Ebbets Field: The Home of the Brooklyn Dodgers, 1913 to 1957
The story of Ebbets Field in Flatbush, from its opening in 1913 through Jackie Robinson, the near misses against the Yankees and the 1955 title, to the last game in 1957 and the Dodgers' move to Los Angeles.
Ebbets Field was the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers for 45 seasons, from 1913 through 1957, and the club's record across those 45 seasons was 3,657 wins and 3,202 losses, a .533 winning percentage. The park saw nine pennants and one World Series title, in 1955. It also produced a neighborhood's idea of what a ball club was: a small, noisy, crowded park in Flatbush, where the fans sat close enough to the field to be part of the game and where the home team lost so often in October that "wait till next year" became a Brooklyn refrain.
The park is gone, demolished in 1960 and replaced by apartment buildings, but its place in the sport is secure. Jackie Robinson broke the modern color line there in 1947, the Dodgers played the Yankees in seven World Series during its life, and its loss made a point about how much baseball depended on its neighborhoods. All the club numbers in this article come from the historical record, which covers the franchise from 1884 through 2025.
A park built on a bet, 1913
The Dodgers had played in a series of Washington Parks and at Eastern Park before 1913, and none of them ever drew more than about 321,300 fans in a season. The club's president, Charles Ebbets, wanted something better. He assembled a site in Flatbush lot by lot, in an area that had been a patchwork of small properties, and the park he built there strained his finances for years. The new ballpark carried his name from the start.
It belonged to the first generation of steel-and-concrete parks, along with Pittsburgh's Forbes Field and Philadelphia's Shibe Park, both of which opened in 1909. The club that played in it was then known as the Superbas, and then as the Robins from 1914 through 1931, a name taken from its manager, Wilbert Robinson, who ran the club from 1914 to 1931 and finished with a 1,375-1,341 record. In 1932 the name Dodgers came back and stuck.
The Dodgers did not win right away. In the first season at Ebbets Field they went 65-84 and drew 347,000 fans. But the park was built for baseball in a growing city, and in its first big year, 1916, the club went 94-60 and won the pennant, losing the World Series to Boston in five games.
The Robins and the lean years, 1914 to 1940
The first quarter-century at Ebbets Field produced two pennants and a lot of ordinary baseball. The 1920 Robins went 93-61 and won the pennant, losing the World Series to Cleveland five games to two, and the 1924 club went 92-62 and finished second. The stars of the period were Zack Wheat, a left fielder whose 2,804 hits are still the Dodgers' career record and who played 18 seasons for the club, and the pitcher Dazzy Vance, who in 1924 won the Most Valuable Player award and the pitching Triple Crown, going 28-6 with a 2.16 ERA and 262 strikeouts. Babe Herman's .339 is the best career average in club history among players with 3,000 at-bats.
The 1930s were thin. The Dodgers finished above .500 in 1930, 1931 and 1932, then went 65-88 in 1933, 71-81 in 1934, 70-83 in 1935, 67-87 in 1936 and 62-91 in 1937. Attendance in 1934 was 434,188, well below the 1,097,329 the park had drawn in 1930. The turnaround came at the end of the decade, with the arrival of Leo Durocher as manager in 1939. He managed the club through 1948 and won 738 games and lost 565. In 1939 the club went 84-69 and drew 955,668 fans, and in 1941 the Dodgers won 100 games and their first pennant in 21 years.
Night baseball came to the park in 1938, and the first night game at Ebbets Field is remembered for a rival's pitching: Cincinnati's Johnny Vander Meer threw his second consecutive no-hitter there that evening. It was a reminder that the park's best-known moments were not always the home team's.
Reading the attendance table
Attendance is a rough but useful guide to a club's fortunes, and the Ebbets Field years show the whole range. The best year was 1947, with 1,807,526; the second best was 1946, with 1,796,824; and the third was 1949, with 1,633,747. All three came in the first four postwar seasons, when the club was a pennant contender every year. The worst years, apart from the war season of 1918 (83,831) and the opening seasons, were in the 1930s.
