JCMAN320
July 11th, 2007, 09:43 PM
More Jersey City and Dodger history that happened 10 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in JERSEY CITY!!!
Roosevelt Stadium was called one of the most beautiful ballparks in all of minor league baseball. There is also a plauge in Society Hill, where Roosevelt Stadium once stood dedicated to Robinson breaking the color barrier there.
http://losangeles.dodgers.mlb.com/la/history/ballparks.jsp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Stadium
http://www.njcu.edu/programs/jchistory/Pages/R_Pages/Roosevelt_Stadium.htm
Shows Roosevelt Stadium on the Dodgers site and shows Robinson scoring his first run in Jersey City in the Dodgers Organization
Don't hate on JC!! :)
When Jersey City was a pawn for the Dodgers
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
BY MATTHEW FUTTERMAN
Star-Ledger Staff
Nowadays, the scenario is all too familiar.
Wealthy owner doesn't get what he wants from local government. Wealthy owner flirts with rival city and threatens to move his franchise. Local government calls wealthy owner's bluff. Wealthy owner leaves town, breaking the hearts of loyal fans.
This is the game former Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley was playing in 1955 when word leaked out: The Dodgers would be coming to Jersey City.
"O'Malley had to show he was looking to get out of Ebbets Field," said Michael Shapiro, author of "The Last Good Season," which chronicled the Dodgers' final years in Brooklyn. "He never had any intention of moving the team to Jersey City, but he had to do something to show he was serious."
That meant announcing that for the 1956 season, the Dodgers would play seven games and one exhibition at Roosevelt Stadium, a $1.5 million minor-league ballpark built during the Great Depression and known for a whipping wind off New York Harbor.
O'Malley's broadside got the attention of New York City officials like a fastball under the chin. It also foretold a series of events re-examined with the expected angst and nostalgia in a new documentary, "Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush," which premieres at 8 tonight on HBO.
Shortly after the announcement, which dominated the front page of the Jersey Journal, O'Malley was called to a meeting at New York's Gracie Mansion with Mayor Robert Wagner and the city's development czar, Robert Moses.
At the meeting, which was filmed by television news cameras, O'Malley explained why he had to replace crumbling Ebbets Field, a ballpark with just 700 parking spaces. He wanted to replace it with a domed stadium at Atlantic and Flatbush avenues in downtown Brooklyn, where the Nets now plan to build their arena.
Moses, perhaps the most powerful public official in the history of the region, wanted the Dodgers to construct a stadium at the convergence of his Long Island highways in Flushing Meadows, where Shea Stadium now stands. Moses led more than a dozen public agencies and had spent 30 years demolishing huge swaths of New York to make way for his roads, highways and parks, outlasting nearly every politician or community group that challenged him.
Never one to succumb to a threat, an irritated Moses, tried to portray O'Malley as a spoiled child who wanted his way and wouldn't accept anything else.
"So what you're saying is unless a home for the Dodgers is found at this location, you're going to take your marbles and go," Moses said to O'Malley with Wagner sitting nearby and the cameras rolling.
With that as the backdrop, the games in Jersey City got under way in 1956, with the Dodgers taking six out of seven, in front of some 158,000 fans, including an exhibition game against Cleveland.
A year later the Dodgers were back for eight more games that would mark the last Major League Baseball played in New Jersey. It also showed other owners they could do more with their teams than simply put them on the field and wait to see who showed up.
"This was Walter O'Malley being savvy," said Ezra Edelman, a producer on the new film. "Sure it was part of the negotiation with New York, but he was really ahead of his time in thinking about things such as building his brand and spreading his fan base."
At Roosevelt Stadium 50 summers ago, though, fans came to watch Major League Baseball, not to get in the middle of a New York political row. They came to a stadium that had some 25,000 seats and was once home to the intense rivalry between the International League's Jersey City Giants and the Newark Bears, the Giants' and Yankees' top farm teams.
"There was never any thought they would stay there," said Star-Ledger columnist emeritus Jerry Izenberg, who covered the games for the New York Herald Tribune. "Jersey City was a good baseball town. Newark was better, but Newark didn't have the right stadium."
Turns out neither did Brooklyn.
In good weather, crowds at Roosevelt Stadium often outnumbered those at Ebbets Field. The "season opener" at Roosevelt Stadium in 1957, a 5-1 win over Philadelphia, drew 11,629 compared with 11,202 who showed up in Brooklyn for the home opener the previous week.
