O’Malley Had His Eyes on Los Angeles from the Beginning
By Andrew Paul Mele
Special to Brooklyn Daily Eagle
BROOKLYN — On October 9, 1957, a headline in the New York Herald-Tribune placed a lingering fear into words that carried a dreaded finality, “It’s Official — Dodgers Go To Los Angeles.” Under the byline of Dodgers beat writer Tommy Holmes were the words, “The Dodgers yesterday took the irrevocable step from Ebbets Field to Los Angeles.”
And so it was over. The fat lady had sung; the song had ended; King Kong had fallen from the top of the Empire State Building; for Brooklyn fans it was the beginning of the winter of our discontent. The Dodgers had left Brooklyn. It was with melancholy, and sadness and depression, but not without rancor that the Flatbush Faithful bid their beloved Bums adieu.
The malice and resentment was directed at one man, and though New York City Parks Commissioner and “Czar” Robert Moses has been implicated in the abduction, it was eminently clear to the populous of the borough that one man only carried that responsibility — one Walter Francis O’Malley.
O’Malley, the president of the Dodgers, has been variously described as shrewd, congenial, and conversational to the point of manifesting a bit of the blarney. An astute businessman, he was outwardly candid, friendly and charming. Physically he was a bit portly, bespeckled and perpetually armed with a cigar tucked into a holder.
But he was often described in other ways. Branch Rickey said “he was the most devious man I’ve ever met,” and Leo Durocher derisively called him “Whalebelly” to his face.
He held court with convivial afternoons over drinks and poker at the Hotel Bossert. He grew to be a presence, the presence among his counterparts in the major leagues. O’Malley was considered to be a manipulator of people and events. In engineering the exodus of major league baseball to the West Coast, it appears to be a plan he had been nurturing for years, all the while “negotiating” with the city of New York to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn.
Who Was O’Malley?
Walter Francis O’Malley was born in the Bronx on October 9, 1903. He received an engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania and entered Columbia Law School in 1926. He completed his law studies with evening classes at Fordham University and earned his degree in 1930.
It was during the depression that Walter developed a law practice by specializing in bankruptcy law. It was in this regard that he came in contact with George V. McLaughlin, the president of the Brooklyn Trust Company, which held the mortgage for the Brooklyn Dodgers organization.
The ball club was nearly bankrupt and deeply in arrears in its mortgage loan payments to Brooklyn Trust. McLaughlin assigned O’Malley the job of monitoring the baseball organization’s legal and business affairs. Thus, in 1943, O’Malley gave up his practice to become vice president and general counsel for the Dodgers.
On August 13, 1945, O’Malley, along with Branch Rickey and John L. Smith; then vice president of Pfizer Chemical; purchased 75 percent of the team stock, equally divided among them. O’Malley was now officially a part of the historic franchise whose roots can be traced to the late nineteenth century.
L.A. Mentioned as Site for
Major Team as Early as 1941
Los Angeles first began to be mentioned as a site for a baseball franchise in 1941 when Don Barnes, owner of the St. Louis Browns, requested that he be allowed to relocate his team to L.A. He believed that he had all the bases covered, including scheduling and claimed to have the necessary votes from the owners.
His request was on the agenda at the major league meetings and was to be addressed at 9 a.m. on Monday, December 8, 1941. Events of December 7 made the move a moot point, since baseball was not even sure of playing at all in the coming season.
Immediately following the dispatching of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Los Angeles was back on track as a potential major league city.
The Pacific Coast League (PCL) had been petitioning the majors for greater consideration, possibly as a third major league and in 1945 they voted to become a full major league. The major league owners turned them down, but made some concessions in regard to the amounts paid to PCL teams for players drafted out of their league.
It became necessary for the leagues to act, so in 1947, Commissioner A. B. “Happy” Chandler presented a proposal that would allow the coast cities to become a part of the two existing major leagues. The intent was to increase both the National and American Leagues from eight to 10 teams — the additions being four PCL cities; Los Angeles and Hollywood, and San Francisco and Oakland. The National League passed the resolution, but the American League turned it down.
In the July 7, 1948 issue of The Sporting News, it was reported that Los Angeles County Supervisor Leonard Roach led a contingent of LA officials on a hunt for a big league ball club. They sought the St. Louis Browns and the Chicago Cubs. Although turned down this time, Los Angeles and the major leagues were growing closer and closer.
By the time O’Malley had forced Branch Rickey out and totally taken over control of the organization after the 1950 season, it was no longer a question of if Los Angeles would become a part of major league baseball, but when, and who would be the one to nail it down.
Braves, Browns Move
By the spring of 1953, talk of relocating ball clubs had become a regular fact of life among baseball’s owners. Lou Perini of the Boston Braves requested permission to move his team to Milwaukee, showing desperate financial straits as the reason. Indeed, the Braves total attendance for 1952 was 281,000. It was Walter O’Malley who put the motion on the floor at the league meeting, and without his influence, there almost assuredly would not have been an unanimous positive vote. O’Malley saw the Braves move as a test case for his own plan, and when the Braves topped their previous season’s attendance in the first few weeks, it seemed that all systems were a go for the Dodgers president.
While Los Angeles was talked about matter-of-factly as a potential Rumors strong enough to have to be denied by presidents Warren Giles of the National League and Will Harridge of the American had the St. Louis Browns and Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics moving to Los Angeles and San Francisco. The National wanted the Reds and Phils to relocate. Thus, it had now become a dispute over which league would get the rights to the West Coast cities first.
