When the Democratic presidential candidate was a teenager, his beloved Dodgers fled Brooklyn for Los Angeles – and those closest to him believe the shock of their departure helped inspire his political ideologies today

Long before he campaigned against corporate greed and an economy for the rich, a young Bernie Sanders learned his own painful lesson about big business. It came in the fall of 1957 when his neighborhood baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, moved to Los Angeles.

Sanders had just turned 16 and friends say he was devastated after Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley announced the transfer. The Dodgers had been an essential part of his childhood in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn where he could walk to their ballpark, Ebbets Field, and buy a ticket for 60 cents. Even today he can name the Dodgers 1950s infield of Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese and Billy Cox. Then they were gone, whisked away to California.

The shock of their departure seems to have informed the Democratic presidential candidate’s early view of the world, so much so that some of his closest friends and confidants wonder if the incident helped inspire his political ideology today.

“I asked him: ‘Did this have a deep impact on you?’ and he said: ‘Of course! I thought the Dodgers belonged to Brooklyn,’” says Richard Sugarman, who is one of the Democratic frontrunner’s closest friends. “It does lay out the question of who owns what.”

The World Series begins on Tuesday and it features the Mets, who filled the void left by the Dodgers and New York Giants (now in San Francisco) as the city’s National League team. Sanders probably will not follow the Series. Aside from the Super Bowl, which he watches every year with his friend Huck Gutman, he does not pay close attention to professional sports anymore. He doesn’t have the time, Gutman says.

It was a lesson that it doesn’t matter whether people love (a team) it’s all about the money

But baseball has been a part of the Vermont senator’s personal and political life. As mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the early 1980s he worked with business leaders to bring a minor league team believing it could bond the community much like the Dodgers of his childhood Brooklyn. For a time, he wanted that team to be owned by the citizens, meaning it would truly belong to Burlington and not an owner who viewed it as an investment. And in one of his most visible moments as a congressman he complained during the 2005 baseball steroid hearings that the media would pack a hearing room for star baseball players while ignoring childhood poverty.

“He has a tremendous passion for baseball, trust me,” says Mike Agganis, who owned the minor league team Sanders eventually brought to Burlington in 1983. “He was very upset when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles. He had a lot of anger about that.”

No one may understand that anger better than Gutman, who grew up a Dodgers fan in Queens and later became Sanders’s chief of staff for six years in the senate.

“At that age, especially then, (the Dodgers) seemed innocent,” says Gutman, a professor at the University of Vermont. “We all knew it was all about money. It was about the new opportunity on the west coast.”

Rumors of the Dodgers’ departure had been around for a couple of years before they actually moved. The deal Los Angeles was giving O’Malley – allowing him to swap a plot of land below downtown for a hilltop called Chavez Ravine – was too good to turn down. Looking back, Gutman compares it to a company that closes a factory, putting people out of jobs, to take advantage of tax breaks offered in elsewhere. To him – and many others in Brooklyn at the time – their move was a betrayal.

“Bernie and I were both Dodger fans and we talk about that,” Gutman says. “It was the (first indication) that those with a lot of money may have an interest that is different than the community’s interests.”

When asked what he means, Gutman replies:

“We never understood that he who pays the piper plays the tune. It was a lesson that it doesn’t matter whether people love (a team) it’s all about the money. I don’t think there had been those kinds of things. We all know now the sports world is all about making money but this was the first time we saw it. This was uprooting a club that had all these historical links to the community.”

Sanders, whose campaign did not comment for this story or make him available for an interview, has said many of his political ideas were molded in college at the University of Chicago. The most he has said about the impact of the Dodgers’ move came on a recent podcast with President Barack Obama’s former advisor David Axelrod in which he said he didn’t understand O’Malley’s departure at the time and called it “a brutal act which impacted Brooklyn in a very significant way.”

But those who know him best presume the Dodgers leaving must have inspired some sense of corporate distrust.

When Axelrod asked if this is what turned him against corporations, Sanders laughed and said: “I wouldn’t say that was the only thing.”

But those who know him best presume the Dodgers leaving must have inspired some sense of corporate distrust.

“I think it certainly has some plausibility,” Gutman says. “Now, when Bernie goes after pharmaceutical companies are the Dodgers in his mind? I don’t know, it was definitely important to him.”

***

Since Sanders does not speak much about his past, there are few sports references in profiles about him. But the young Sanders was an athlete. Profiles say he lettered in cross country at James Madison High School in Brooklyn, where he has said he ran a 4min 37sec mile. But his best sport might have been basketball. He played a lot as a child and has told Gutman that he once went up against New York City playground legend and later professional star Connie Hawkins.

