Send in the 'Clones.(minor league baseball team in Brooklyn, NYC)(Brief Article)

After 43 years, Brooklyn has its own team again. Just one bummer: It's the Class A Cyclones, net the home-grown Dodgers.

Say the name Walter O'Malley in Brooklyn, and you still will hit a nerve--43 years after the ex-Dodgers owner moved his team west to Los Angeles. The Dodgers remain a symbol of the borough's proud past and sad decline. When they left, Brooklyn lost more than just a ballclub. It lost its identity.

But starting this month, Brooklyn once again will have its own ballclub. The Cyclones, a Mets Rookie League entry, will play in a new, 6,500-seat stadium in Coney Island. Named for the famed Cyclone rollercoaster, which sits just outside the neighborhood's last remaining amusement park, the Cyclones will play 76 games in the New York-Penn League. And they will try to earn the loyalty of fans who've been flocking to the team's offices at KeySpan Park to purchase season tickets and curse the name O'Malley.

"You hear the hurt," says general manager Steve Cohen, who joined the Cyclones when they moved to St. John's University last year and were called the Queens Kings. "The majority of people in Brooklyn eventually became Mets fans, but some of them didn't forgive the Dodgers for leaving. We had one guy in here buying tickets who said that his father, a huge Dodger fan, refused to go to any ballgames after the Dodgers left town. And now, 43 years later, his son is finally going to take him back into a ball park."

Not everyone in Brooklyn has been so forgiving. When it was announced two years ago that the Yankees and the Mets would both move minor league teams into the city (the Staten Island Yankees also play in the New York-Penn League), some Brooklynites insisted that no short-season team, playing at the lowest rung in professional baseball, could assuage their pain. In fact, borough president Howard Golden ordered that a blue Dodgers pennant be flown above Borough Hall, where the 1955 Dodgers celebrated their lone World Series victory. It would remain there, Golden vowed, until the Dodgers came home.

Hyperbole? Maybe you don't know Brooklyn. With a population of 2.6 million, it's not some sleepy backwater like Oneonta, Batavia or Pittsfield. This is the place where baseball was incubated, where Walt Whitman played, where Henry Chadwick invented the box score, where the first baseball card was produced and where Brooklynites claim the shortstop position was developed and the first stolen base was swiped. Since 1957, it also has been home to the greatest heartbreak in baseball history.

Brooklyn's sad-sack self-image was ...