been dissatisfied with Ebbets Field for a long time.”
In longer timelines beyond relocation, the different narrative arcs of the teams may have shaped their memories differently. Early in the 20th century, the Giants were a dominant force.
“The earlier Giants were much more famous than the Dodgers,” the late Larry King said in 2013. “The Giants of (John) McGraw, Carl Hubbell, Christy Mathewson.”
The Giants won the 1905, 1921, ’22 and ’33 World Series and lost several others. The Dodgers, meanwhile, were empty-handed, year after year after — until their only title in New York, in 1955. The Dodgers were the occupants of the mantle that the Mets would later take up: the lovable loser.
In 1934, Giants manager Bill Terry asked whether the Dodgers were even still in the league. The Giants carried a feeling of superiority that the Dodgers, for the longest time, never could.
The Giants didn’t “have what’s building in Brooklyn as far as, ‘Wait’ Til Next Year,'” Langill said. “It really led to a crescendo with the ’55 championship.”
The Dodgers made the World Series again in 1956, too. They were reaching new peaks, and then they were gone.
“In ’57, it’s announced the team’s leaving,” Brooklyn pitcher Carl Erskine said in a 2013 interview. “I relate that to a young person who is talented … and everybody’s so proud of. And suddenly, they’re gone. They got wiped out, they got into an accident, or something took them out of the picture.”
Polo Grounds, 1923. ( Mark Rucker / Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images)The team’s respective stadiums probably contribute to the Brooklyn Dodgers’ flourishing image. Ebbets Field is considered much more charming than the horseshoe-shaped Polo Grounds.
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“Going to the Polo Grounds always felt dark, always felt bleak: 155th and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, and the beautiful Yankee Stadium across the bridge,” King said. “The Polo Grounds was a weird place.”
Harvey Weinberg, a 76-year-old New York Giants fan born in the Bronx, believes some of the sentimentality toward the Brooklyn Dodgers can be found in the team name itself.
“When you say ‘New York,’ it could be New York City, it could be New York State,” Weinberg said. “But when you say ‘Brooklyn,’ it’s a defined, confined geographical area.”
In the broadest of strokes, the Dodgers had blue-collar fans, the Giants white-collar.
“Bankers and lawyers and clerks, and they would leave downtown for the Polo Grounds by the train in 1905, 1910, and arrive in time for a game’s start at 3:30,” Thorn said.
But to Thorn, the teams were more defined by the sentiment attached to them rather than specific geographic location.
The Dodgers-Giants rivalry dates back to when Brooklyn was technically a separate city, which was the case until 1898 — a point of significance to Thorn.
“The sense that we have of Brooklyn being the team of underdogs predates Jackie Robinson,” he said.
Robinson’s reach extended to Thorn himself.
“(He) was an inspiration to me as a kid,” Thorn said. “Because he was the outsider brought inside. I was born in a displaced person’s camp. I had no say in the matter of coming to the U.S. at age two and a half. But I was certainly mystified by it. Through baseball cards, I came to love not only Jackie Robinson but the Dodgers. I could have chosen — my parents had no allegiance to any ball club. They knew nothing about sports ever, their entire lives.”
Bob McGee, author of a book about Ebbets Field, called “The Greatest Ballpark Ever,” thinks that some of the Dodgers’ image has been shaped by what’s transpired since the move, not before it.
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After 1962, the Giants didn’t appear in a World Series again until 1989.
“I think the difference in terms of separation in the sort of baseball consciousness between the two franchises, in as much as there was one,” McGee said, “probably came about during the ’60s, after the Giants started to fade, and the Dodgers still had competitive teams through the ’70s.”
Dodger Stadium, McGee noted, was better designed and became more popular than the Giants’ Candlestick Park.
Langill notes that the Dodgers also had the advantage of literally being in Hollywood, and they won very quickly in their new locale: in 1959 and again in ’63 and ’65. The Giants didn’t win a World Series in California until 2010.
Many times over the years, Carl Erskine has been asked about the staying power of his Brooklyn Dodgers. He’s always settled on the winner-gone-too-soon theory. But what about the other guys across town?
“That’s the other thing I wonder, is there as much carryover — I don’t think so — for the Giants?” Erskine said. “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World and Willie Mays … I don’t know how to answer that one.”
(Top photo of Willie Mays (left) and Don Newcombe: AP Photo)
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