World Series stirs memories of old Brooklyn for Long Island Dodgers fans

The debate this week in the Adler household is about who the late family patriarch, Marty Adler, would root for in the 2024 World Series. The Yankees — or, the Los Angeles Dodgers?

"I can’t choose," Max Adler, 29, said Tuesday. "I think we’re all having that problem."

Why?

"Because," he said, "it’s between the team that broke my grandpa’s heart and the Evil Empire."

As it is for a dwindling group of aging Dodgers fans and their families, the choice is a near-impossible one: the abandonment of Brooklyn in favor of Los Angeles by then-team owner Walter O’Malley in 1957 remains such a painful moment that, to this day, those fans still won’t root for the Dodgers. It turns out, though, many still hate the Yankees as only a sports fan can.

"It’s a dilemma," Marty Adler's son Eric, 59, said this week. "My Dad was heartbroken when the Dodgers left ... When the Mets started [in 1962] he went full-in on the Mets. I’m a 100% Mets fan. In our family, if you were a Yankees fan you had no soul. We were just raised that way."

Born in Borough Park, Brooklyn, Marty Adler, who died in 2013 at age 76, once tried out for the Dodgers. Though he lined a ball off the right field wall at old Ebbets Field during that tryout, he was soon advised to pursue other career plans. A diehard fan, Adler found another avenue.

Following the death of Jackie Robinson in 1972, he campaigned to have Crown Heights Intermediate School, where he was assistant principal, renamed.

IS 320 was located across from the Ebbets Field apartments, where the Dodgers once played at Bedford Avenue and McKeever Place. Adler got the New York City Board of Education to rename it the Jackie Robinson Intermediate School for the man who became the first Black player in Major League Baseball when he took the field for Brooklyn on April 15, 1947.

In 1984, Adler started the Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Fame, collecting memorabilia, bringing old Dodgers stars back to Brooklyn for ceremonies at Grand Army Plaza.

"We lived his obsession with him," Leslie Adler, Eric’s wife, said. "Everything in our lives was baseball references. A person’s integrity was to be measured by what they did on a baseball field."

Eric Adler grew up in Wantagh, and he and Leslie, who now live in Manhattan, raised Max and daughter Sydney in Jericho. Eric Adler is general counsel for a newspaper group that includes The Star-Ledger and Staten Island Advance. As a teen, old Dodgers pitcher Carl Erskine taught him how to grip a curveball while stuck in traffic on the Belt Parkway — as Adler drove Oisk, as Brooklyn faithful called him, from Kennedy Airport to Brooklyn Dodgers Day in the 1980s.

"My father was an obsessive sports fan," said Max Adler, now a reporter for Bloomberg based in, of all places, Los Angeles. "But not to the level of fandom as my grandpa. Poppy loved baseball. But though he came to follow the Mets, those Dodgers definitely occupied a place to where there was really no room for any team other than the Brooklyn Dodgers."

Brooklyn Dodgers were baseball's lovable losers

Once upon a time, there were three Major League Baseball teams in New York. The Yankees in the Bronx, the Giants in Manhattan, and the Dodgers in Brooklyn.

The Giants, who followed the Dodgers west in 1957, moving to San Francisco, first owned the town, winning the World Series in 1905 and beating the Yankees for titles in 1921 and 1922. Then it was the Yankees, who’d moved from Baltimore in 1903, who became baseball royalty led by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and a lineup once known as "Murderer’s Row."

Brooklyn? They were baseball’s lovable losers.

Starting in 1883 as the Grays, Brooklyn went through a series of name changes: Atlantics; Bridegrooms; Grooms; Superbas; Trolley Dodgers; Robins — all before settling for good on the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1932. But, no matter the incarnation, Brooklyn couldn’t win a thing.

The franchise had a cool young outfielder named Casey Stengel, but lost to Babe Ruth and the Boston Red Sox in the 1916 World Series, then lost to Cleveland in the 1920 World Series.

The Dodgers wouldn’t make the World Series again until 1941, beginning a run of 11 World Series battles with the Yankees — the last before this one, when Los Angeles beat New York in 1981.

