Bridegrooms and Bums: How the Dodgers went from Brooklyn’s darling to Los Angeles’ colossus

When the New York Yankees’ Gleyber Torres faces the first pitch of the 2024 World Series, he will have traveled roughly 2,500 miles to be there. There was a time, though, when facing the Dodgers was a walkable distance.

When New York Yankees second baseman Gleyber Torres faces the first pitch of the 2024 World Series on Friday, he will have traveled roughly 2,500 miles to be there. There was a time, though, when any Yankees player on his way to face the Dodgers could have walked. Long before the likes of Shohei Ohtani, Clayton Kershaw or even Fernando Valenzuela, real estate magnate Charles Byrne put an ad in the New York Clipper, looking for “men of intelligence and not corner-lot toughs who happen to possess some skill as a player but whose habits and ways make them unfit for thorough team work.” It was 1883, and Byrne was forming a baseball team – one which would eventually go on to be known as the Brooklyn Dodgers. Baseball teams had been competing out of Brooklyn as early as 1849, but Byrne meant business with this venture. Having convinced his brother-in-law Joseph Doyle and casino owner Ferdinand “Gus” Abell to help him finance a team, Byrne spent $32,000 (nearly $1 million today) to build Washington Park, so called because a stone house in the area had been used by General George Washington during the Battle of Long Island in the Revolutionary War.