In the Jersey Journal the next day, sportswriter Ed Grant noted the looming trouble to come: "During the winter there was talk of moving the team to Los Angeles and if the fans here and in Brooklyn should fall off in their payments at the box office, the talk may be followed by action."
Grant went on to note the recently opened New Jersey Turnpike extension made the stadium more accessible than ever.
Perhaps that helped bring 14,470 fans to the stadium on May 3 when Don Newcombe shut out St. Louis, 6-0.
The Jersey City roll continued 33 days later, when a 20-year-old hurler named Don Drysdale tossed another nine innings of shutout ball and the Dodgers topped the hapless Cubs, 4-0.
At the game, newly elected Jersey City Mayor Charles Witrowski told reporters that if the Dodgers went to California, he planned to make a run at another major-league team.
All the while, O'Malley was negotiating on two coasts. He tried hopelessly to get the intransigent Moses to budge from his plan to put the team in Queens in a city-owned park, then jetted to Los Angeles to search out locations in the fast-growing mecca of the Golden State, a world away from Jersey City and Brooklyn.
The Dodgers' run in Jersey City came to an end on Sept. 3. According to Jack Powers' column in the Jersey Journal the next day, Don Zimmer threw early batting practice in bare feet, and manager Walter Alston coached third because the regular coach, Billy Herman, had slipped on subway steps a few days before.
Drysdale joked that Roosevelt Stadium was a bad-luck charm.
"When Newk (Newcombe) pitches here, the wind blows in from the outfield," Drysdale said. "Now that it's my turn, there's almost a hurricane blowing out from home plate."
Drysdale pitched all 12 innings of a 3-2 loss to Philadelphia that day, allowing the winning run on a fly ball off the bat of Puddin' Head Jones that sent Chico Fernandez home.
On the bright side, 10,190 fans showed up for the game, some 3,500 more than would watch the Dodgers play their final game in Brooklyn on Sept. 24, a 2-0 win over Pittsburgh.
"Dodger spokesman told me last night the club will return to Roosevelt Stadium next season IF the club didn't move out of NY," Powers wrote.
By then, O'Malley had all but nailed down his deal for 350 acres near downtown Los Angeles in an undeveloped area called Chavez Ravine. In a press release three weeks later, O'Malley announced the team was headed west.
---------------------------
Matthew Futterman may be reached at mfutterman@starledger.com
Roosevelt Stadium was called one of the most beautiful ballparks in all of minor league baseball. There is also a plauge in Society Hill, where Roosevelt Stadium once stood dedicated to Robinson breaking the color barrier there.
http://losangeles.dodgers.mlb.com/la/history/ballparks.jsp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Stadium
http://www.njcu.edu/programs/jchistory/Pages/R_Pages/Roosevelt_Stadium.htm
Shows Roosevelt Stadium on the Dodgers site and shows Robinson scoring his first run in Jersey City in the Dodgers Organization
Don't hate on JC!! :)
When Jersey City was a pawn for the Dodgers
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
BY MATTHEW FUTTERMAN
Star-Ledger Staff
Nowadays, the scenario is all too familiar.
Wealthy owner doesn't get what he wants from local government. Wealthy owner flirts with rival city and threatens to move his franchise. Local government calls wealthy owner's bluff. Wealthy owner leaves town, breaking the hearts of loyal fans.
This is the game former Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley was playing in 1955 when word leaked out: The Dodgers would be coming to Jersey City.
"O'Malley had to show he was looking to get out of Ebbets Field," said Michael Shapiro, author of "The Last Good Season," which chronicled the Dodgers' final years in Brooklyn. "He never had any intention of moving the team to Jersey City, but he had to do something to show he was serious."
That meant announcing that for the 1956 season, the Dodgers would play seven games and one exhibition at Roosevelt Stadium, a $1.5 million minor-league ballpark built during the Great Depression and known for a whipping wind off New York Harbor.
O'Malley's broadside got the attention of New York City officials like a fastball under the chin. It also foretold a series of events re-examined with the expected angst and nostalgia in a new documentary, "Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush," which premieres at 8 tonight on HBO.
Shortly after the announcement, which dominated the front page of the Jersey Journal, O'Malley was called to a meeting at New York's Gracie Mansion with Mayor Robert Wagner and the city's development czar, Robert Moses.
At the meeting, which was filmed by television news cameras, O'Malley explained why he had to replace crumbling Ebbets Field, a ballpark with just 700 parking spaces. He wanted to replace it with a domed stadium at Atlantic and Flatbush avenues in downtown Brooklyn, where the Nets now plan to build their arena.
