Los Angeles Dodgers

The Los Angeles Dodgers are a Major League Baseball team based in Los Angeles, California, USA. The team is in the Western Division of the National League. more...

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Established in 1883, the team originated in Brooklyn, New York, where it was known as the Brooklyn Dodgers, before moving to Los Angeles before the 1958 season.

Team History

Early Brooklyn baseball

Brooklyn was home to outstanding baseball clubs in the mid-1850s. Eight of 16 participants in the first convention were from Brooklyn, including the Atlantic, Eckford and Excelsior clubs that combined to dominate play for most of the 1860s. Brooklyn helped make baseball commercial, as the locale of the first paid admission games, a series of three all star contests matching New York and Brooklyn in 1858. Brooklyn also featured the first two enclosed baseball grounds, the Union Grounds and the Capitoline Grounds; enclosed, dedicated ballparks accelerated the evolution from amateurism to professionalism.

Despite the success of Brooklyn clubs in the first Association, officially amateur until 1869, they fielded weak teams in the succeeding National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, the first professional league formed in 1871. The Excelsiors no longer challenged for the amateur championship after the war and never entered the professional NA. The Eckfords and Atlantics declined to join until 1872 and thereby lost their best players; Eckford survived only one season and Atlantic four, with losing teams.

The National League replaced the NA in 1876 and granted exclusive territories to its eight members, excluding the Atlantics in favor of the New York Mutuals who had shared the same home grounds. When the Mutuals were expelled by the League, the Hartford Dark Blues club moved in, changed its name to The Brooklyn Hartfords and played its home games at Union Grounds in 1877 before disbanding. They were also the Brooklyn Superbas for a little while.

Brooklyn Dodgers

The Brooklyn baseball club that eventually became the NL Dodgers was established in 1883, and the team joined the upstart American Association the following year. Originally the Brooklyn team was known as the "Atlantics" (a reference to the earlier National Association team), and later as the "Grays." After several of the team's players were married in succession in 1888, the press began referring to the team as the "Brooklyn Bridegrooms." The Bridegrooms won the AA pennant in 1889. Upon switching to the National League in 1890, the franchise became the first of only three major league sports teams, and the only major league baseball team, to win championships in different leagues in consecutive years. (The other two sports teams to win consecutive championships in different leagues were the 1948-1949 Minneapolis Lakers and the 1949-1950 Cleveland Browns.) Eight years passed before any more success followed. Because of joint ownership between the two clubs, several Hall of Fame players were sold to Brooklyn by the soon-to-be-defunct Baltimore Orioles, along with their manager, Ned Hanlon. This catapulted Brooklyn to instant contention, and "Brooklyn Superbas" (as the team was known in the late 1890s because the manager shared a surname with "Hanlon's Superbas," a popular acrobatic troupe at the time) lived up to their name, winning pennants in 1899 and 1900.

Read more at Wikipedia.org