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BRING 'EM BACK
April 1, 1997
TRANSCRIPT
The Yankees belong in the Bronx; the Mets belong in Queens, and the Dodgers belong in Brooklyn. On this opening day of the Major League Baseball season essayist Roger Rosenblatt speaks to us from Brooklyn.
JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight on this opening day of the Major League Baseball season essayist Roger Rosenblatt speaks to us from Brooklyn.GOVERNOR GEORGE PATAKI, New York: The Yankees belong in the Bronx; the Mets belong in Queens, and the Dodgers belong in Brooklyn.
ROGER ROSENBLATT: Bring back the bums. That's the cry arising like a high drive over Brooklyn these days and over Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island too. Ever since 1957, when Dodger owner Walter O'Malley, known forever in the borough as the Judas of Flatbush, stole the Dodgers away from Ebbets Field and replanted what was then baseball's most colorful team in the smoggy wastes of Los Angeles, the loss has been palpable, the yearning unremitting.
Forty years without a team to call their own, Brooklynites rooted for the Mets, or worse, the Yankees. Unthinkable for Brooklyn to root for those stuck up bombers stuck up there in the Bronx, yet, what else was there to do once they was robbed? Put up apartments where Ebbets Field used to be. Put up a sign suggesting Ebbets Field used to be here. Curse O'Malley. Despair. Not dare to dream. Then suddenly this news: Brooklyn schools are taking up petitions. Stores are displaying signs. A $2 billion business complex with new hotels shoots up. New York governor George Pataki says the Dodgers belong in Brooklyn. Howard Golden, the borough president says:
HOWARD GOLDEN, Brooklyn Borough President: It was like we lost a member of our family. Well, there's a chance to get ‘em back, and we want that chance.
ROGER ROSENBLATT: Never mind that Peter O'Malley, the Judas of Flatbush, Jr., doesn't want to take the Dodgers out of La-La Land. Never mind that the Mets don't want to lose attendance to another National League team. Never mind that no one has yet to step forward with $300 million to $500 million the club is expected to sell for. The baseball season begins, and Brooklyn springs eternal.
NEWSREEL SPOKESMAN: It happened in Brooklyn, and where else, as the world champion Dodgers took the National League pennant again, just when everybody--well almost everybody--thought they wouldn't.
ROGER ROSENBLATT: Bring back the bums. Bring back not only the images of Gil, Peewee, Campy, Junior, Gilliam, Joe Black, Big Newk, the Duke, and Carl "What an Arm" Furillo. Bring back the past too. Bring back youth. That's what this outcry is really about. You hear a few young pups cheer the cause, but mainly the sound is coming from us 50 and over geezers, the AARP all-stars, who in our own great transcontinental shift could become shoeless Joes from Hannibal, Moes again--young, strong, reflexes restored, yelling ourselves hoarse in the outfield.
Bring back us boys of summer, swaggering through the white hot streets, biting into orange ices, playing stick ball and making two sewer shots in a world sans computers, sans faxes, sans Internets and Webs, sans everything except local teams, local lives. If only it were possible, bring ‘em back this year especially, so that on April 15th, 50 years to the day Jackie Robinson stepped out onto the field and liberated baseball we could celebrate that in Brooklyn.
Baseball? Hell, Jackie Robinson liberated much of America--seven years before Brown Vs. Education--eight years before the Montgomery-Alabama boycott, long before the sit-ins and "I have a dream" and the civil rights laws, Branch Ricky's Brooklyn Dodgers awakened a morally comatose country. All that was the past as well, when issues were vital and the causes were big.
So bring ‘em back, bring back the East, when the Dodgers when westward so did America. Bring back three teams to New York City; we can handle it. Most of all, bring back the rivalry, the arguments in the schoolyards, in the subway series. What a time that was. Mantle, Snider, or Mays? We Yankee fans remember. We long to see the Dodgers here because we remember how great to fight for the pennant, how wonderful to meet the Dodgers in the Series, how sublime to beat them again and again, year after year after year. Bring back the bums.
I'm Roger Rosenblatt.
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