A VERY GOOD FIT

Leo Durocher once said that if anyone had asked him which was more likely to move out of Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Bridge or the Brooklyn Dodgers, he’d have put his dough on the bridge.

And for the Dodgers to abandon Brooklyn for Los Angeles, of all places -- the city that H.L. Mencken called “Moronia,” and Norman Mailer christened “a constellation of plastic” -- no, no, it just couldn’t happen.

It did happen, and Brooklyn has never, ever gotten over it. To this day, Roz Wyman -- back then a young city councilwoman crusading for major league baseball in L.A. -- can’t go to a dinner party in New York without someone pointing her out as “the lady who took the Dodgers” and someone refusing to speak to her. In 1957, W. Averell Harriman, New York’s governor and a Brooklyn fan, desperately, preposterously warned the team that if it moved to L.A., it would have to cancel night games because of the smog. And also in 1957, a furious New York sportswriter named Dick Young wrote, “To hell with the L.A. Dodgers . . . it’s preposterous -- the Dodgers not only belong in Brooklyn, they are Brooklyn.”

Are the Dodgers Los Angeles the way they were Brooklyn?

Nowadays, maybe not. Maybe it’d be no big deal anymore, landing a big baseball team. We let the Rams leave for Orange County, and we practically shoved the Raiders on a plane back to Oakland, and the city hasn’t shriveled up and died for want of pro football.

Los Angeles is a world city now, more than comfortable in its own skin, whether that skin is tan or melanin, wrinkled or Botoxed. Oh, but in 1957, Los Angeles had a chip on its civic shoulder the size of one of Duke Kahanamoku’s surfboards. The place was a joke, a burg, a backwater, wanting in couth and chic. L.A. took itself seriously because no one else did. A big-name team would draw big-name business. Getting the Dodgers would show ‘em. That’d shut up the jokesters, all right.

So Los Angeles became Ahab hunting a complaisant whale, Jason and the Argonauts questing for Walter O’Malley’s Golden Fleece, which wasn’t exactly playing hard to get. The overanxious mayor, Norris Poulson, scolded his residents for even questioning the deal; on his travels, he said, people were always “wondering whether Los Angeles is a bush league town or whether we’re a major league town.”

The Los Angeles chapter of the Baseball Writers Assn. of America met in solemn congress and passed a resolution. The team that Brooklyn had lovingly derided as “dem bums” would henceforth be written of only as “the Dodgers.” Any reference to them as “bums” would be officially frowned upon. When the team disappeared from Brooklyn, “bums” all but disappeared from the headlines.

On opening day, at the Coliseum, the present and future governor watched. Gregory Peck and Jimmy Stewart and Edward G. Robinson and Jack Lemmon and Nat King Cole ornamented the crowd.

Six weeks later, as the city voted on the Chavez Ravine stadium deal, Angelenos were hammered with a five-hour live Election Day “Dodgerthon” on KTTV. Groucho Marx and Ronald Reagan improbably shared the stage with the Catholic Youth Organization and the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and the Urban League. And to seal the deal, the Dodgers beat the Cubs. All Vin Scully said to them was, “Don’t forget to vote,” and they didn’t. O’Malley had his Chavez Ravine.

The first year the Dodgers played in L.A., they came in seventh, and people booed O’Malley on his way into the Coliseum. The second year, they went to the Series, and when Scully -- the man who earned the Dodgers’ first million-dollar paycheck -- announced on the final out, “We go to Chicago,” they say you could hear the car horns shrieking from the Santa Susana Pass to San Pedro.

It’s 2008 now. Los Angeles has been host to two summer Olympics and two national political conventions. It has raised up museums and music centers and concert halls and restaurants. Does this long-ago triumphal matrimony with the Dodgers and the City of Angels mean much anymore?

It does. The Dodgers are as hometown as any immigrants who declare themselves to be Angelenos. They haven’t pulled up stakes and left like the gridiron guys. They don’t play in an arena that looks like the frantic inside of a pinball machine, like the Lakers. They haven’t priced out the working stiffs to make room for the high and mighty. Sure, the ratio isn’t ideal. For every fan inside Dodger Stadium, there may be 20 Angelenos driving by outside, snarling at the traffic jams. Doesn’t matter.

Six months before the Dodgers threw out their first L.A. pitch, the National Weather Service’s record keeper was called upon to declare that their future home, Chavez Ravine, might have been designed just for baseball -- protected from night chills, from wind and fog, with temperatures that were unfailing balm to the body and the spirit.

As the weather forecaster promised, the air in Chavez Ravine is still, and like the valley of Shangri-La, time stands still too. No Wiis, no iPods, no camera phones can coax time or physics to move faster than nature has always allowed. Chavez Ravine remains a human place that answers to a human scale. The white ball lifts and soars and descends at the same speed that it always has, since an ancient someone first smacked a rock with a stick. Men throw and run and lift their arms to catch as they did a hundred years ago, a hundred centuries ago.

Charles Ebbets visited L.A. in 1915, and he was speaking of Brooklyn when he said then, “Any city will support a winning ball team, but its support of a loser team year after year is the real test.”

The same can be said of a team that supports its crowd. It’s true that when we get up to stretch in the seventh inning, we often keep going, right on out the parking lot. Allan Malamud believed it’s because fans could listen to Vin Scully on their transistor radios and then their car radios all the way home and not miss a thing. And why shouldn’t we, here in the city that perfected the virtual, make it seamless from the real? It’s just our way of doing things here in Greater Hollywood.

At those twilights when the sky cooperates as if it were staged by the lighting director from one of the studios a few canyons away, when the hills that ring the stadium at the magic hour are a palisade of black palm trees, and the stadium lights come on up above the city and glow like a crown of candles on St. Lucia’s Day -- even if you’re not there, you’re glad the Dodgers are.

We have been faithful to them, in our fashion.

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