Welcome to The Trolley Dodger. This is a blog covering the Los Angeles Dodgers and affiliated teams and is created by writer and programmer Robert Daeley. You might like to check out Why this site? and Back in the day… for more background.
The site’s name comes from deep in Dodgers history:
The term “Trolley Dodgers” was attached to the Brooklyn ballclub due to the complex maze of trolley cars that weaved its way through the borough of Brooklyn. The name was then shortened to just “Dodgers.”
From the Los Angeles Dodgers article on Wikipedia:
They first earned the nickname “Trolley Dodgers,” later shortened to Dodgers, while at Eastern Park during the 1890s because of the difficulty fans (and players) had in reaching the ballpark due to the number of trolley lines in the area. The name “Trolley Dodgers” is recorded separately in two newspapers on September 3, 1895.
The trolley was associated with the Dodgers even after they moved into Ebbets Field. It’s been said that no one drove to a Brooklyn Dodgers game — everybody arrived on foot. Pete Hamill mentions in his article on that storied park:
Nobody we knew owned a car, so we went there on foot from where I lived, walking across the hills and meadows of Prospect Park. By the time we reached Flatbush Avenue, there was a convergence of all the tribes of Brooklyn: the Jews and the Irish and the Italians, immigrants and their American children; oldtimers who had moved from the waterfront neighborhoods to the higher slopes to be near the great ballpark; tough lean men who had survived Iwo Jima and Anzio and the Hurtgen Forest, places where they had lost the hyphenated prefixes of origin and had become Americans; and of course, all those black Americans, including men with gray hair who had waited for too many decades to see Jack Roosevelt Robinson walk on big league grass.
Times have sure changed, and almost everyone arrives at Dodger games in a car now, but there is still a great convergence of different folks trudging from the various parking lots and melding into a blurry mass of fans cheering on the Boys in Blue. Maybe the trolleys or their 21st Century equivalents will return one day for real, but for now, the spirit of the Trolley Dodgers lives on.