The pattern is useful because it separates two stories. One is about the team: attendance rose from 663,087 in 1938 to 1,214,910 in 1941 as the club improved from 69-80 to 100-54. The other is about the neighborhood: after 1947 the club kept winning, with 105 victories in 1953, but the crowds shrank anyway. A club that wins more and draws less has a problem that a better lineup cannot fix, and by the middle of the 1950s that problem had a name, which was the park.
What the park was like
Ebbets Field was small and irregular, and that was part of its charm. The field was built on a compact lot, so the stands pressed close to the foul lines, and the outfield walls were crowded by streets. Right field was extremely short down the line, roughly 300 feet, with a tall wall topped by a scoreboard, and left and center were more ordinary at roughly 350 and just under 400 feet. The exact distances were adjusted a few times over the years, and sources vary, so treat these as approximate.
Several features became famous. The right-field wall carried advertising signs, including a clothier's sign that promised a free suit to any batter who hit it. The scoreboard carried a beer advertisement in which one letter lit up for a hit and another for an error, so the home crowd learned the official scorer's decision at a glance. The main entrance was a rotunda with a marble floor and a chandelier made to look like baseball bats.
The crowd was as much a feature as the architecture. A group of fans called the Sym-Phony played out-of-tune music in the stands, a fan named Hilda Chester rang a cowbell and the team was affectionately known as the Bums. Ebbets Field had a closeness that a big stadium could not duplicate.
The Dodgers in Ebbets Field: the numbers
The seasons at Ebbets Field divide into three periods: the early Robins, who won in 1916 and 1920 and were otherwise inconsistent; the lean 1930s; and the great postwar teams. The table shows the nine pennant years, with the World Series result.
| Year | Record | World Series result |
|---|---|---|
| 1916 | 94-60 | Lost to Boston 1-4 |
| 1920 | 93-61 | Lost to Cleveland 2-5 |
| 1941 | 100-54 | Lost to Yankees 1-4 |
| 1947 | 94-60 | Lost to Yankees 3-4 |
| 1949 | 97-57 | Lost to Yankees 1-4 |
| 1952 | 96-57 | Lost to Yankees 3-4 |
| 1953 | 105-49 | Lost to Yankees 2-4 |
| 1955 | 98-55 | Beat Yankees 4-3 |
| 1956 | 93-61 | Lost to Yankees 3-4 |
The Dodgers had winning records in 27 of the 45 seasons at Ebbets Field, and they were better still after the war. From 1946 through 1957 they won at least 84 games every year, finishing first six times and second four times, with a high of 105 wins in 1953.
Robinson, Reese and the Boys of Summer
The postwar club was one of the great teams of its era. Its core was Pee Wee Reese at shortstop (16 seasons, 2,170 hits and 1,338 runs, the club record for runs), Duke Snider in center field (389 home runs, still the club record), Gil Hodges at first base (361 home runs), Roy Campanella behind the plate (three MVP awards, in 1951, 1953 and 1955) and Carl Furillo in right. Don Newcombe, Rookie of the Year in 1949, won both the Cy Young Award and the MVP in 1956. On the staff in the mid-1950s was Johnny Podres, who would win the seventh game of the 1955 World Series.
None of them mattered as much as Jackie Robinson, who made his debut at Ebbets Field on April 15, 1947, the first Black player in the major leagues in the modern era. He was Rookie of the Year that season, the MVP in 1949 and a regular for 10 seasons, with 947 runs scored and a lifetime .311 batting average for the Dodgers. The 1947 Dodgers drew 1,807,526 fans, the largest crowd total in the park's history. That is an average of about 23,500 over 77 home dates.
Robinson's career deserves a full telling of its own. The point here is that Ebbets Field was where the change happened in front of a home crowd, in a borough where the club had a devoted following.
