Baseball blooms anew in Brooklyn

BROOKLYN, N.Y. -

And there used to be a ballpark where the field was warm and green

And the people played their crazy game with a joy I'd never seen

And the air was such a wonder from the hot dogs and the beer

Yes, there used a ballpark right here

- Frank Sinatra, 1973
Frank Sinatra never saw KeySpan Park. He never looked over the scoreboard in left field and saw the famous Coney Island Cyclone. Sinatra sang those lyrics about Ebbets Field, which housed the Brooklyn Dodgers in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn for 44 years.

That was until 50 years ago, when owner Walter O'Malley couldn't get the domed stadium he wanted in Brooklyn and moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles. Ebbets Field became an apartment complex.

Baseball was brought back to Brooklyn in 2001 at KeySpan Park. It is a 7,500-seat minor-league stadium that houses the single-A Brooklyn Cyclones of the New York-Penn League - not exactly featuring Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider and Pee Wee Reese.

But there's a phenomenon associated with Cyclones baseball. The Cyclones have averaged 7,749 fans this season, tops in the New York-Penn League. The next highest is the Aberdeen (Md.) IronBirds with 6,567. Eleven of the 14 teams in the league draw an average of fewer than 5,000 fans per game.

On Tuesday, 7,420 saw the Cyclones beat the Williamsport CrossCutters - the Phillies' single-A affiliate - 5-1, despite Phillies 2007 fifth-round pick Michael Taylor's going 2 for 4 with a double and an RBI.

The reason is simple: Fifty years after the Dodgers left, the borough of Brooklyn has changed, but the love for baseball lingers.

The Dodgers were a source of pride for Brooklyn, which had the distinction of being "Manhattan's bedroom." Residents worked in Manhattan and slept in Brooklyn.

But they had a baseball team, and that was enough.

"We're not a city, just a borough, and we have a team," Roger Kahn said by phone. Kahn grew up in Brooklyn and covered the Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune and wrote the classic book The Boys of Summer.

The franchise started in 1890 but was not particularly successful until the 1940s. From 1941 to 1956, the Dodgers won seven pennants. They won the 1955 World Series and set their mark in history in 1947 when Jackie Robinson integrated baseball.

But Brooklyn started to change, too. Attendance slipped, partly because of a population shift to the suburbs following World War II. Kahn pointed to television as the primary catalyst for sliding attendance because fewer people needed to be at the ballpark to see the game.

O'Malley's answer was a new ballpark. He was steadfast about building a domed stadium at Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues in downtown Brooklyn. Robert Moses, the New York City building commissioner, wanted the ballpark in Queens on the plot of land where Shea Stadium is now located.

Neither man compromised, and O'Malley moved to franchise to Los Angeles.

Brooklyn was crushed. The Dodgers were not as much a ballclub as an institution.

"The pyramids are in Egypt, and the Dodgers are in Brooklyn," Kahn said.

The lure of land and a stadium in Los Angeles - plus the legacy of westward expansion in baseball - was enough for O'Malley to break the hearts of Brooklynites. Kahn and another Brooklyn native, Jay Leonard, who now lives in Short Hills, N.J., echoed the fabled expression that there would be a public lynching of O'Malley if he had returned to Brooklyn after the move.

"Here's a team that's an integral part of the community for 75 years, and all of the sudden, a greedy man says, 'If I go to California, I'll find gold,' " Kahn said. "Baseball is a private business, but it's a quasi-public institution."

In the late 1990s, then-New York mayor and current presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani worked to land minor-league franchises in Brooklyn and Staten Island. New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon is a Brooklyn native and understood the importance of baseball to the borough. The Mets became a natural affiliate for a Brooklyn franchise.

The New York Yankees took the Staten Island franchise.

It was an opportune development to place the ballpark at Coney Island, which is a summer place with its amusement park and beach. Single A is short-season summer ball, which made the Coney Island location even more ideal.

The team has set various attendance records. In 2002 and 2003, the Cyclones became the first short-season team in history to eclipse 300,000 fans in a season. During those years, they were also the only short-season team in history to rank in the top 10 in the minor leagues in average attendance - and that's regardless of class.

"Part of it is the tradition of baseball in Brooklyn," Cyclones general manager Steve Cohen said. "I think it's the atmosphere and the fun that people have when they come to the game."

The ballpark has neon lights flashing like an amusement park's, which is no coincidence because an actual amusement park lies beyond the left-field fence. Beyond the right-field fence is the beach.

Even the Cyclones' broadcaster is a throwback. Warner Fusselle, the former voice of This Week in Baseball, calls the Cyclones' games. Fusselle labeled his seat the "catbird seat," a name that was started by Dodgers Hall of Fame broadcaster Red Barber. The Brooklyn radio waves also featured legendary broadcasters Vin Scully and Ernie Harwell.

"[Barber] started that; he told stories about it," Fusselle said. "I try to do the broadcast the way I think it should be done, and that's the way people did it a long time ago, like Ernie Harwell and Red Barber.

"This franchise is one of a kind because of the history of the Brooklyn Dodgers. A lot of people come to these games and they don't even know what team Brooklyn is playing, but they have a good time."

The crowd turns out and is able to watch professional baseball in Brooklyn at a fraction of the price of the two major-league teams in the city.

"Just not having a [major-league] team in Brooklyn like they used to, this is what they turn to," said Cyclones infielder Jake Eigsti, who is in his second season with the Cyclones. "I think [minor-league baseball] gets worse from here. I played a week in double A. As far as facility and crowds, you can't get much better."

Four old friends who grew up Dodgers fans have a ritual. They meet at Nathan's Famous and go to the ballpark to see professional baseball in Brooklyn.

Jay Leonard; Gordon Bassen, who lives in Milwaukee; and Bob Schwartz and Marc Goldberg, both still in Brooklyn, have gone separate ways since the Dodgers moved, but their link remains baseball and Brooklyn. They are from Brooklyn, grew up watching the Dodgers, and remember the players living in the community. They said a kid could play stoopball where Gil Hodges lived.

Times have changed, but for the few hours at the ball game, the friends were brought back to the days when they traded in 10 ice cream wrappers for a grandstand seat at Ebbets Field.

"The Brooklyn Cyclones are a link to those of us old enough to be Dodgers fans," Leonard said. "It's nice to come back to Brooklyn, it's nice to see baseball in Brooklyn, and it's nice to be back in Coney Island. "There's no better way to see baseball than with a nice sea breeze and a Nathan's hot dog before the game."

As Leonard was speaking, he had a Brooklyn Dodgers cap on his head. At Tuesday's game, the same kind of hat was worn by Michael Clemenza, 30, who was born in Brooklyn and still lives there.

By his admission, the hat is becoming rare.

"People have the official Brooklyn Cyclones hat," Clemenza said, more an indication of changing fans than changing fashion.

With each passing year, memories of the Dodgers fade and Brooklyn has a single-A team to embrace. It's not the Dodgers, and Kahn said the Cyclones could not replace what the Dodgers were to the borough.

The Dodgers are gone. So is Sinatra.

Yet there is, in fact, a ballpark here.