Donald
Dewey has written some 40 books of fiction and nonfiction, as
well as contributed scores of stories to magazines and other
periodicals. He has also had some 30 plays staged in Europe
and the United States. Dewey was editor of the ASME-award winning
magazine Attenzione and was editorial director of the
East-West Network, overseeing a dozen in-flight magazines and
the PBS organ Dial. Don's latest book, Nullo,
is now available.
Wrigley
Field and Fenway Park notwithstanding, no baseball facility
past or present has dramatized the relationship between a team
and its fans as Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field did between 1913
and 1957. Depending on the weather, the alcohol consumed, and
the scoreboard, the relationship could be balky, loving, or
violent, and this was after owner Charles Ebbets had risked
making it literally incendiary. In fact, it wasn’t until
some 24,000 people (the capacity at the time) converged on the
park’s single rotunda 
entrance
for an inaugural preseason exhibition against the Yankees on
April 5, 1913 that Ebbets realized he had a fire hazard on his
hands with every cigarette and cigar in sight. Since it was
too late to make radical alterations in architect Clarence Van
Buskirk’s designs for the official opener against Philadelphia
four days later, Ebbets hurriedly cut tiny cell-like windows
into the street walls around the park as additional ticket booths
and hacked out four extra entry portals. For those not going
through the rotunda, buying a ticket was like slipping a little
something to a prison inmate and walking into the stadium was
akin to stepping into a dark warehouse. Few airs of self-importance
survived the ramp climb to seats.
The
park was as intimate as any outdoor professional sports arena
could be. This didn’t owe only to the short outfield distances;
from the left field foul pole to center field, Ebbets Field
was actually comparable to a number of other parks. Even in
right field, where a 40-foot screen was installed above advertising
signs to help neutralize a paltry distance of 297 feet down
the line, there were similarities to Philadelphia’s Baker
Bowl and St. Louis’s Sportsman’s Park. The intimacy
was more the product of the facility’s location in Brooklyn,
the proximity of the stands to the field, and the high rate
of grandstand regulars long before season ticket holders had
become an indispensable part of baseball’s finances.
Although
near Prospect Park and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, Ebbets
Field was squeezed into the most urban of neighbourhoods. The
notion that the field (and the team) relied primarily on a rough-hewn
lumpen fan base is more indebted to populist nostalgia than
to the historical record. Abetting this perception is the fact
that the land gobbled up for the facility by Ebbets was, at
the beginning of the 20th century, a tawdry collection of shanties
and chicken coops known locally as Pigtown. But it wasn’t
long after the Dodgers moved in that the area around Bedford
Avenue and Montgomery Place developed into an ever-widening
zone of middle-class apartment buildings and private homes whose
occupants were as apt to commute to Manhattan offices as drive
plumbing supplies trucks or line up for unemployment benefits.
If there was a solid core of blue-collar fans from the surrounding
neighbourhoods of Flatbush, Prospect Heights, and Bed-Stuy,
many of them were highly paid union workers. Certainly, the
Dodgers anticipated no prohibitive economic barriers when they
took the lead among big league clubs in televising games in
the 1950s --- a period when a 17” black-and-white set
still represented an appreciable family investment. The persisting
image of a low-class clientele has also been furthered by baseball
writers who, if not beguiled by the dems-and-dese Hollywood
stereotypes of William Bendix and Lloyd Nolan, have felt compelled
to distinguish in sociological shorthand the Dodger fan from
his Giant (usually characterized as Manhattan white-collar and
show business) and Yankee (only those with money clips need
apply) counterparts.
The
most important distinction of the Dodger fan was to be found
in the neighbourhood around Ebbets Field and in the neighbourhood
the team made of the entire borough of Brooklyn. While the most
populous borough, Brooklyn didn’t have Manhattan’s
daunting skyline or Queens’s endless sprawl. It was a
physically manageable community in which black as well as (predominantly)
white ethnic clusters exposed a topographical order policed
by thoroughfares and parkways. If these separations later proved
to be the borough’s undoing, stoking a social crisis and
an economic depression in which the Dodgers themselves played
a key role by moving to Los Angeles, they first seeded that
most sentimental of urban communal hungers for being the-many-in-the-one.
Centered around an entertainment like a major league baseball
team, there wasn’t all that much of a gamble in satisfying
the hunger, or in the pride at having it. Two-and-a-half hours,
nine innings, a season --- it was a preciously timed romance
of togetherness that embraced the manual labourer who wanted
a few hits with his beer, the Bay Ridge home owner who took
his kids to Sunday doubleheaders, the high school student who
walked a few blocks to night games after finishing his homework,
and the housewife who wanted a closeup view of the pitcher who
looked so much more sensitive than her husband.
And
the closeup views were there. The distance between the coaching
boxes and front row field boxes was less than 10 feet, enabling
omniscient hecklers to guide Brooklyn and visiting coaches through
the game and making it imperative the coaches ingratiate themselves.
