The L.A. Dodgers Are Named After Terrified Brooklyn Pedestrians

It's a great day for baseball fans, with pitchers and catchers reporting to camp for a number of MLB teams, including the Los Angeles Dodgers. But since not much happens other than the players "literally showing up," as Eric Stephens of SB Nation's True Blue LA blog puts it, we thought we'd fill the down time with a little history lesson. In the case of the Dodgers, it's a terrifying one.

You probably know the Dodgers used to play in Brooklyn, even if you weren't around when the team moved in 1958. But what you might not know is that the team's full name was once "Trolley Dodgers," or that dodging trolleys was a matter or life and death for 19th-century Brooklynites. Here's Joseph P. Sullivan writing about the "terror of the trolley" in the Journal of Urban Technology: