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Los Angeles Dodgers

Major League Baseball franchise

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Founded in 1883 in Brooklyn, New York, the team joined the NL in 1890 as the Brooklyn Bridegrooms and used other names before becoming the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1932. The Dodgers broke the baseball color line in 1947 with the debut of Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play in the Major Leagues since 1884. From the 1940s through the mid-1950s, the Dodgers had a crosstown rivalry with the New York Yankees. The clubs have faced each other in the World Series a record 12 times, with the Dodgers losing the first five matchups before winning the franchise's first title, and its only one in Brooklyn, in 1955. The following year Don Newcombe became the first player to win the Cy Young Award and be named NL MVP in the same season.

After 68 seasons in Brooklyn, Dodgers owner and president Walter O'Malley moved the franchise to Los Angeles before the 1958 season. The team played their first four seasons at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum before moving to their current home of Dodger Stadium in 1962. They won the 1959 World Series in their second season on the West Coast, and took further titles in 1963 and 1965 behind the pitchers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. In 1981 the rookie pitcher Fernando Valenzuela led the team to a championship; he remains the only player to win the Cy Young and Rookie of the Year awards in the same season. The Dodgers won again in 1988, becoming the only franchise to win multiple titles in the 1980s. They then made 12 postseason appearances in a 17-year span before ending the championship drought in 2020. After signing the two-way player Shohei Ohtani in December 2023 to what was then the largest contract in North American sports history, the Dodgers won consecutive World Series titles in 2024 and 2025, the first team to repeat since the Yankees won three in a row from 1998 to 2000.

The O'Malley family owned the Dodgers for 48 years before selling the club to Rupert Murdoch's Fox Group in 1998. Frank and Jamie McCourt bought the team in 2004; amid their divorce and the franchise's debts, Major League Baseball took over day-to-day operations and the Dodgers filed for bankruptcy protection in 2011. Guggenheim Baseball Management purchased the club in 2012 for $2.15 billion, then the highest price ever paid for a North American professional sports franchise. Thirteen Dodgers have been named National League Most Valuable Player and eight Dodger pitchers have won twelve Cy Young Awards, while eighteen have won the Rookie of the Year Award, more than any other franchise. From 1884 through 2026, the Dodgers' record is 11,625–10,199–139 (.532). The club draws among the largest home attendances in Major League Baseball, and its rivalry with the San Francisco Giants has spanned more than a century as a New York City cross-town affair and then a California cross-state one.

History

The franchise was founded in Brooklyn in 1883 and played there until it moved to Los Angeles for the 1958 season.

1883–1912: Founding in Brooklyn

The club was formed as the Brooklyn Baseball Association in 1883, playing that season in the Interstate League. It joined the major league American Association in 1884 — the season it played as the Brooklyn Atlantics, borrowing the name of a defunct team that had played in Brooklyn before them — won the American Association championship in 1889, and joined the National League in 1890, promptly winning the National League pennant in its first season in the league.

The club was organized by a group that included the Brooklyn real estate man Charles Byrne and Ferdinand Abell, a Rhode Island casino operator who supplied most of the capital and held a controlling interest through the 1890s. Charles Ebbets, who had joined the club in its first season as a bookkeeper and scorecard salesman and worked for it for 42 years, succeeded Byrne as president upon Byrne's death in January 1898 and spent the following decade accumulating stock, buying out Abell and the remaining outside interests in November 1907.

1913–1938: Ebbets Field and the Robins

Ebbets bought 25 to 30 parcels of land in secrecy so that word of the plan would not drive prices up, and to finance construction he sold half the club in August 1912 to the Brooklyn contractors Edward and Stephen McKeever, who took 25 percent each. Ebbets Field opened for the National League opener on April 9, 1913; the park seated about 24,000. Late that year the club hired Wilbert Robinson as manager. He held the job for 18 seasons, and the team became widely known as the Robins after him.

Brooklyn won the National League pennant in 1916 at 94–60 and lost the World Series to the Boston Red Sox in five games. A second pennant followed in 1920, a 93–61 season that drew an unprecedented 809,000 spectators to Ebbets Field, second best in the National League; Brooklyn lost that World Series to the Cleveland Indians, five games to two.

