DEVIL RAYS
Rays, Dodgers Go Retro Tonight
Published: Jun 22, 2007
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ST. PETERSBURG - The Devil Rays will set baseball back a half-century tonight.
This time, we should enjoy it.
The Rays will take on the look of the old St. Petersburg Saints on Turn Back the Clock Night at Tropicana Field. The visiting Los Angeles Dodgers will pay homage to their roots by wearing blue and gray throwbacks to the Brooklyn era.
Their roots and mine.
I was knee high to Pee Wee Reese in the early 1950s, when my family lived on the top floor of a three-story brick building in the borough's Flatbush section. The street level housed a small open-air diner and a drug store at the corner of Church and Nostrand avenues. The bustling intersection was filled with the sounds of passing trolley cars, buses, automobiles and below, rumbling subway trains.
We heard the most joyful noises while sitting on the roof on summer days and nights - those of fellow Dodgers fans cheering on our flanneled heroes up Bedford Avenue at Ebbets Field. The rest of us religiously followed the action through the radio calls of young broadcaster Vin Scully.
Not long after the lordly Yankees bowed to the '55 Bums - by then a misnomer - in the World Series, my parents were plotting a move to the open spaces of Long Island. Two years later, Dodgers owner and ultimate bum Walter O'Malley silenced the old neighborhood by hauling our beloved Boys of Summer to a sterile new home on the opposite coast.
Carl Erskine pitched a dozen years for the Dodgers and posted a winning record in each of his 10 seasons in Brooklyn. Eight months after his final game, "Oisk" was among those who stood by solemnly on Feb. 23, 1960, when a steel wrecking ball leveled its first swings at our hallowed baseball grounds.
"As much as I hated that visitors dugout," Erskine said, "when they dropped that big ball - and they had it painted like a baseball, white with stitches on it - on top of that concrete dugout and caved it in, I got sick. I left. I didn't want to see it."
With the rival New York Giants also defecting to California after the 1957 season, no one saw National League baseball in the city again until 1962.
I immediately adopted the newborn Mets, whose blue and orange colors serve as lasting tributes to the departed Dodgers and Giants, respectively. I treasure the memories of the only Mets game I attended during their two seasons at the storied Polo Grounds, which later was demolished by the same wrecking ball that toppled Ebbets Field.
Fittingly, the first pitch I saw was delivered by former Brooklyn right-hander Roger Craig. Unfortunately, his ex-Dodgers teammate and current Rays adviser Don Zimmer already had been traded by the Mets, less than a month into that inaugural season.
Other Brooklyn favorites eventually played for my new team - Duke Snider, Gil Hodges and Clem Labine were among the most notable - but all I could do was imagine being among the adoring crowds who witnessed their glory years.
My father helped by sharing tales of his peering through knot holes and other openings in the wooden fences of Ebbets Field when he didn't have the nickel required to join Hilda Chester - the cowbell-ringing First Lady of Flatbush - in the bleachers.
Tonight at 7:10, more than a half-century late, I'll finally see players wearing Brooklyn in blue script across their chests.
Imagine that.
Reporter Bob Bellone can be reached at (813) 259-7303 or bbellone@tampatrib.com.
