When New York Yankees second baseman Gleyber Torres faces first pitch of the 2024 World Series on Friday, he will have to travel about 2,500 miles to be there. However, there was a time when any Yankees player on the road against the Dodgers could walk. Long before the likes of Shohei Ohtani, Clayton Kershaw or even Fernando Valenzuela, real estate mogul Charles Byrne placed ads in the New York Clipper, looking for “intelligent men, not thugs.” corner of the field, who happen to possess some skills as a player but have habits and behavior that make them unsuitable for team spirit”.

In 1883, Byrne was founding a baseball team – the team that would later become known as the Brooklyn Dodgers. The next 30 years saw Brooklyn win four more NL championships. The team is also known by another name. As fans began to avoid streetcars, which became one of the main means of transportation in the county, the team was nicknamed the Trolley Dodgers, and later, simply the Dodgers. But in the two decades after 1920 that saw no more wins and increasing hardship on the field, the Dodgers’ reputation shifted from winning machine to lovable loser.

In 1939, sports cartoonist Willard Mullin asked a taxi driver how the Dodgers were doing. “Dem Bums are bums,” he replied, and Mullin’s next cartoon, “Brooklyn Bum,” depicted Emmett Kelly’s circus clown character “Weary Willie” as a personification of the team. is failing, has defined the recession period. However, the next decade saw an upturn. After winning the 1941 championship, the Dodgers won six championships in the 10 years from 1947 to 1956, fueled by the likes of Jackie Robinson, the first black player in the modern major leagues.