Ebbets died on April 18, 1925, and Edward McKeever died eleven days after his funeral, leaving the Ebbets and McKeever heirs holding exactly half the stock apiece and deadlocking the board for more than a decade. Robinson served as club president as well as manager from 1925 to 1929, years in which the team became known as the "Daffy Dodgers". After finishing second in 1924, a game and a half back, Brooklyn placed sixth in each of the next five seasons, and Robinson was replaced by Max Carey after the 1931 season. The club added roughly 9,000 seats to Ebbets Field in 1931, but attendance fell below 500,000 from 1934 through 1937, and the 1937 team lost 91 games.

The club lost money every year from 1931 through 1937 and fell more than $700,000 into debt to the Brooklyn Trust Company, whose chairman, George V. McLaughlin, effectively directed the franchise and installed Larry MacPhail as general manager in 1938. MacPhail introduced night baseball at Ebbets Field and hired Red Barber to broadcast the games.

1939–1957: Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, and the last Brooklyn years

In 1941, the Dodgers won the National League pennant and reached the World Series for the third time, losing to the New York Yankees. This marked the onset of the Dodgers–Yankees rivalry, as the Dodgers would face them in their next six World Series appearances.

The deadlock between the Ebbets and McKeever heirs ended in stages: in October 1944 a group including Branch Rickey, the attorney Walter O'Malley and the Pfizer president John L. Smith bought the McKeever estate's quarter share for $240,000, and in August 1945 the three purchased the Ebbets estate's half for $800,000.

For most of the first half of the 20th century, no Major League Baseball team employed an African American player. Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play in the major leagues since 1884 when he played his first major league game on April 15, 1947, as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers. This was mainly due to general manager Branch Rickey's efforts. Baseball researcher Andy McCue attributes Rickey's pursuit of African American players to a combination of motives: his religious beliefs, his desire to win games and draw fans, and his ability to see baseball in the context of American society. Rickey came from a devout Methodist family and had a reputation as a lay preacher.

Robinson's debut preceded Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott, and is regarded as an early moment in the American Civil Rights Movement. It also hastened the decline of the Negro leagues: attendance in black baseball fell sharply in 1947 as fans followed Robinson to Ebbets Field and to Dodgers road games, and the Negro National League folded after the 1948 season. Robinson batted .311 over ten seasons in Brooklyn, and in 1949 won the National League batting title with a .342 average and led the league with 37 stolen bases. He was the inaugural recipient of the Rookie of the Year award, which is now named the Jackie Robinson Award in his honor. Robinson would eventually go on to become the first African American elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.

The Dodgers' willingness to integrate, when most other teams refused to, was a key factor in their 1947–1956 success. They won six pennants in those 10 years with the help of Robinson, three-time National League Most Valuable Player Roy Campanella, also signed out of the Negro leagues, Cy Young Award winner Don Newcombe, Jim Gilliam and Joe Black. They captured their first World Series title in 1955 by defeating the Yankees for the first time, a story described in the 1972 book The Boys of Summer.

O'Malley acquired majority ownership of the Dodgers in 1950 when he bought the 25 percent share of co-owner Branch Rickey and became allied with the widow of John L. Smith. Smith had died that July, leaving his widow aligned with O'Malley, and under the partnership's buyout terms the Rickey share cost slightly more than $1 million. O'Malley bought Mrs. Smith's share in 1957, giving him two-thirds of the club; he acquired the remaining third from the James and Dearie Mulvey estate in January 1975 to become sole owner. Through the 1950s he was working to buy new land in Brooklyn to build a more accessible and profitable ballpark than the aging Ebbets Field. The Dodgers could no longer fill the park even for the World Series; Games Six and Seven of the 1952 Series did not sell out.

O'Malley wanted to replace Ebbets Field with a privately financed stadium at Atlantic and Flatbush avenues in Brooklyn, saying that he did not want to be "a tenant in a political ball park". He asked the city to assemble the land under Title I of the Housing Act of 1949, which funded slum clearance. Robert Moses, who as head of the city's Committee on Slum Clearance controlled that money, refused, writing that the plan did not justify "the exercise of the power of eminent domain, not to speak of the use of public funds to reduce the cost of land". The Dodgers offered $1.5 million toward a site whose acquisition was estimated at over $9 million, which would have left the city paying about 90 percent of the cost. To put pressure on the city, O'Malley announced during the 1955 season that the team would play seven regular-season games and one exhibition game at Jersey City's Roosevelt Stadium in 1956. Mayor Robert Wagner convened a meeting three days later, and the Board of Estimate appropriated $100,000 to study the site.

