A Sense of Boomer: Michael Diamond, Born a Dodgers Fan

Editor’s Note: Michael Diamond, father of Benjamin Diamond, was born in Brooklyn in 1945. He experienced the rare occurrence in New York sports history by having his favorite baseball team move away from the city — all the way to the West Coast — leaving a gaping hole in a young fan’s heart. This is his story.

When I was 10 years old, the world was perfect. Well, almost. I was only five feet tall and the fattest kid on my block in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. My grandmother (my Bubbie) was an amazing baker, and every day I ate every pound of cake or other dessert she baked. So even if I was put on a street stickball team, since I was neither a great fielder nor a great hitter (I wore Coke bottle thick glasses to compensate for a serious case of near-sightedness), it was “contractually” understood that if any kid showed up who could play better than I could, I was to go to the bench/nearest stoop and watch. And we played a lot of two-sewer stickball, and I got to watch a lot. 

The celebration began with Don Hoak (left), Johnny Podres and Roy Campanella converging as World Champions (1955).

But in 1955, the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series by beating the Yankees, 2-0 in Game 7, and perfect was the only way to describe the feelings that flooded my neighborhood. Future Hall of Famers: Don Newcombe, Sandy Koufax, Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella and coach Walter Alston were the core of a team that was destined to win many World Series, and keep Brooklyn at the earthquake-proof center of the baseball universe. I was determined to celebrate every one of those World Series wins by losing weight to show how a fan responds and bonds with greatness. I couldn’t imagine anything ever changing that sense that being born in Brooklyn was a magical gift from those in heaven who took charge of where we arrived on this planet. But then 1956 happened and the Dodgers lost the World Series to the despised Yankees and my 11-year old world crashed into what I thought was temporary oblivion.

But even more brutal was the 1958 move the Dodgers made to Los Angeles, California, and losing weight was a distant second to not losing my mind. Players that I considered family and whose statistics I knew by heart were now playing three thousand miles away in a city I had never been to and was determined to never even consider visiting. The team’s owner Walter Francis O'Malley was so hated by Brooklyn Dodger fans after the move to the West Coast, that it was said, "If you asked a Brooklyn Dodger fan, if you had a gun with only two bullets in it and were in a room with Hitler, Stalin and O'Malley, who would you shoot? The answer: O'Malley, twice!"

My revenge was to finally lose the weight that my Bubbie had cemented to my body with her amazing desserts. And since I loved baseball, and the former New York Giants were now playing in San Francisco, I had limited options. My dad had bought a TV so we could watch Dodgers games.  That meant my choices came down to either throwing the Dumont TV with a 14” screen out of the living room window or commit the mortal sin of becoming a Yankee fan. And for many years, especially when the now LA Dodgers were winning five World Series rings - metal hoops wrapped around my heart that made even inhaling a painful reminder of how much I had lost when the Dodgers left Brooklyn, I rooted quietly for the damn Yankees, MLB’s record holder of 27 World Series rings.

And because life has a randomness that makes us all part of a giant experiment in testing our sports loyalty, I need to add one more layer to my original Brooklyn Dodger mega fandom. I was attending Midwood High School in Flatbush and after my senior year, before heading off to college, I played on a 1962 summer league softball team. Stickball was played with a pink rubber Spaulding, smaller than a baseball, that had to be hit with a thin broom-handle bat – for me as impossible a feat as dunking a basketball. A softball is huge by comparison so I actually could hit and even more importantly field fly balls that challenged my skills in right field. By that summer, I sprouted to 6’1” and was about 220 lbs and eager to be athletically in the game. One of the mysteries in my life is how fast-pitch men’s softball is now only played by extremely talented and highly skilled women in colleges across the country which I admit I do enjoy watching. Slow-pitch softball is still played by men but it has no resemblance to the high-speed game and the only danger is if a batter nods off while at the plate waiting for the high-arcing pitch to pass through the hitting zone.

But men’s “real” softball was as intense an experience as one could hope for in a city full of asphalt school yards. The pitcher wound up and with an underarm motion hurled flaming meteors at the plate forty-five feet away. If the ball slipped out of the pitcher’s hand the word “soft” was meaningless as the batter’s bones were broken or their skull cracked if the miss-aimed ball struck the batter. The pitcher on our team was the Midwood basketball coach, who was 6’3”, 230 lbs and basically unhittable. But one summer afternoon, a player on the other team proved to be unstoppable. The fence in left field was 200 feet from home plate and over 20 feet high. Every time this hitter came to bat, he not only clouted the ball over the fence but onto the roof of the four-story grade school that was beyond the fence. After each home run our pitcher looked ready to tear his hair out, but when the game was over our pitcher embraced the home-run hitter and then introduced him to the rest of us. (Please take into account that TV viewing of baseball games resembled watching Lilliputians on a large postage stamp running around on a black and white planet – a color TV cost as much as a car. Early TV broadcasts of baseball games had five cameras and one was in the booth with the announcer. The only means of knowing what a player really looked like was from baseball trading cards.)

When our previously unhittable pitcher proudly introduced the dominating hitter our collective jaws dropped. The hitter’s name was Gil Hodges, the former Brooklyn first baseman, who had a day off from the Mets where he ended his playing career. (He also happened to live three blocks away from Midwood High School, and would go on to be the manager of the 1969 World Champion Amazin’ Mets.) He was friends with our pitcher who accepted the brutal truth that to a professional baseball player with Hodges’ skills, a softball might as well have been a soccer ball because it was going to be pounded over the left-field fence every time it tried to cross the plate. It was a grand way to relive for a few fleeting hours the passion and respect I once had for the Brooklyn Dodgers who still had a central place in my heart next to the space I grudgingly sublet to the Yankees.