October at Ebbets Field
The World Series of the period produced the most famous moments in the park's history, and most of them were losses. In 1941, in Game 4 against the Yankees, catcher Mickey Owen failed to hold a third strike on a swing, allowing a batter to reach first, and the Yankees rallied to win. In 1947, in Game 4, Yankee pitcher Bill Bevens carried a no-hitter into the ninth inning, and Cookie Lavagetto's pinch-hit double ended it and won the game for the Dodgers. Neither changed who won its Series: the Yankees won the first in five games and the second in seven.
The pattern was repeated in 1949, 1952, 1953 and 1956. The Dodgers reached the World Series seven times between 1941 and 1956, and six times they lost to the Yankees. In 1955, finally, they beat the Yankees four games to three, and Podres threw a shutout in the seventh game. It was played at Yankee Stadium rather than in Brooklyn, so the borough's only title was clinched in the Bronx. In 1951 the Dodgers lost the pennant to the Giants in a playoff, a contest settled by Bobby Thomson's home run at the Polo Grounds. For the neighbor's park, see the Polo Grounds and its odd shape.
Before 1969, only the two league champions met in October, with no divisions and no playoff rounds, which explains why a club that won 97 games and finished second, as the 1951 Dodgers did, could go home with nothing. How the MLB postseason works explains the format that replaced it.
The decline in attendance
Ebbets Field drew well in the late 1940s, but the numbers fell as the 1950s went on, even while the club kept winning. After the 1947 peak of 1,807,526, the totals dropped to 1,633,747 in 1949, 1,282,628 in 1951, 1,088,704 in 1952 and 1,033,589 in 1955, the year the club won the title. In 1957 the club drew 1,028,258.
The reasons were the ones that affected many city ballparks at the time. The park was small, roughly 32,000 seats, and had limited parking in a neighborhood where more and more fans were moving away or arriving by car. The surroundings had changed and the stadium had not. The Dodgers' owner, Walter O'Malley, concluded that the club needed a new and larger ballpark, with parking, and began looking for a site.
The end, 1957
The effort to build a new Brooklyn park ran into the city's power broker Robert Moses, who favored a site in Queens and not the location in Brooklyn that O'Malley preferred. O'Malley was courted by Los Angeles, and in 1957, with the New York Giants also preparing to leave for San Francisco, the Dodgers decided to move. The last game at Ebbets Field was played on September 24, 1957, a 2-0 win over Pittsburgh in front of a crowd of about 6,700, far below capacity.
The Dodgers went 84-70 that season and finished third. The team that opened in Los Angeles in 1958 played in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for four seasons, drawing 2,253,887 in its best year there, and then moved to Dodger Stadium in 1962. Ebbets Field was demolished beginning in early 1960, with a wrecking ball painted to look like a baseball, and apartment buildings now stand on the site.
Why the park still matters
There are three reasons the park has outlived its use. The first is Robinson, whose debut there is one of the few moments in baseball history that is also a moment in American history. The second is the Dodgers' long years of near misses against the Yankees, which gave the club an identity as the underdog of the city. The third is what the move showed about the business: that a ballpark, an owner and a city could drift apart, and a franchise with a loyal base could leave.
The amateur players who filled the Dodgers' farm system in those years did so before baseball's draft existed, which began in 1965. The club signed young players directly and built one of the largest minor-league systems in the sport. For the later history of that system, see the history of the amateur draft and signing bonuses.
Common questions
When was Ebbets Field open? From 1913 through 1957. The Dodgers moved to Los Angeles for the 1958 season.
Who was Ebbets? Charles Ebbets was the club's president and owner who built the park and gave it his name.
Where was it? In the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York.
Did the Dodgers ever clinch a World Series at Ebbets Field? No. They won their only Brooklyn title in 1955, over the Yankees, with the seventh game played in the Bronx.
Is the park still standing? No. It was demolished in 1960 and the site is now housing.
Where to go next
For the wider story of the club, from the Atlantics of 1884 to the present, the franchise's team page is at Los Angeles Dodgers, and for the era's other great parks read the Polo Grounds, Forbes Field and Shibe Park. The ballparks and fans topic page has current coverage of ballparks old and new.