The Dodgers left Brooklyn after a fight over one stadium site
Walter O'Malley wanted to build a new ballpark with his own money at Atlantic and Flatbush avenues in Brooklyn. The city's powerful planner Robert Moses refused to assemble the land for him. Before the 1958 season, after 68 seasons in Brooklyn, the Dodgers headed west to Los Angeles.
The club began in 1883 as the Brooklyn Baseball Association and cycled through names, including the Bridegrooms and the Robins, the latter after Wilbert Robinson, manager for 18 seasons, before settling on Dodgers in 1932. Charles Ebbets, who started as bookkeeper and scorecard seller, quietly bought 25 to 30 plots of land so prices would not spike, and opened Ebbets Field in 1913. After he and his co-owner died within weeks of each other in 1925, their heirs split the stock exactly in half and deadlocked the board for over a decade, while the so-called Daffy Dodgers lost money and slid into debt.
The team's defining moment came on April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson took the field, the first African American major leaguer since 1884. General manager Branch Rickey drove the signing, motivated by his Methodist faith, his wish to win and draw crowds, and his sense of baseball's place in society. Robinson won the first Rookie of the Year award, now named after him. Integration powered six pennants in ten years, and in 1955 Brooklyn finally beat the Yankees for its only World Series title there.
O'Malley, by then majority owner, complained he would not be a tenant in a political ballpark. His offer of $1.5 million for a site estimated to cost over $9 million would have left the city covering about 90 percent, and Moses declined to use slum-clearance powers for it.
In California the Dodgers won the 1959 World Series in only their second season and more under Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. After signing Shohei Ohtani in December 2023 to what was then North American sport's largest contract, they took titles in 2024 and 2025, and they hold a record 26 National League pennants.
Source: Los Angeles Dodgers
