Children learned arithmetic by calculating player batting averages, Mr. Sanders said. They cheered the league’s first black player, Jackie Robinson, and the left-handed pitcher Sandy Koufax, who was Jewish like Mr. Sanders.

They came to understand that the local ice cream man, surrounded by curious crowds on summer evenings around 7 p.m., was also a bookie taking bets on the Dodgers and New York Giants.

“The kids were really the cover,” said Steve Slavin, a friend who has known Mr. Sanders since their teens. “We didn’t know. We were just very happy that he came around.”

Mr. Sanders’s memories were more wholesome. There was the Dodgers shirt that arrived in the mail one day when he was home sick from school — “a very meaningful present for me,” he said quietly — and the time, at age 6, when Mr. Sanders grew so animated after a Dodgers victory that he banged into a closet door, making a dent.

In the interview, he spoke of the villainous Yankees (“with all their money and all their, you know”) and ticked off a full starting lineup when prompted: “Gil Hodges played first. Junior Gilliam played second. Pee Wee Reese played shortstop. Billy Cox played third base. Carl Furillo played right field. Duke Snider played center field. They had a number of left fielders — Gene Hermanski was one. Roy Campanella caught.”

Mr. Sanders held for a beat, pleased with himself: “How’s that?”

The joy would fade. Two years after the team’s signal triumph, defeating the Yankees in the 1955 World Series, the Dodgers were gone, airlifted to Los Angeles by an owner, Walter O’Malley, whose very mention can still prove triggering for a veteran Brooklynite.

Mr. Sanders invoked an old joke about the three men most loathed in the borough at the time: Stalin, Hitler and Mr. O’Malley — “not necessarily in that order.”