Walter O’Malley: Misunderstood Genius

By Taryn "The Coop" Cooper
Posted Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Like any self-respecting Flushing University student, I am schooled (or so I like to think) on the intricacies of what created New York National League baseball and the mystique surrounding it. Yankee fans like to think they claim all rights to “mystique” and “aura;” meanwhile, those of us with National League roots scoff at the very thought of that so-called “Yankee mystique.”

What conjures up more tears, more joy, more heartache, more laughs, more good memories, some painful, than the storied bums, the Brooklyn Dodgers? I mean, just ask Fred Wilpon about that. Nostalgia is that man’s middle name, with his nod to that park that sat on 55 Sullivan Place -- Ebbets Field.

With books like The Boys of Summer, Bums and documentaries still highlighting the 1951 Shot Heard ‘Round the World (yes, I know that was a Giant moment, but against the Dodgers), Jackie Robinson and the new Ghosts of Flatbush documentary on HBO, the storied and mythical magical Brooklyn Dodgers have cornered the market on mystique and aura.

As a diligent Flushing University student, I have also watched the Ghosts of Flatbush and I have to say, it made me cry. Not just as a fan of baseball but as a person with a heart, who saw how the very heart and soul of Brooklyn was ripped out of town, and transplanted out west.

As one fan put it – Los Angeles may as well have been Saturn back then.

Initially, I was going to do a review on Ghosts of Flatbush, but I figure I would just be wasting many words on my ultimate decision – and that is, watch it. And watch it many many more times. It is a must-see for any baseball fan, Mets fan, New York fan, whatever.

I decided, however, to take a different angle. To fully look at the Dodgers going west, one has to look at the man who was responsible for doing so. And that, my friends, is who old dyed-in-the-wool Brooklyn Dodger fans deem Satan himself, Walter O’Malley.

You see, dear readers, Red Sox fans forever have Harry Frazee, who notoriously sold the rights of George Herman Ruth to the New York Yankees for $125,000.…to finance a Broadway musical called “No No Nanette,” which to this day, most die-hard Red Sox fans will never pay to watch.

Brooklyn Dodgers fans have their nouveau Harry Frazee in Walter O’Malley, the greedy “pig of a boss” who...

Now, after reading typically biased accounts of the Brooklyn Dodgers in Roger Kahn’s and Peter Golenbock’s books, I was willing to deem O’Malley this too. After watching this documentary though, I have come to another decision….something that will probably get me skewered by Grandpa Al out in Bensonhurst and chased out of Dodge with pitchforks and torches.

I think Walter O’Malley made the right move.

Now, I am not giving a biased opinion because who knows – I may have been a Giants fan, I may have been a Dodgers fan. I don’t know, since the teams moved before my father made his allegiance and had to boo the Yankees before the Mets came into existence. But at the root of it all, I am a baseball fan, and I can love certain players, even if they do not play for my team. I love them more when they wear my team’s uniform, but nonetheless, I can respect another baseball player.

As a business person though, I can say that O’Malley’s decision was a shrewd move.

Something that most lay fans do not realize is that O’Malley tried his durndest to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn. You see, what happened in the early to mid-1950s was a demographic switch. The Irish, Italian, Russian, Jewish, Polish -- essentially all the European immigrants who settled in Brooklyn after the first and second World Wars -- those who basically paid the attendance and the players’ salaries, all migrated out to the ‘burbs of Long Island when the original McMansions of Levittown started sprouting up like weeds, and people could raise their baby-booming families out in a nice neighborhood where strip malls would soon develop.

These families were also dependent on the motor vehicle – cars to you youngsters out there. Something that was a completely foreign concept back when Ebbets was originally built, which had capacity to hold 700 cars. Fans were reliant on the trolley cars (RIP) and the subway cars.

O’Malley lobbied for years to get land over by the Atlantic Yards, where several subway stops converged and even a Long Island Rail Road transfer stop, so that he could have enough land to build a futuristic domed stadium that could hold the capacity of fans wanting to come to the game. Not to mention enough land to make parking lots for those new-fangled automobiles these transplanted Brooklynites were now driving. To O’Malley, from a business standpoint, a baseball standpoint and even a good-for-the-city standpoint, this was a no-brainer.

Enter Robert Moses.

Robert Moses held several titles as a glorified civil engineer in the State of New York, but most of all, was singularly responsible for the infrastructure we see today that links New York to the freeway system. To name a few: the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Long Island Expressway, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. You get the idea. Moses believed in progress and science, and with that comes the advancement of the automobile as the main method of transportation and less reliance on mass transportation such as trains, subways and trolley cars.

He essentially encouraged people to move OUT of the cities and boroughs, and into the ‘burbs! Take your car with you too!

Yes, Moses was considered more powerful than the Mayor, the Governor, and the Mayor and Governor put together.

So in order to get this land deal approved at the Atlantic Yards, O’Malley had to get Moses’ approval. Moses shot down the requests each and every time. O’Malley should build, Moses suggested, in the Flushing Corona Park area where the World’s Fair was held (sound familiar?). This is conveniently accessible to the highways and the automobile transfers.

O’Malley knew his fan base. They want to be able to have the luxury of both train AND automobile access. Not to mention, this land is not being used for anything!

It was then that the city of Los Angeles, desperate for a baseball team, reached out to O’Malley and made him the proverbial offer he could not refuse. There was money, there was glitz, glamour….there was no Robert Moses.

O’Malley knew he could not go out there alone however. He invited disillusioned New York Giant owner, Horace Stoneham, to join him on this trip to go west.

This created a natural rivalry in a time where the closest “western” team was the St. Louis Cardinals. Brilliant strategy. As one old time Brooklyn fan told me, O’Malley could do what he wanted, but he would have NEVER gone out west without the other team.

And so as history goes, in 1957, the Giants and the Dodgers bid adieu to the lights of New York, and went out to the sunsets in the Pacific. And you know, five years later, my hero Bill Shea was instrumental in bringing National League baseball back to New York with some team most of you have never heard of…(that’s a joke).

As a business man, and from a business person’s perspective, O’Malley was WAY ahead of his time. True, greed might have forced him to go into Los Angeles, but he was a visionary. Baseball moved out west. An instant rivalry with the now San Francisco Giants.

Roger Kahn mentions towards the end of Boys of Summer that O’Malley owned nearly half of Los Angeles due this move. So maybe greed was a part of it, but in the long run, we got the Mets out of it. And we have expanded baseball as a result.

Brooklyn Dodger fans may – if given the choice of Stalin or O’Malley in a room with only two bullets, shooting O’Malley twice – vilify O’Malley, but the truth was, he tried on numerous occasions to get the Dodgers to stay in Brooklyn. Where they belonged. Not in some marsh in Queens or Long Island.

The truth was, the demographic changed in New York, the population shifted, the times –whoa – they were a’changin’…and the Dodgers moving out west was a sign of the progress in not only baseball, but science and life as we know it.