After moving to Vermont in the mid-1960s he and a few friends, including Gutman, played a weekly basketball game at a Catholic church on the south side of town. Sanders at just over 6 ft was usually played center.

“He was an assertive player,” Gutman recalls. “He wanted the ball and he wanted to take the shots. But not overly-assertive. I’d say he was a better shooter than rebounder.”

The group even formed a team one year and joined a summer basketball league in Burlington playing evening games in a park against teams with players from the University of Vermont and St Michael’s College.

“We were playing against players who were Division I and Division II basketball players,” Gutman says. “We didn’t do very well.”

Sanders gave up basketball after he became mayor in 1981. His life had changed. His schedule was full. He was too busy to play sports.

***

When Sanders ran for mayor of Burlington in 1981 he promised to enhance the city’s quality of life. After he won by 10 votes he set out to rebuild Burlington’s fading waterfront and preserve affordable housing for the city’s blue-collar workers. He also believed Burlington needed a baseball team like the Brooklyn of his childhood.

Early in Sanders’s first term he was approached by a group of residents and business leaders who told him a Class AA Eastern League franchise in Holyoke, Massachusetts was for sale. They urged him to see if he the city could get it.

At the time, Sugarman, Gutman and Sanders were intrigued by the idea of having the citizens own a team in a sort of public trust like the NFL’s Green Bay Packers. Their thought was that the city would get a bank to finance the purchase – the Holyoke franchise eventually sold for $85,000 – then find or create a business entity to handle the selling of shares to the public. Gutman believes the price they discussed was $100 a share.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest As mayor of Burlington, Sanders sought to replicate the bond the Dodgers shared with Brooklyn. Photograph: Donna Light/AP

“We thought it would be a very good idea and bring the community together,” said Sugarman, a professor in the religion department at the University of Vermont.

Gutman had seen similar plans work in European soccer leagues and hoped it could revolutionize minor league baseball, which was not the great money-making institution it is now. He and Sanders envisioned people buying shares and then giving them to their children or grandchildren as gifts, hoping to create an eternal bond between residents and their baseball team that O’Malley took from Sanders and Gutman.

“I think people could feel some sense of ownership,” Gutman says. “It would make people in Burlington feel a little better about where they live.”

He pauses for a moment.

“I guess I thought in the back of my mind: ‘If this works in Burlington maybe a big city will try it too.’ We had discussions – Bernie, Richard and me. We said: ‘This is something we should do. It would have been a new model of sports ownership.”

It’s hard to know how close Sanders, Gutman and Sugarman got to actually making their plan work. Gutman believes they went as far as to get bank approval to buy the team. Sugarman says they didn’t get as far as presenting to the city council. A 1983 Vermont Vanguard Press story about bringing baseball to Burlington said Sanders eventually abandoned the public ownership plan and “turned to more customary sources of capital.”

Tom Kayser, who owned the Holyoke team, remembers driving to Burlington to meet with Sanders and discuss a potential sale. The conversation was brief. “I said: ‘Here is what I expect, make an offer,’” Kayser recalls. He says Sanders never made a formal offer and he eventually sold the team to a local buyer in Holyoke.

Not long after, Agganis visited as he searched for a new location for his Eastern League team in Lynn, Massachusetts, then affiliated with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Lynn had been a terrible minor league city with dreadful attendance and Agganis had to get out. With the idea of citizen-owned team gone. Sanders pushed Agganis to bring the Lynn team to Burlington.

“He was very aggressive,” Agganis says. “I needed to move the team and he wanted the team and that was my objective.”

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Sanders worked with the University of Vermont to have Agganis’s team play at the University’s Centennial Field. Sanders even arranged to have local business leaders raise money for essential renovations to the stadium, which was built in 1904. Soon Agganis had agreed to move to Burlington, signing a lease with the university. Not long after, the Pirates decided to switch their affiliation to a franchise in New Hampshire. They were replaced by the Class AA team of the Cincinnati Reds.

The new team, the Vermont Reds, became something of a punchline for reporters who couldn’t resist chuckling about the mayor who had visited Cuba and he Soviet Union and his team called the Reds.

Agganis liked Sanders. The mayor frequently came to games and the two men chatted. Agganis found him honest and passionate about his social and economic views even if Agganis didn’t understand what Sanders was thinking.