Moses, perhaps the most powerful public official in the history of the region, wanted the Dodgers to construct a stadium at the convergence of his Long Island highways in Flushing Meadows, where Shea Stadium now stands. Moses led more than a dozen public agencies and had spent 30 years demolishing huge swaths of New York to make way for his roads, highways and parks, outlasting nearly every politician or community group that challenged him.
Never one to succumb to a threat, an irritated Moses, tried to portray O'Malley as a spoiled child who wanted his way and wouldn't accept anything else.
"So what you're saying is unless a home for the Dodgers is found at this location, you're going to take your marbles and go," Moses said to O'Malley with Wagner sitting nearby and the cameras rolling.
With that as the backdrop, the games in Jersey City got under way in 1956, with the Dodgers taking six out of seven, in front of some 158,000 fans, including an exhibition game against Cleveland.
A year later the Dodgers were back for eight more games that would mark the last Major League Baseball played in New Jersey. It also showed other owners they could do more with their teams than simply put them on the field and wait to see who showed up.
"This was Walter O'Malley being savvy," said Ezra Edelman, a producer on the new film. "Sure it was part of the negotiation with New York, but he was really ahead of his time in thinking about things such as building his brand and spreading his fan base."
At Roosevelt Stadium 50 summers ago, though, fans came to watch Major League Baseball, not to get in the middle of a New York political row. They came to a stadium that had some 25,000 seats and was once home to the intense rivalry between the International League's Jersey City Giants and the Newark Bears, the Giants' and Yankees' top farm teams.
"There was never any thought they would stay there," said Star-Ledger columnist emeritus Jerry Izenberg, who covered the games for the New York Herald Tribune. "Jersey City was a good baseball town. Newark was better, but Newark didn't have the right stadium."
Turns out neither did Brooklyn.
In good weather, crowds at Roosevelt Stadium often outnumbered those at Ebbets Field. The "season opener" at Roosevelt Stadium in 1957, a 5-1 win over Philadelphia, drew 11,629 compared with 11,202 who showed up in Brooklyn for the home opener the previous week.
In the Jersey Journal the next day, sportswriter Ed Grant noted the looming trouble to come: "During the winter there was talk of moving the team to Los Angeles and if the fans here and in Brooklyn should fall off in their payments at the box office, the talk may be followed by action."
Grant went on to note the recently opened New Jersey Turnpike extension made the stadium more accessible than ever.
Perhaps that helped bring 14,470 fans to the stadium on May 3 when Don Newcombe shut out St. Louis, 6-0.
The Jersey City roll continued 33 days later, when a 20-year-old hurler named Don Drysdale tossed another nine innings of shutout ball and the Dodgers topped the hapless Cubs, 4-0.
At the game, newly elected Jersey City Mayor Charles Witrowski told reporters that if the Dodgers went to California, he planned to make a run at another major-league team.
All the while, O'Malley was negotiating on two coasts. He tried hopelessly to get the intransigent Moses to budge from his plan to put the team in Queens in a city-owned park, then jetted to Los Angeles to search out locations in the fast-growing mecca of the Golden State, a world away from Jersey City and Brooklyn.
The Dodgers' run in Jersey City came to an end on Sept. 3. According to Jack Powers' column in the Jersey Journal the next day, Don Zimmer threw early batting practice in bare feet, and manager Walter Alston coached third because the regular coach, Billy Herman, had slipped on subway steps a few days before.
Drysdale joked that Roosevelt Stadium was a bad-luck charm.
"When Newk (Newcombe) pitches here, the wind blows in from the outfield," Drysdale said. "Now that it's my turn, there's almost a hurricane blowing out from home plate."
Drysdale pitched all 12 innings of a 3-2 loss to Philadelphia that day, allowing the winning run on a fly ball off the bat of Puddin' Head Jones that sent Chico Fernandez home.
On the bright side, 10,190 fans showed up for the game, some 3,500 more than would watch the Dodgers play their final game in Brooklyn on Sept. 24, a 2-0 win over Pittsburgh.
"Dodger spokesman told me last night the club will return to Roosevelt Stadium next season IF the club didn't move out of NY," Powers wrote.
By then, O'Malley had all but nailed down his deal for 350 acres near downtown Los Angeles in an undeveloped area called Chavez Ravine. In a press release three weeks later, O'Malley announced the team was headed west.
---------------------------
Matthew Futterman may be reached at mfutterman@starledger.com