Ebbets Field

Ebbets Field

Nobody we knew owned a car, so we went there on foot from where I lived, walking across the hills and meadows of Prospect Park. By the time we reached Flatbush Avenue, there was a convergence of all the tribes of Brooklyn: the Jews and the Irish and the Italians, immigrants and their American children; oldtimers who had moved from the waterfront neighborhoods to the higher slopes to be near the great ballpark; tough lean men who had survived Iwo Jima and Anzio and the Hurtgen Forest, places where they had lost the hyphenated prefixes of origin and had become Americans; and of course, all those black Americans, including men with gray hair who had waited for too many decades to see Jack Roosevelt Robinson walk on big league grass. All of us were going to Ebbets Field. In memory, encoded in all those unreliable images printed upon me as a boy, the place was huge. It was, in fact, the largest structure I had ever entered, larger than any church, larger than any movie house. I know now that it was sneered at as a bandbox: TK feet down the right field line, TK feet to center, TK to left. But if you were eleven, and you were sitting in those centerfield stands, and Terry Moore of the Cardinals was directly below you, and home plate seemed a mile away, it was huge. It was also beautiful. As kids, we used free tickets from the Police Athletic League to get in, or brought one of our friends who had been crippled by polio and played on the sympathies of the special cops, who always let us in, with a growl and a wink. Then we climbed dark ramps, higher and higher, climbing to the distant reaches and the cheapest seats in the ball park. Finally we were at the top level, and walked through a gate, out of the darkness, and there before us was the field. No grass has ever been greener. Each time I went back to Ebbets Field, and made that climb, and saw that field, my skin  pebbled once more, at the sight of all that beauty. There was no television then, and so we knew the Dodgers and Ebbets Field from stories and photographs in the Daily News and from the voice of Red Barber on the radio. Most of us imagined the Dodgers before we ever saw them. Nothing in newspapers or radio ever matched the experience of being there: the smell of hot dogs, the signs along the walls (“Hit Sign, Win Suit”), the barking of beer hawkers in thick Brooklynese (“Getcha cold one now, heah day are, cold as da Nawt’ Pole”) the music of the Brooklyn Sym-Phony, the shouting and argument, dismay and joy in the stands. Everyone was joined in the rough democracy of the upper deck. The great accomplishment of Robinson in 1947 was not so much that he integrated baseball, but that he integrated those stands. Which is to say he started integrating his country, our country. And so when Robinson jittered off second base, upsetting the enemy pitcher, the number 42 sending signals of possible amazements, we all roared. Whites and blacks: roaring for Robinson. And when he broke for third, the roar exploded to another level, and birds rose from the roofs of the ballpark and the stands shook so hard you thought they might fall. They would eventually fall, but not from the roar. There was much to roar about. Kids my age were granted an amazing gift that went beyond the crowded intimacy of the park itself. Branch Rickey had built for us an extraordinary team: Snider, Furillo, Reese and the others. Robinson was their engine. Driven by his passion (the way 40 years later the Chicago Bulls would be driven by Michael Jordan) , they fought for every victory; they did not shrug away a loss and call their agents. Most of them had no agents. Most of them even lived in Brooklyn; Gil Hodges had a small house on a good street about eight blocks from the tenement where I lived.  The great ones stayed with the team year after year; we knew them, we celebrated their great victories, and plunged into gloom at their defeats. We thought we would have them forever, and that when they got old they would come back to Ebbets Field on Old Timers Day and we’d see the Dook slash one off the concave wall in right field or Robinson walk to bat in his pigeon-toed way and dare the pitcher to throw at his head. We would have our children with us. We would tell them the tale of that great team, those boys of summer. None of that ever happened and we should have known it, even as boys. The last game was played in 1957, and then they were gone. For some people, the departure was an immense wound, a betrayal, a rejection. Walter O’Malley, the Dodger owner, had played with our emotions, made fools of us, and some people never forgave him. I didn’t go to another major league baseball game for twelve years; my father, an Irish immigrant made into an American by baseball, lived another 28 years and never entered a single ballpark. Within a year after the Dodgers lammed to Los Angeles, Ebbets Field was smashed into rubble. From the rubble would rise a project called Ebbets Field Houses. Years later, I went out there for a look, and there was a sign on the wall beside the front door. NO BALLPLAYING ALLOWED, it said. I started walking home, the way I did as a boy, through Prospect Park, and all around me I could hear a roar, and there in my mind, as it will be forever, was the image of Robinson, dancing off second, about to break for third.

Copyright 2004 Pete Hamill