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O’MALLEY in the HALL
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What's next? A Nobel peace prize for Bin Laden?
of TheColumnists.com
I hate him. I hate him. I hate him. Now he’s in the Baseball hall of Fame. I hate him. I hate him. I hate him.
The worst baseball news of the season,
the decade, maybe our lifetimes for a lot of us old geezers who
once called Brooklyn, New York, home was the announcement last
week that Walter O’Malley was elected to the Baseball Hall
of Fame by a special, new committee of veterans, executives,
former players and sportswriters.
O’Malley was in and Marvin Miller was out. Bowie Kuhn was
in and Marvin Miller was out. Managers Dick Williams, Billy Southworth
and old Pittsburgh owner Barney Dreyfuss were in and Marvin Miller
was out.
New York writer Pete Hamill once said the three most despised
villains of the 20th century were Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin
and Walter O’Malley, and in Brooklyn, not necessarily in
that order.
“If you were riding with the three of them,” Hamill
once wrote, “and you had only two bullets in your gun, which
ones would you shoot?”
The answer in Brooklyn was always the same.
“I’d shoot O’Malley twice,” we’d all
say.
O’Malley was the owner and president of the Brooklyn Dodgers
from 1950, when he eased out Branch Rickey, through 1957. He
then moved the team to Los Angeles, so he could get richer than
he was. The city of Los Angeles gave him Chavez Ravine for a
buck and they threw in the underground rights in case some holes
dug in the ground came up with oil.
O’Malley really wanted to build a new park in downtown Brooklyn
after Ebbets Field, the Bedford Avenue home of the Dodgers since
1913, grew old and decrepit. He actually hired famed architect
Buckminster Fuller to design a 21st century domed stadium for
Brooklyn. This was about 1955.
As always, the politicians soon got in the act because O’Malley
needed public lands, condemnation proceedings and city money.
None of this happened because of a tyrant named Robert Moses.
He was the Boss of all Bosses in New York City before the Godfather,
before Steinbrenner and well before the Sopranos.
Moses offered land out in Queens, a place later used by the city
to build Shea stadium for the new New York Mets in 1964.
“If I’m going to build a stadium in Queens for the
Brooklyn Dodgers,” O’Malley said, “I might as
well build it in Los Angeles.”
Now, 50 years after the Dodgers moved west--unhappy anniversary--O’Malley’s
Hall of Fame election comes back to haunt all of us who lost
our hearts that October day in 1957 when the move was announced.
What did O'Malley get elected for? He made owners rich by opening
up the west. Marvin Miller, the players' union rep, made players
rich. You don’t expect any current baseball executives,
laboring always to keep salaries down 10 million, 20 million,
30 million a year, whatever, to endorse Miller’s nomination.
That would be like Hillary Clinton asking Monica Lewinsky to
make an endorsement tape for her.
“Flabbergasted,” said Marty Markowitz, the powerless
borough president of Brooklyn, a meaningless, if symbolic, job
in the borough.
He’s a politician who actually wants to be mayor of the
whole city some day. He had to keep it clean. Others didn’t.
Curse words were flying across Bedford Avenue and Sullivan Place
in Brooklyn now, down by Atlantic Avenue and across the Brooklyn
Bridge.
The hardest thing to explain in the world is love. You know it
when you see it. No one can ever quite explain it to you if it
never happened.
Rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers was the same thing. In my old
days, the Dodgers came first. Family, school, church and God
all tied for second.
Bobby Thomson hurt us with that stupid, lucky 1951 homer. Mickey
Owen hurt us with that 1941 passed ball on Hugh Casey’s
pitch against Tommy Henrich. The Yankees hurt us with all those
World Series wins. O’Malley killed us.
O’Malley’s son, Peter, who ran the Dodgers for many
years after his father died, tried hard to repair the wounds.
He supported a Brooklyn Dodgers Hall of Fame in KeySpan stadium,
Coney Island, of which I am a proud member. He retired the numbers
of many great Brooklyn players. He supported the statue of Jackie
Robinson and Pee Wee Reese, built on the site of the new Brooklyn
minor league park.
Still, nothing worked. The Brooklyn Dodgers are dead. A part
of all of us went with the demise.
I hate him. Now Walter O’Malley is in the Baseball Hall
of Fame. To stretch Groucho Marx’s famous line, “A
Hall of Fame that would admit Walter O’Malley isn’t
worth getting into.” I hate him.
©2007 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen
caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The photo of the late
Walter O'Malley is courtesy of the official O'Malley website.
This column first posted Dec. 10, 2007.
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