The Los Angeles Dodgers are an American professional baseball team based in Los Angeles. The Dodgers compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the National League (NL) West Division. The club has won nine World Series championships and a record 26 National League pennants. As of 2026, Forbes ranked the Dodgers second in MLB franchise valuation at $7.8 billion.
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.Great Baseball Feats, Facts and Figures, 2008 Edition, p. 152, David Nemec and Scott Flatow, A Signet Book, Penguin Group, New York,
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 and behind the pitchers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. In 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 , 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 . 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 and , the first team to repeat since the Yankees won three in a row from to .
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 (). 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.