In the autumn of 1956 the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors sent Kenneth Hahn to the World Series to pursue a major league team for the city, and he met Washington Senators owner Calvin Griffith; O'Malley learned of the approach and told Hahn that he was interested himself. Los Angeles offered what New York would not: land O'Malley could buy and a ballpark he would own. Moses proposed instead a city-owned stadium at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, which O'Malley rejected because he would not own it; the mayor's Special Committee ruled the Queens site out in May 1957. Mayor Wagner and the Board of Estimate declined to subsidize a stadium, taking the view that a baseball franchise was a private business. In Brooklyn, a "Keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn" petition launched by borough president John Cashmore drew 25,000 signatures. National League owners voted unanimously on May 29, 1957, to authorize both the Dodgers and the Giants to move to the West Coast, provided each club confirmed its intention before October 1. Giants owner Horace Stoneham had decided by March 1957 to move his club to Minneapolis, home of his Triple-A Minneapolis Millers; he chose San Francisco instead, encouraged by O'Malley and by Los Angeles mayor Norris Poulson.

The Brooklyn Dodgers played their final game at Ebbets Field on September 24, 1957, beating the Pittsburgh Pirates 2–0.

1958–1973: Los Angeles, Dodger Stadium, and the Koufax era

For the 1958 season, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles and kept their nickname, even though pedestrians in Los Angeles were not known for dodging trolleys. The Giants also kept their nickname when they moved to San Francisco for that season as well. These moves left New York with only one baseball team, the American League Yankees, and without a National League team until 1962, when Joan Payson founded the New York Mets. The blue background used by the Dodgers was adopted by the Mets, honoring their New York NL forebears with a blend of Dodgers blue and Giants orange.

On April 18, 1958, the Dodgers played the first major league game in Los Angeles, defeating the former New York and now new San Francisco Giants, 6–5, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Catcher Roy Campanella, left partially paralyzed in an off-season accident, was never able to play in Los Angeles.

In just their second season in Los Angeles, the Dodgers won their second World Series title, beating the Chicago White Sox in six games in 1959.

Construction on Dodger Stadium was completed in time for Opening Day of the 1962 season. Cantilevered grandstands replaced the pillars used in older parks, and O'Malley promoted the resulting unobstructed views as a selling point; the trade-off was that seats above the lowest deck sat farther from the field than comparable seats elsewhere. Although close to downtown Los Angeles, the stadium was surrounded by parking lots and framed by three freeways, with limited public transport. The park favored pitching. O'Malley privately financed and built Dodger Stadium, retaining ownership of the ballpark and its revenue streams.

In the club's first season at the new park, Maury Wills stole 104 bases, a major league record, and was named the National League's Most Valuable Player. The Dodgers and the Giants finished the season tied at 101–61, but the Giants took the pennant by winning the third game of a best-of-three playoff at Dodger Stadium on October 3.

Behind the pitching of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, the Dodgers captured three pennants in the 1960s and won two more World Series titles, sweeping the Yankees in four games in 1963, and edging the Minnesota Twins in seven in 1965. The 1963 sweep was their second victory against the Yankees, and their first against them as a Los Angeles team. Koufax won the National League's Most Valuable Player award and its pitching Triple Crown in 1963, and was the first pitcher to win three Cy Young Awards, all of them in years when one award covered both major leagues. He threw four no-hitters, the last of them a perfect game against the Chicago Cubs on September 9, 1965. Drysdale won the Cy Young Award in 1962, and in 1968 pitched 58+2⁄3 consecutive scoreless innings, breaking a record set by Walter Johnson in 1913.

The Dodgers won another pennant in 1966 but were swept in the World Series by the Baltimore Orioles. Koufax retired after that season at the age of 30, his left elbow disabled by arthritis.

