October never felt so cold.
Despite a recently expanded postseason, New York did not field a playoff team for the first time in nine years. Since the Yankees’ most recent trip to the World Series, more than half of MLB teams (16) have been to the Fall Classic. Following the Yankees’ worst season in 31 years, the most successful franchise in American sports will establish its longest drought without a pennant in more than a century. The Mets finished with the fourth-worst record in the National League (75-87) after building the most expensive roster. It is now 37 years since the Mets traveled down the Canyon of Heroes.
New York has claimed more than 29 percent of all World Series titles — and produced 14 Subway Series — with four franchises combining to win 33 championships. Even dating back to the founding of the National League (1876), New York has endured only one drought without a champion longer than the current stretch. In two years, the Mets and Yankees may match it.
The present is unfulfilling. The future is uninspiring.
This is how you end up spending a fall morning in Brooklyn, staring at a 26-story gravestone.
How can you love baseball without appreciating its history? It is what distinguishes our nation’s former favorite pastime from its peers. How can a New Yorker love baseball without feeling like limbs are missing, without yearning for a portal to Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds?
You can miss what you never knew, if it evokes envy, anger and sorrow. The Golden Age of Baseball shines brightly in black-and-white film. It is described as if Gil Hodges had breakfast with you before leaving for the ballpark each day.
Nostalgia knows to filter out the stretches of futility, the uncomfortable seats and cramped concourses. It leaves you with Willie, Mickey and The Duke, the Shot Heard ‘Round the World and a world that no longer exists.
Change is inevitable. Nothing else was.
Brooklyn’s wound was deepest because no team was more beloved than the Dodgers, because its players were its neighbors. The scars of sudden loss never fade.
So you stand on Bedford Avenue, staring at a brick wall with large white letters — E-B-B-E-T-S F-I-E-L-D — transfixed as if it’s the Grand Canyon or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. How could heaven have stood here?
Countless people walk by the large, unremarkable apartment complex without glancing at what was the borough’s holiest ground. The Dodgers have called Los Angeles home for 65 years.
Children’s laughter echoes from the Jackie Robinson School across McKeever Place. The noise of nearby construction of luxury high-rises rings out. Change is coming. It’s always en route. This parcel of land was once part of Pigtown. The farms are long gone. There is little more evidence of the most famous building in Brooklyn’s history.
A small gray sign is embedded in the apartment building. “1962” — when the complex was built — is chiseled within an oversized baseball. Below, it states this is the former site of Ebbets Field. The inscription is blocked by a hedge.
You walk down Sullivan Place and turn toward the maintenance office. A building employee is rolling a garbage can past Roy Campanella’s office. Beside a parking lot, a metallic pentagon is tucked into the pavement, proclaiming it as the former site of home plate, the location where Jackie Robinson integrated baseball.
Pride and melancholy wrestle for top billing. It is a tip of a cap and a slap in the face. There is no good way to dispose of the dead.
Even if the Dodgers still belonged to Brooklyn, Ebbets Field would be gone. The intimate shrine was already past its prime in 1957. It belonged to a city that has been home to four Madison Square Gardens and is pushing for a fifth. That replaced baseball’s most famous venue (Yankee Stadium) with a billion-dollar knockoff.
You look at the plate and try to see Robinson steal home. You expected to feel more. You close your eyes and imagine the faithful walking toward the rotunda, but then open them to find residents making half-hearted efforts to clean up after their dogs. You circle the city block that housed the stadium. It feels like fantasy any of it could have existed. Your mind can only travel so far before you’re brought back to what’s in front of you — a Burger King.
Time marches forward. It is the only option.
Fans felt sick.
The smells that wafted from the Gowanus Canal and nearby factories made it difficult to sit through Dodgers games at Washington Park. A Whole Foods now hugs that water, down the block from what may be the oldest surviving piece of any major league ballpark.
On Third Avenue — two miles from Ebbets Field — stands a 20-foot high stone wall, protecting a ConEd storage facility. Some say the Washington Park remnant dates back to the 19th century. The Dodgers — once known as the Superbas, Bridegrooms, Trolley Dodgers and Robins — played in the 18,000-seat stadium from 1898 until leaving for Ebbets Field in 1913. Others contend the wall was built in 1914 by the Brooklyn Tri-Tops, a Federal League team that existed for two years before the nascent league lost its battle with the majors. Neither side has definitive proof.
By the youngest estimate, the wall has stood as long as Wrigley Field. The grave is unmarked. No pedestrians pause, or shorten their stride, to view the unflattering relic, slathered in chipped white paint, with hints of graffiti.
On the other side of the wall, bleacher seats went for a quarter. The grandstand cost another 50-cent piece. When demand exceeded capacity, fans watched along the foul lines and in the outfield.