“He told me that no one should make more than $50,000,” Agganis says. “I didn’t agree with that. I laugh now that he’s making $200,000 (actually $174,000 as a US senator).”

The Vermont Reds turned out to be very good. Cincinnati’s minor league system was filled with great talent in those days as was that of the Seattle Mariners who took over in 1988. Among the players to play in Burlington during Sanders’s tenure were: Ken Griffey Jr, Barry Larkin, Omar Vizquel, Paul O’Neill, Rob Dibble and Norm Charlton.

“I don’t want to blow this out of proportion but this is a somewhat prestigious thing – to get this team – and I thought it is going to be something the whole state can be proud of,” Sanders told the Vermont Vanguard Press in 1983. In the final analysis though, it doesn’t mean any more than people sitting outside on a nice summer night enjoying themselves and watching top-notch baseball. It’s just a hell of a nice way to go out with your family and friends and get together with your neighbors.”

At the time, the Vermont Reds were heralded as one of the first instances where Sanders worked successfully with the local business establishment that had opposed him. Everything seemed perfect. Then, in 1989, much like O’Malley in Brooklyn, Agganis took the team to Canton, Ohio.

“Bernie called me up and he was upset with me – he was angry with me – because I was moving the team,” Agganis says. “It didn’t change my opinion of him as a person and it didn’t change my opinion of him as a mayor. I respected Bernie for fighting for what he believed in. I told him I had no choice.”

Asked if Agganis had O’Malley-ed Burlington, Gutman chuckled.

“I think that’s right,” he said.

Agganis told Sanders that Burlington would be a perfect place for a team in the “short-season” Class A New York-Penn League that only plays from June to early September. Eventually, Burlington did get a New York-Penn franchise in 1993 and it remains today. By then Sanders had moved on to Congress.

“We were very successful at bringing a minor league team to Burlington but we weren’t as successful in designing a new business model for professional sports,” Gutman says.

***

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In 2005, Sanders questioned former and current MLB players on steroid use in baseball.

Sanders most public connection to baseball came on 17 March 2005 when the House Committee on Government Reform held a hearing on the use of steroids in baseball.

At the time, several committee members said the session to was to investigate the risk of teenagers using steroids, but it became a public shaming of several of the game’s biggest stars including Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Cameras were everywhere, with several networks broadcasting the hearing live.

It was one of the few times in recent years where members of both parties worked together without the usual political sniping. And yet even as an independent outcast on the committee, Sanders managed to stand out from the line of faceless congressmen who grilled the players all day.

One congressional staff member who worked on the hearings remembers Henry Waxman, the powerful Democratic congressman from California, urging the other Democrats – with whom Sanders caucused – to refrain from making political statements before interrogating the players.

“Sanders refused to play by the rules,” the staff member says laughing.

When Sanders’s turn came he launched into a loud, hand-waving diatribe about now-familiar topics.

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I do want to say that I am overwhelmed by the kind of media attention this has gotten. I have counted dozens of TV cameras, and I think some of the American people wonder, is this all we do? Because this is what they see on television. So I want to say to our media friends, that when some of us talk about the collapse of our healthcare system and millions of people not having any health insurance, come and join us. And we talk about the United States having the highest rate of childhood poverty in the industrialized world at a time when the rich are going richer, come on down. Now maybe we may have to bring great baseball players to help us talk about childhood poverty. I don’t know. I would hope not. I’d hope we could have some of the great experts and I would hope you would come. But to the American people, some of us are dealing with other issues, as well.

Many of the journalists covering the hearings quoted Sanders’s speech in their stories. But he did also ask pointed questions to McGwire, Sosa, Curt Schilling, Rafael Palmeiro and Jose Canseco – whose book exposing steroid use in baseball was the reason for the hearings. He aggressively tried to get each player to guess the percentage of players using performance enhancing drugs, then asked each if they thought Congress should pass legislation forcing baseball to have a strong steroid policy.

At one point he told Schilling: “You sound like a politician.”

In the background another congressman shouted: “Bernie, Bernie, Bernie, he’s a Republican. You better not encourage him.”

Sanders smiled.

***

“He’s an everything guy,” Sugarman says when asked if Sanders can be considered a “baseball guy.”

“He’s always liked baseball. I think the Dodgers was a big one.”

Suddenly Sugarman has a thought, something Sanders can do if he is elected president. The professor laughs even as he repeats it:

“I think it would be a nice thing to buy the Dodgers and move them back to Brooklyn.”