According to St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck, George Weiss professed to have a syndicate ready and waiting on the West Coast to buy the Browns and relocate them to L.A. The league turned down Veeck’s request for a transfer; one executive chastising him for even suggesting such a move so close to the start of the season. Two days after the denial, permission was granted to Lou Perini to relocate his Boston Braves to Milwaukee. Bill Veeck was ultimately forced to sell the Browns, the new owners immediately getting the okay to go to Baltimore, a move that Veeck had earlier asked but was denied. Following the Browns move to Baltimore, a column in The Sporting News written by Frank Finch said that while the third major league talk was now “childish prattle”, in view of current attendance figures, “Los Angeles is ripe for the plucking ala Milwaukee.”
O’Malley vs. Robert Moses
Meanwhile, the saga of Walter O’Malley and Robert Moses was being perpetuated in the middle fifties. O’Malley had been hinting at the need for a new stadium for the Dodgers since the late forties. He was making money in Brooklyn. In 1956 the Dodgers showed a net profit of $487,000; the Braves in Milwaukee netted $362,000. The Dodgers were recording a million-plus in attendance every season, a profitable number in that era, and were raking in $800,000 in television revenue. Still, with his decrepit old ballpark in a neighborhood with changing demographics and his ball club getting old, O’Malley wondered whether the revenues would be able to be maintained.
In August of 1955, the Dodgers announced that they would play seven “home” games in Jersey City’s Roosevelt Stadium, a subtle hint that if he didn’t get his way, the Dodgers could wind up someplace else. Dick Young in the New York Daily News wrote that the Dodgers were “inching their way westward.”
Through it all, one of baseball histories’ finest ball clubs had blossomed. With Jackie Robinson in the vanguard, and Pee Wee Reese in the leadership role as team captain, a team developed that would dominate the National League over the last 11 years of the team’s existence. Even in losing, they would provide thrills and unforgettable scenes.
In order to keep his array of stars — Carl Erskine, Duke Snider, Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella and all the rest — in Brooklyn, O’Malley asked the city to condemn a piece of land and sell it to him, and he would build his own ballpark.
The authority being cited was Title I of the Federal Housing Act of 1949, allowing the city to condemn a parcel of land to be replaced by a public project or to be sold to a private developer whose construction would conform to a “public purpose.” O’Malley wanted a site at Flatbush and Atlantic avenues in Downtown Brooklyn, but Moses refused to allow the building of a ball park, as he considered it not to be in accord with the intent of the Act. The entire question of blame hinges on whether the Dodgers’ boss was sincere in his desire to obtain this piece of property.
Some thought not. Bill Veeck has written that “They couldn’t have met his demands, of course, because if they had given him what he wanted, he’d probably have kept changing them.”
O’Malley was then offered a site at Flushing Meadows in Queens, where the current Mets reside. He refused it, saying that Dodgers fans would know that it wasn’t in Brooklyn. Presumably, they wouldn’t notice that Los Angeles was not in Brooklyn either.
Following the Braves, shift to Milwaukee, Veeck maintains, he made an offer to O’Malley to purchase the Dodgers with the idea of taking the club to Los Angeles. Veeck was refused, of course, but came away with an interesting supposition. “When I left his office, it was with the distinct impression that O’Malley wasn’t going to sell the club to me because he had already mapped out Los Angeles for himself. And that was four years before he moved.”
Parking, TV Won Out
There were two primary reasons for O’Malley to want to build and own his own ballpark. One was parking, for which all proceeds would be his. At the Flatbush and Atlantic site, projections ranged from 2,500 parking spaces to 5,000; in L.A. he got 16,000. Another reason was television. Nobody can call the Dodgers boss a fool, and he was decidedly ahead of his time when he zeroed in on pay TV.
With free television, he believed that the best approach was to air away games and black out all home games, thus buttering up the fans’ appetite when the team came home. This, he believed would increase home attendance. Brooklyn fans were already being treated to 100 televised games, all home games and the remaining, select road games. With two other teams in NYC televising games, O’Malley would not have exclusive control of the airways. His plan could not effectively be implicated in Brooklyn.
A headline in the Los Angeles Examiner on August 19, 1953 boldly declared, “LA MAJOR LEAGUE BALL PLAN SPEEDED UP....VEECK’S BIG LEAGUE OFFER STUDIED.” In 1953, four years before the actual move, LA was ready, baseball was ready, and so was O’Malley. The evidence is circumstantial, yet can we imagine this shrewd, calculating, manipulative, brilliant businessman standing in the anteroom of Robert Moses’ office, hat in hand, begging for a piece of land so that he can keep his Dodgers in the bosom of their loving fans? It would seem rather that if Moses was the power broker he is accused of being, then he played into O’Malley’s hands, and the borough of Brooklyn was merely a pawn in the charade.
It was 50 years ago this October, and perhaps it doesn’t matter very much any more. Fans in Brooklyn will live as they have for all this time with the mind’s eye view of a Duke Snider home run majestically sailing over the right field screen and bouncing onto Bedford Avenue; of Jackie Robinson glissading off of third base and then running full out, stopping short and returning to the bag without even drawing a throw; and Pee Wee Reese slapping one behind the runner.
It was the fans also that won’t be forgotten. Hilda Chester and her cowbell; and the Dodgers Sym-Phony band banging out a tinny version of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game.”
O’Malley knew that he had every opportunity of having it all on the gold coast. Brooklyn never had a chance! There is every reason to agree with writer Dave Anderson when he said, “O’Malley would have broken through a brick wall to get his team to LA.”
Andrew Paul Mele is a member of the Old Boys of Summer, a group of men in their 60s and 70s, including some former minor league players, who play regularly in Propsect Park. He is also the editor of “A Brooklyn Dodger Reader.”
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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