Dodgers center fielder Casey Stengel debuted with four hits at Washington Park. It’s where Cy Young took the mound for the final time. On multiple occasions, the Dodgers were arrested for playing baseball on Sunday, which wasn’t legalized in New York until 1919. It was the home of Hall of Famer Willie Keeler and the 1899 NL champs — whose .682 win percentage (101-47) was the franchise’s best until 2020 — as well as the winners of the 1900 Chronicle-Telegraph Cup — over Honus Wagner’s Pirates — marking Brooklyn’s only postseason series victory until 1955.
It was the second Washington Park.
Make a left heading south on Third Avenue and head a block down Third Street and you’ll meet the original. Past the view of Brooklyn’s ever-changing skyline is the Old Stone House, sandwiched between a turf athletic field and a playground. The reconstructed farm house that held George Washington’s outnumbered soldiers during the Battle of Long Island became the Dodgers’ first clubhouse more than a century later.
In 1884 — roughly 35 years before Jackie Robinson was born — Washington Park welcomed Toledo’s Moses Fleetwood Walker, the first Black player in the majors. The field also hosted three pre-modern World Series, including 1889, the only Subway Series to take place before the subway was built.
It was also home to ice baseball. Yes, ice baseball.
Hardball’s marriage with skating started in Rochester and made its debut in Brooklyn on Feb. 4, 1861, in front of nearly 12,000 fans. Games lasted five innings and featured a bright red ball. Players were permitted to overskate the bases carved into the ice. Newspapers regularly covered the contests, before freezing temperatures and a comedy of errors led to the sport’s decline before the 20th century.
Hilltop Park has experienced a similar afterlife to Washington Park. Visitors follow historic footpaths for other reasons.
The New York-Presbyterian medical center has stood at 168th Street and Broadway in Upper Manhattan for 95 years. In 1903, its grounds gave birth to the Yankees.
The hastily constructed wooden ballpark was the first home of New York’s first American League team. Hilltop Park served that purpose for only 10 years, before the New York Institute for the Blind declined to renew the then-Highlanders’ lease of the land.
In the stadium’s short lifespan, it witnessed Cy Young pitch a no-hitter at age 41. It saw Ty Cobb rush into the grandstand and beat up a verbally abusive fan who had lost all but two fingers in a printing press accident. “That man has no hands,” someone yelled during the altercation, prompting Cobb to allegedly respond: “I don’t care if he has no feet!” The incident earned the Tigers legend a $50 fine and an indefinite suspension that ended 10 days later. It was also home to the New York Giants in 1911, after Polo Grounds III was destroyed by fire.
Hilltop Park also hosted the first notable chapter of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry.
The Highlanders and Boston Pilgrims had battled for first place throughout the 1904 season, when the World Series wasn’t held because the Giants refused to play the winners of the upstart American League.
On the final day of the season — in front of 28,854 fans — New York ace Jack Chesbro, who amassed an unbreakable record of 41 wins that season, gave up the pennant-clinching run on a ninth-inning spitball that sailed high for a wild pitch. The Boston Globe declared it “The greatest victory ever won in outdoor sport.”
Beside a light post, at the edge of an inconspicuous concrete walking path within the massive hospital complex, is a small plaque signifying where home plate once sat. It is behind a black net and metal scaffolding bars.
It cannot be touched.
It is a mile from Hilltop Park’s home plate to a batter’s box at the Polo Grounds. The Yankees made the move in 1913, when the John T. Brush Stairway — named for the former Giants owner — was opened to provide a quick descent from Coogan’s Bluff to the Polo Grounds ticket booths.
Atop the cliff — 175 feet above the Harlem River — fans watched games for free. The staircase — the last remaining artifact of the Giants’ existence in New York, offers an engraved reminder at the midway point — was restored a decade ago, allowing you to travel as fans and players once did.
On the Harlem River Driveway, you can see Yankee Stadium between the 30-story Polo Grounds Towers. The same wrecking ball used in 1960 to clear space for the Ebbets Field Apartments took down the Polo Grounds a little more than four years later..
At the 1,614-unit public housing complex — 57 percent of homes have a household income below $20,000, according to a 2019 city policy brief — yesteryear is found in crumbs.
The orange and black lettering on signs. The sun-bleached plaque at the approximate location of home plate. The multi-colored murals, displaying the bathtub-shaped stadium and Willie Mays. The “Say Hey Kid” is now 92. In center field, kids attend P.S. 46.
History’s heartbeat is stronger directly across Frederick Douglass Boulevard at Holcombe Rucker Park, where a basketball is bouncing. Before leaving, you take one more look at the land where locals fell in love with Christy Mathewson, Carl Hubbell and Mel Ott. There was no need.
It is best left for books, for highlights, for memories, for conversations. It is best left undisturbed.
You can’t find what you’re looking for.