As a kid in Long Beach in the mid-1950s, Billie Jean King would sit across from her father at the kitchen table and excitedly listen to him reading newspaper accounts of a blue-clad squad that could soon be moving from Brooklyn to Los Angeles.
Yet just as the Dodgers were showing up to play baseball, King was leaving town to pursue her tennis career, and the two powerful entities spent the next 60 years mirroring each other from afar.
The Dodgers became known as a model for inclusion and equality, from Jackie Robinson to Hideo Nomo to Jaime Jarrin and Major League Baseball’s first Spanish-language broadcast.