Brooklyn, 2019: Who’s a Cyclone?

I was like many other kids born in the late 1950s or early 1960s. My Dad, William E. McDonald, a thirty-year US Navy Chief Petty Officer who was forever known as “The Chief,” was a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. When I arrived in February of 1961, I became—along with Dad—a New York Mets fan. This was a year after Ebbets Field had been demolished (following the 1958 exodus of both the Bums of Brooklyn and the Giants of Manhattan). Our special connection to the National League New York team born around the same time as I was remained visceral, long after The Chief died in September of 1980 (the Mets started playing in 1962, to fill the void left by the loss of the Dodgers and Giants). In addition, the memory of his childhood team, which had gone West when he was thirty-five years old, was something that I embraced, first through talks with him and later when I began working for New York City Transit in Downtown Brooklyn in 1985.

In the twenty years that I was based in Brooklyn, one of the things that I did was try and get more of a taste of how it was when the Dodgers were there. I did this by talking to some coworkers and friends who had grown up in Brooklyn rooting for the Bums. On more than one occasion, I went by the site of Ebbets Field, which had opened in 1913 and was now an apartment building, as well as its predecessor, Washington Park, just a few miles away. In 1991, I attended a memorable presentation at the Brooklyn Historical Society Museum about the old Dodgers, where I met one of the team’s fine pitchers, Clem Labine. And I was there when they dedicated a plaque in 1995 at the site of the old Brooklyn Dodgers offices, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of Jackie Robinson in 1945. When I started writing baseball poetry in 1989, the Brooklyn Dodgers were a frequent topic, including what I would consider a signature piece of mine called “The Park That Isn’t There.” Then in 2001, the New York Mets got a new farm team in Coney Island called the Brooklyn Cyclones.

When my Dad died in 1980, he was in the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital. He had been in and out of the bigger VA Hospital on Twenty-Third Street in Manhattan a number of times from 1975–80, but when he was about to pass on, they sent him to the one in Kingsbridge Avenue in The Bronx. One of the things that struck me was that he was a guy from Queens, once a Brooklyn fan, who had died in The Bronx. For whatever reason, this reminded me that in 1955, when the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only World Championship of the modern World Series (1903-present), they took the final game at Yankee Stadium in The Bronx and not at home at Ebbets Field. One of the things that I imagined when the Cyclones began playing in Coney Island in 2001 was that one day a professional team from Brooklyn (albeit a Short Season, Single “A” team) might finally win a Championship on their own turf for the first time ever. When that happened, I made a promise to myself to be there.

By 2019, MCU Park in Coney Island had cemented itself as a vital part of the Brooklyn landscape. The little ballpark just off the famous boardwalk had revitalized the area when it arrived as Keyspan Park in 2001. It was the home of the short-season Single “A” Brooklyn Cyclones, the first professional baseball team in Brooklyn since the Dodgers went West following the 1957 MLB season. In that magical inaugural 2001 season, the Cyclones went 52–24 (the best record in the New York-Penn League), before taking out the rival Staten Island Yankees (also in their first season) in the best-of-three NYPL semifinals. In Game One of the Finals against the Williamsport Crosscutters on September 10, 2001, the Cyclones prevailed, 7–4, at...