1974–1997: Lasorda, Fernandomania, and the 1988 title

Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, Ron Cey and Bill Russell first started together as the Dodgers' infield on June 13, 1973, and stayed together longer than any infield in major league history, surpassing the Chicago White Stockings combination of 1883–89.

Walter Alston retired after the 1976 season, ending 23 years as manager, and was succeeded by Tommy Lasorda. The Dodgers won pennants in 1974, 1977 and 1978 and lost the World Series each time, to the Oakland Athletics and then to the Yankees twice. They won the World Series again in 1981, when the rookie Fernando Valenzuela took both the Cy Young Award and the Rookie of the Year Award, the only player to win both in one season; the attention around him became known as "Fernandomania".

Walter O'Malley died in 1979, and control passed to a trust for his children, Peter O'Malley and Therese O'Malley Seidler, with Peter serving as president and chairman.

The Dodgers won the National League West in 1983 and in 1985, losing the Championship Series both times.

Orel Hershiser closed the 1988 regular season with 59 consecutive scoreless innings, breaking Drysdale's record, and won the Cy Young Award. The Dodgers went on to win the World Series against the Oakland Athletics. In the first game Kirk Gibson, injured in both knees, came off the bench to pinch-hit with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning and hit the home run that won it, his only appearance of the series.

The Dodgers did not reach the postseason again until 1995. They won 93 games in 1991 but finished a game behind the Atlanta Braves, then fell to 63–99 in 1992, the franchise's worst record since 1912. Five Dodgers won the National League Rookie of the Year Award in consecutive seasons over this stretch: Eric Karros in 1992, Mike Piazza in 1993, Raúl Mondesí in 1994, Hideo Nomo in 1995 and Todd Hollandsworth in 1996.

Los Angeles led the National League West when the players' strike ended the 1994 season in August, and no postseason was played. The club reached the Division Series in 1995 as division champions and in 1996 as the wild card, and was swept in three games each time, by the Cincinnati Reds and the Atlanta Braves. Lasorda's 20 seasons as manager ended during the 1996 season, when Bill Russell replaced him.

In January 1997 Peter O'Malley announced that the club was for sale, citing estate-tax exposure and his view that family ownership could no longer compete with corporate-backed franchises.

1998–2012: Fox, McCourt, and bankruptcy

Major League Baseball's owners approved the sale of the Dodgers to Rupert Murdoch's Fox Group, a division of News Corporation, by a vote of 27–2 on March 19, 1998, ending 48 years of O'Malley family control. The $311 million purchase included the franchise, Dodger Stadium and roughly 300 surrounding acres, and the club's training complexes in Vero Beach, Florida and the Dominican Republic. Fox had sought the team primarily as programming for its regional sports networks and as a competitive response to Disney's ownership of the Anaheim Angels.

The Fox ownership era proved turbulent. The May 1998 trade of catcher Mike Piazza was executed without the knowledge of general manager Fred Claire, who was dismissed along with manager Bill Russell the following month; Peter O'Malley resigned as chairman before the end of the year. In 1999 Fox sold a minority stake to the former Warner Bros. chairman Bob Daly, who took over as chairman and chief executive. The Dodgers did not reach the postseason in any of the six seasons under Fox ownership, finishing second in the National League West twice. Closer Éric Gagné won the National League Cy Young Award in 2003, taking 28 of 32 first-place votes.

Major League Baseball approved the sale of the club to the Boston real estate developers Frank and Jamie McCourt on January 29, 2004, for approximately $430 million. The purchase was almost entirely debt-financed, with Fox itself providing much of the financing, secured against McCourt's parking lots on the South Boston waterfront — property he later conveyed to Fox in lieu of repayment. By August 2010 the club's debt had grown to roughly $433 million.

In their first season under the new owners the Dodgers won 93 games and returned to the postseason for the first time since 1996, clinching the division on October 2 when Steve Finley hit a walk-off grand slam against the Giants. They lost the National League Division Series to the St. Louis Cardinals that year, and were swept by the New York Mets in the 2006 Division Series.

