|
OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
 |
|
FOR O'MALLEY
|
A flim-flammer who said
his roots were in Brooklyn
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
Walter O’Malley, the man who sold out Brooklyn, has been been voted into the baseball Hall of Fame by a veterans committee. Well, if Henry Kissinger could have been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, I suppose anybody can be honored anywhere.
The people in Los Angeles have been lobbying for the inclusion of O’Malley for a long time. They have helped spread two myths: 1) O’Malley deserves credit for opening baseball to the west coast. 2) Robert Moses, not O’Malley, was the villain responsible for forcing the Dodgers to desert Brooklyn.
First off, it was inevitable that baseball would expand to the west coast. It did a few years after the Dodgers’ move with the establishment of the Los Angeles Angels in the American League--without taking a team from another city.
O/Malley killed baseball’s most meaningful franchise, the one that transformed the game and the country by breaking the color line with Jackie Robinson’s emergence in Brooklyn.
O’Malley slithered his way out of Brooklyn by mouthing slanderous falsehoods about Ebbets Field and the neighborhood. Because of a few isolated incidents, the impression was given that fans constantly urinated on ramps and that the neighborhood was unsafe and that the lack of parking was deadly for accommodating fans.
He trashed Ebbets Field as too old, too small to the extent that most people believed him. Lost upon many was the character of Ebbets Field, the kind of intimate charm celebrated by Boston’s Fenway Park now. Calls to build a new ball park for the Red Sox were beaten down by wiser heads, and Fenway is now the most celebrated park in baseball. Ebbets Field had aplenty what Fenway Park has.
Once O’Malley smelled the golden riches of Los Angeles there was no holding him. Los Angeles offered him land in the center of the city, Chavez Ravine, that was the equivalent almost of Central Park in Manhattan. According to one report, O’Malley told a Los Angeles county supervisor in 1956 (the Dodgers left after the 1957 season) “I’m coming, but I will deny it to the press becaue I have another season to play in Ebbets Field.”
In the 10 previous years before the Dodgers deserted, they were the second most profitable franchise in baseball to the Yankees. That wasn’t enough. Given the giveaway land deal in Los Angeles, he was able to obtain the funds to build his own stadium there. He also anticipated big bucks that could come from pay television in the new city.
He played a con game of making people think he really wanted to stay in Brooklyn. His notorious line was, “My roots are in Brooklyn.” I remember only too well sitting at a table with O’Malley and several New York reporters and listening to him shilly shally on the subject of leaving Brookyn. I sat there not really believing him, but also thinking that the man could not possibly move. How naive we were.
Buzzy Bavasi, the Dodgers’ general manager under O’Malley, later told New York Times columnist Dave Anderson, “Walter did it for a reason: money. All those acres in downtown Los Angeles. …We had a vote among the eight top people in the front office. The vote was 8 to 1 not to go to California, but the one vote was Walter’s.”
The Los Angeles people seized on a book written by a City University professor, Neil Sullivan, in 1987, which made Moses the heavy. No doubt Moses was the power broker of New York at the time. He stood up to O’Malley’s demand for choice real estate in the heart of Brooklyn--Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues--and offered the Flushing Meadow site that eventually becamd Shea Stadium for the Mets.
In those days cities didn’t give valuable land to private baseball owners. Later, cities did roll over and awarded sweetheart deals to baseball owners threatening to move. But that has stopped now. Like Moses, citizens in Minneapolis, San Francisco, Seattle and Miami have refused to knuckle under to grasping big league moguls.
None other than Prof. Sulllivan wrote years later in a Times op-ed piece, “All stadium deals should be subjected to referendums, and politicians should be made to support the results. Let the taxpayers decide what they owe the likes of George Steinbrenner.”
The Hall of Fame veterans committee consists of former players Monte Irvin, Harmon Killebrew and Bobby Brown, executives John Harrington, Bill DeWitt, and Andy MacPhail, David Glass of WalMart, and writers Paul Hagen of Philadelphia, Rick Hummel of St. Louis and Hal McCoy of Ohio.
On top of the O’Malley outrage they did not distinguish themselves by voting for the relatively inept baseball commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, and not voting for union leader Marvin Miller.
People I respect are outraged by the omission of Miller so I would go along with them, but I have no such passion. I think Miller was a great man for the players, but not necessarily for the fans.
Miller helped establish a strong union, seemingly loyal only to the players, often at the expense of the game and the fans. He helped enrich the players so that they command outrageous salaries now. So much so that only the richest baseball franchises-in TV rich cities, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles in particular-can bid for free agent stars. Because these free agents players can command outlandish sums, small-market cities like Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Cincinnati cannot hold on to them or bid for them. They rarely can make their way into a World Series. This is blatantly unfair.
Fans are often at a loss to keep up with the players’ moves. Loyalty to one’s city and fans is lost. All this is not an attractive aspect of what we still manage to call “the grand national pastime.”
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Stan Isaacs. To send an
email, click here and don't forget to mention Stan's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|