Selling hallowed ground

Forty-three years after opening their $750,000 ballpark in 1913, the Brooklyn Dodgers sell Ebbets Field 68 years ago today to real estate developer Marvin Kratter for a reported $3 million.

Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley agrees, well sort of, to continue playing at Ebbets Field until 1959 with an option to stay there until 1961.

Turns out O’Malley and the Dodgers abandon Ebbets Field and all of Brooklyn after the 1957 season for the riches that await them in Los Angeles.

“The field was even greener than my boy’s mind had pictured it,” Dodgers Hall of Fame center fielder Duke Snider later says of Ebbets Field, where he is a .313 career hitter with 175 home runs in 701 games.

“In later years,” Snider says, “friends of ours visited Ireland and said the grass there was plenty green all right, but that not even the Emerald Isle itself was as green as the grass that grew in Ebbets Field.”

After a few years of farming out Brooklyn’s hallowed grounds for college baseball games and soccer matches, Kratter’s company eventually demolishes Ebbets Field in February 1960 to make room for an apartment complex.

“It was a terrible psychic blow,” longtime Dodgers fan and Hollywood actor Joe Flaherty once says. “Ebbets Field was replaced by a housing project. How could a father tell his son where Duke Snider used to hit one? Point out Apartment 5Q?”