Joe Torre managed the team from 2008 to 2010. Los Angeles acquired Manny Ramirez from the Boston Red Sox in a three-team trade on July 31, 2008; he batted .396 in 53 games for the Dodgers. The club won the Division Series in both 2008 and 2009, its first postseason series wins since 1988, and lost the National League Championship Series to the Philadelphia Phillies in each of those years.

The McCourts separated in October 2009, and Frank McCourt's dismissal of his wife as chief executive was followed by divorce proceedings in which she asserted a community-property claim to half the franchise. In December 2010 a Los Angeles Superior Court judge invalidated the post-marital agreement that Frank McCourt contended gave him sole ownership. With the club's finances in question, commissioner Bud Selig announced on April 20, 2011, that Major League Baseball would take over the Dodgers' day-to-day operations, citing "deep concerns regarding the finances and operations" of the franchise, and appointed the former Texas Rangers president Tom Schieffer as monitor. Selig rejected a proposed long-term television agreement with Fox that June, and on June 27, 2011, the Dodgers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware, listing deferred compensation owed to Manny Ramirez and Andruw Jones among its largest unsecured claims. The Dodgers had losing records in 2010 and 2011.

The McCourts reached a divorce settlement in October 2011 under which Frank McCourt agreed to pay $131 million and Jamie McCourt relinquished all claims to the team. On November 1, 2011, McCourt and Major League Baseball jointly announced that the franchise would be sold under court supervision.

In March 2012 McCourt agreed to sell the Dodgers to Guggenheim Baseball Management for $2.15 billion, then the highest price ever paid for a North American professional sports franchise and roughly two and a half times the previous Major League Baseball record of $845 million paid for the Chicago Cubs in 2009. The bankruptcy court approved the sale in April and it closed on May 1, 2012. The group was led by the Guggenheim Partners chief executive Mark Walter as controlling owner and included Magic Johnson, Peter Guber, Todd Boehly, Bobby Patton and the executive Stan Kasten, who became team president.

On August 25, 2012, the new owners acquired Adrián González, Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford and Nick Punto from Boston in a nine-player trade, the largest in franchise history.

2013–present: The Guggenheim era

The Dodgers have reached the postseason in every season since 2013. They lost the National League Championship Series to the St. Louis Cardinals in 2013 and to the Chicago Cubs in 2016. Their next pennant came in 2017, aided by a Justin Turner walk-off home run, 29 years to the day after Gibson's. They lost the Series in seven games to the Houston Astros, which would later be revealed to have been stealing signs. The Dodgers repeated as pennant-winners in 2018 but lost the Series to the Boston Red Sox in five games; Game 3 lasted 18 innings and seven hours and 20 minutes, the longest game in World Series and postseason history.

In 2020, in a season shortened to 60 games by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Dodgers scored 11 runs in one inning of Game 3 of the National League Championship Series against the Atlanta Braves, the most in any inning of a postseason game. They won the pennant and beat the Tampa Bay Rays in six games for their first World Series title since 1988.

Before the 2024 season the Dodgers signed Shohei Ohtani to a 10-year, $700 million contract. They returned to the World Series that October, where Freddie Freeman won Game 1 with a walk-off grand slam, the first in World Series history. The Dodgers came back from a five-run deficit in Game 5 to beat the New York Yankees in five games for their eighth title, and Freeman was named the series' most valuable player.

The Dodgers repeated in 2025, beating the Toronto Blue Jays in seven games. Miguel Rojas tied Game 7 with a home run in the ninth inning, the first game-tying home run in the ninth inning or later of a World Series Game 7 in major league history. It was the first back-to-back title in 25 years; no team had repeated since the Yankees won three in a row from 1998 to 2000. In 2026 the Dodgers clinched a postseason berth on September 14, their 14th consecutive appearance, matching the major league record set by the Atlanta Braves. They finished the regular season 100–62, first in the National League West.

The ownership group has expanded since acquiring the team, adding Billie Jean King and Ilana Kloss in 2018 and the businessmen Alan Smolinisky and Robert L. Plummer in September 2019. The franchise's estimated value has risen sharply under Guggenheim ownership. Forbes valued the club at $6.8 billion in 2025 and $7.8 billion in 2026, while Sportico estimated its value at $9.05 billion in 2026. Both ranked the Dodgers second among Major League Baseball franchises, behind the New York Yankees.

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