Between 1941 and 1956 the teams met in the World Series seven times: 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955 and 1956. Though the Dodgers won just one of those matchups, in 1955, the battles produced some of the most iconic moments in postseason history: a perfect game by Yankees pitcher Don Larsen in 1956; a steal of home by Robinson in Game 1 in 1955; an over-the-shoulder catch by Dodgers outfielder Al Gionfriddo to force a Game 7 in 1947.

All that postseason losing to the Yankees gave rise to a well-worn slogan: "Wait ’Til Next Year." Still, Brooklyn fans remained steadfast, though they referred to their team as " D em Bums."

Brooklyn was one out away from tying the 1941 World Series when catcher Mickey Owen dropped a third strike by Tommy Henrich. The Yankees went on to win for a 3-1 series lead.

The ball rolled to the feet of the young on-field public announcer at Ebbets Field, Charlie Clark.

Clark would become the high school sports coordinator at Newsday, where he’d recount the story for young reporters, two of whom will cover the 2024 World Series for FOX: Tom Verducci and former Newsday summer intern Ken Rosenthal.

"I should’ve kicked it," Clark once said of that passed ball.

Yes, he hated the Yankees that much.

After move to L.A., hard feelings

But, how much do some old Brooklyn Dodgers fans still hate the team that once owned their hearts? "To a passion," Bernie Rosen, 92, of Old Bethpage said Wednesday.

Rosen grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, and attended games at Ebbets Field religiously.

"They were right in our backyard," he said. "We’d hop the turnstiles to get on the train. Or we’d take a penny, turn it into a nickel by getting it squished to size on the old trolley tracks. We’d do whatever we could to get in to see a game. That’s how much we loved the Dodgers."

Rosen's mother, Bella, listened to games on a radio while doing dishes. She took him to Ebbets Field. It helped, he said, that Brooklyn had a player named Goody Rosen.

"I hated the Yankees and I hated the Giants, because they were from the Bronx and they were from New York, and I was a Brooklyn person," he said.

"It was that simple. That’s where I belonged, where we belonged: Brooklyn."

A lifetime later Rosen will likely root for the Yankees in the World Series. "It’s the abandonment," he said. "I hate the Yankees. But for what they did, I still hate the Dodgers more."

Longtime Wading River resident Robert Lowery, 83, had never set foot in Brooklyn when he became a Dodgers fan in 1948. He was 8.

And, he said, his love affair, which lasts to this day, had as much to do with the state of the world, and the state of America, as it had to do with baseball.

His family was from Konawa, Oklahoma and held values other than his own. His father opposed integration; Lowery believed in it.

"If you had a certain empathy for what was going on, well ... I felt that automatically passed my allegiance on to the Dodgers," he said. "They had African American players — Robinson, Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella, Junior Gilliam — and I think there were hundreds like me out there in the heartland who loved the Dodgers even though they’d never set foot in Ebbets Field."

Author of seven books, Lowery still watches every game.

"Unlike a lot of people, it didn’t matter to me whether the Dodgers were in Brooklyn — or were in Los Angeles. That wasn’t why I was a fan," he said.

So, which team will they be rooting for in the Adler household?

Leslie and Eric Adler will both be rooting for the Dodgers.

For Max, it remains far more complicated. The O'Malley family sent flowers to Marty Adler's funeral because of his role in founding the now defunct Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Fame.

"Still," Max Adler said, "I can’t find myself rooting for the Yankees. And I definitely can’t root for the team that broke my grandfather’s heart. I guess I want the World Series to go seven games, because I love baseball."

By John Valenti

john.valenti@newsday.com

John Valenti, a reporter at Newsday since 1981, has been honored nationally by the Associated Press and Society of the Silurians for investigative, enterprise and breaking news reporting, as well as column writing, and is the author of “Swee'pea,” a book about former New York playground basketball star Lloyd Daniels. Valenti is featured in the Emmy Award-winning ESPN 30-for-30 film “Big Shot.”