Fly Ball Brand

L.A. / S.F. Teams - The long-standing rivalry between the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants has roots on both coasts. The oldest rivalry in sports history pitted amateur baseball teams representing the Borough of Brooklyn against teams from the City of New York, each vying for baseball supremacy in games played prior to the Civil War. Their contretemps continued through the earliest stages of professional baseball and well into the twentieth century, before both teams abandoned the East Coast for California in 1958. The LA-SF dichotomy, each a yin to the other’s yang, played out first in the Pacific Coast League (PCL) from the late-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries. A natural rivalry developed between minor league PCL teams from the north—the San Francisco Seals and Missions, the Oakland Oaks—and the south—the Los Angeles Angels, Hollywood Stars, Vernon Tigers. The painting “Baghdad by the Bay” features a group of Seals ca. 1914 packed precariously into a gleaming Buick roadster; its complement, “Fly Ball Brand,” shows members of a pre-PCL Los Angeles club cavorting in a hot air balloon in 1902. Some wags are sure to comment that it’s only fitting to see the team from Los Angeles, soon to become the hot air capital of the world, posed in such a conveyance.