Brooklyn Dodgers (baseball)
The Brooklyn Dodgers were an American baseball team from the New York borough of Brooklyn . The Dodgers were members of the American Association from 1884 to 1889 and the National League from 1890 to 1957 , and played their home games from 1913 at Ebbets Field . Despite nine World Series appearances between 1916 and 1956, they won only one championship: in 1955 they beat their city rivals, the New York Yankees , who had previously defeated the Dodgers in five series of finals. They have been playing under the name Los Angeles Dodgers since moving to Los Angeles in 1958 .
history
The Dodgers and their Ebbets Field stadium are an integral part of American sports mythology to this day . Various factors came together prior to the 1955–57 events. The Dodgers had suffered seven defeats in the World Series without a win, between 1941 and 1953 they lost five times to the New York Yankees , their arch-rivals from the Bronx . At the time, baseball was a New York sport and the championships were more of a city championship, also known as the New York Subway Subway Series , which the three clubs Yankees, Dodgers and Giants made up among themselves. In addition there was the defeat in the National League final in 1951 against the Giants, for which Bobby Thomson turned the game around at the last minute against the hapless Ralph Branca with the legendary "shot heard 'round the world" .
1955 succeeded in what was no longer thought possible: In a heart-stopping final over seven games against the Yankees, the Dodgers brought the first championship to Brooklyn with 4: 3. The disillusionment followed in the years that followed: Manager Walter O'Malley had been negotiating with city leaders about the construction of a new stadium for some time. After the city refused to give in, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1957. If this is an almost everyday occurrence in North American professional sport nowadays, for many Americans it lost its innocence at that moment. In the same year, the New York Giants followed their rivals to the West Coast and became the San Francisco Giants . The Giants are forgiven for this because they weren't the first: They didn't commit the fall, but the Dodgers. On April 18, 1958, both teams met for the first time in front of 80,000 spectators at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum .
Racial Integration
In 1945 the manager of the Dodgers, Branch Rickey , initiated racial integration in baseball. Previously, there was an agreement between the owners of the major league teams called a gentlemen's agreement not to sign any black players. This was strictly enforced by the Commissioner of Baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis , until his death in 1944. However, his successor, Commissioner Happy Chandler , allowed Rickey to sign a black player, contrary to the agreement. On August 28, 1945, Rickey signed Jackie Robinson and had him initially play for a minor league team of the Dodgers in Montreal , Canada . After a very successful season in Canada, Robinson became the first black player to play for a major league team in 1947. In the following years more and more blacks found their way into the majors, the gentlemen's agreement was finally broken.