Mostly True Brooklyn Baseball Stories from My Grandparents

By Daniel R. Epstein

I was born 25 years after the Dodgers left Brooklyn, but when they returned to New York this weekend to play the Yankees, it brought back an unexpected flood of memories. My grandmother was a jilted Brooklyn Dodgers fan. When they departed for Los Angeles, she couldn’t join my grandfather and my father in rooting for the Yankees, nor did she adopt the Mets five years later. She simply gave up on baseball.

She passed away when I was 11 and I can’t say we were especially close. I had a deeper relationship with my grandfather, who survived 12 years longer, affording me the chance to get to know him in my teenage and young adult years. I remember my grandmother reading me Chicken Little, and that she was a horrendous cook. Most of all, I remember her tales about the Dodgers.

When someone dies, they are survived by the influences they left on the world, the memories they created, and the tales they told. These are my family’s Brooklyn baseball stories. I don’t want to verify or fact-check them—the mystique is more important than the veracity—but I’ll put an asterisk* on anything uncertain.

Though my grandmother was a Dodgers fan, she was originally from Pittsburgh and moved to Brooklyn as a little girl. The Waners are the only pair of brothers in the Hall of Fame, with Paul and Lloyd each spending at least 15 years with the Pirates. They reunited in Brooklyn toward the end of their careers in 1944, which was significant because it was the Dodgers fans who gave them the nicknames “Big Poison” and “Little Poison.” To tell them apart, they called Paul the “big person,” and Lloyd the “little person,” but when you try to pronounce those monikers with a thick Brooklyn accent, “person” sounds more like “poison.”

My grandmother’s favorite player was Fat Freddie Fitzsimmons. He spent most of his career with the hated New York Giants but was traded to Brooklyn in 1937. When the Dodgers finally—finally!—won the pennant in 1941, he was their ace pitcher.* Some of my grandparents' first dates were cheering for Fat Freddie at Ebbets Field. By the way, he’s listed at 5’11”, 185 pounds.

"Fat Freddie" FitzsimmonsPhoto byPhoto courtesy of SABR

My grandfather’s childhood friend Sam Nahem could’ve been a 20-game winner if not for the war.* They played sandlot ball together in the Jewish neighborhoods of Manhattan, along with Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg, who was a senior in high school when my grandfather was a freshman, and whose best sport was actually soccer.* Nahem was signed by Brooklyn manager Casey Stengel and came up through the Dodgers system, debuting in 1938. He only pitched one game for the Dodgers and a handful more for the Cardinals and Phillies later on. In the army, he was the organizer and player-manager of one of the military’s only integrated clubs, which won the US military championship in Europe in 1945. Still, his brother Joe would’ve been even better than him if he hadn’t hurt his arm.*

The best baserunner in baseball history was Jackie Robinson.* The only two players who could consistently squeak out of a rundown were him and Phil Rizzuto.* Grandpa said Yogi got the tag down in 1955, but Grandma was adamant that Jackie was safe.

My father was born in 1951 and grew up on Flatbush Avenue, just a few blocks from Ebbets Field. He became a Yankees fan anyway—such was the gravitas of Mickey Mantle in those years. Still, some of his earliest memories are of hearing the roar from his apartment when Duke Snider came to bat.

My grandmother didn’t have an easy life. She survived a fire and briefly held the Guinness World Record for living the longest with type 1 diabetes, though I’m glad that record has been broken. The Dodgers left Brooklyn in 1958 and the Epsteins followed a year later, but only went as far as North Jersey. Her love of baseball was left behind on Flatbush Avenue, but she brought her stories with her. Now I have them, and so do you.

Daniel R. Epstein serves as a co-director of the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America. He also writes at Baseball Prospectus and Forbes SportsMoney.