If the bullpens were called into action, the relievers (Dodgers
in right field, visitors in left field) had to warm up in the
narrowest of strips between the foul lines and the stands, allowing
several dozen more experts to pronounce on who was or wasn’t
ready (not to mention tempting a humourless visiting reliever
to miss his catcher by several yards when the taunting became
too much). As Leo Durocher discovered to his chagrin in 1941,
even the most remote seats --- the bleachers in the upper deck
of center field --- didn’t always deter hands-on fan participation.
Watching
one of his aces, Whitlow Wyatt, labouring during a game, manager
Durocher was debating with himself about going to the bullpen
when he noticed that, at the end of the top of the fifth inning,
centerfielder Pete Reiser stopped off on his way into the dugout
to exchange a few words with club owner Larry MacPhail, sitting
nearby. When Reiser came into the dugout, he handed Durocher
a note suggesting that Wyatt be replaced by Hugh Casey. While
seething over MacPhail’s interference, the manager did
what he was told, bringing in Casey, who promptly let the game
get completely out of hand. Bent on having at least the satisfaction
of putting MacPhail in his place over the loss, Durocher was
stunned to hear that the owner had never written any note. Reiser
provided the explanation: The outfielder had merely stopped
off to say hello to MacPhail, the note had been thrown to him
from the bleachers by Hilda Chester, the cowbell-ringing fan
who wanted it delivered to Durocher.
Chester
was the most noted of the raucous fans that made Ebbets Field
synonymous with grandstand characters. A one-time peanut sacker
for the Harry M. Stevens company, she was forced into retirement
by two heart attacks. Forbidden by her doctor to excite herself
by yelling for the Dodgers, she took to showing up in the bleachers
with a frying pan and iron ladle, banging away from the first
pitch to the last. When this became unbearable for those around
her, she was presented with a cowbell as the lesser of two noises.
Her devotion to Durocher was so fervid that she perjured herself
in an assault case brought by a fan against the manager, lying
that he had only been defending her honour (Durocher and a ballpark
guard had actually beaten up a heckler under the grandstands).
Another
conspicuous presence was Jack Pierce, who was so obsessed with
Cookie Lavagetto after the third baseman had begun patronizing
his eatery that he was never without business cards urging the
player’s election to the White House. When Pierce showed
up at Ebbets Field, he did so with two cartons of balloons,
a helium tank, a giant banner, and two bottles of scotch. Ensconced
in a third base box seat, he would belt down his scotch, scream
out “Cookie!” at regular intervals, then puncture
one of his inflated balloons for emphasis. Then there was the
Dodger Sym-Phony, a band that whipped up “Three Blind
Mice” when the umpires walked out on the field or figured
in some rhubarb. When four umpires rather than three became
the norm, the band changed its chief specialty number to “The
Worms Crawl In, the Worms Crawl Out” to accompany every
retired opposition hitter as he went back to the bench.
But
as colourful as the Chesters, Pierces, and Sym-Phony musicians
were, Ebbets Field was always more about its own character than
about individual characters. With only half the capacity of
the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium even after expansions from
the original Van Buskirk design, it conferred on every body
passing through the turnstile the simultaneous sensation of
being exclusive for having one of the relatively few tickets
for sale and of being excluded from the higher financial worlds
of Manhattan and the Bronx. Such chauvinistic ambivalence might
have been a distraction in other places, but it had been endemic
to Brooklyn since the place had lost its city status and been
swallowed up within New York City in 1898.
By
way of business compensation for its smaller plant, Ebbets Field’s
general admission policy did not bother much about coordinating
the number of tickets sold and the number of seats in the house.
This regularly produced two-rank-deep fans standing behind the
infield reserved seats in the lower stands; for the most significant
games, a couple of thousand more camped down on the steps of
the upper deck. Aside from negating Ebbets’s concern about
fire hazards and making touring vendors work harder for sales,
the shoulder-to-shoulder spectating imposed a formalized informality
in which only too much silence aroused suspicion. You didn’t
hesitate to share an opinion on a play, if necessary even with
someone who kept apologizing for sticking a shoe into your back.
Ebbets
Field didn’t invent passion, not even of the baseball
fan kind. If the Dodgers hadn’t played there for as many
years as they did, they would have played somewhere else and
undoubtedly drawn the same peculiarly Brooklyn metropolitan
following. Among other things, the park didn’t have the
benefit of its own idealizations. The real Ebbets Field always
had paint chips in its seats and rails and scrawny teenage vendors
who always appeared on the verge of collapsing from the orangeade
tanks they had to carry on their backs as they negotiated all
but impassable staircases. Only the elapse of more than six
decades can make that paint more resplendent or those tanks
any lighter. But the real Ebbets Field also had Frank Germano,
who in 1940 leaped out of the stands to slug umpire George Magerkurth
for what he saw as one bad call too many. Sentenced to six months
for the assault, Germano could only smile that “good,
I’ll be out in time for the season opener at Ebbets.”
