A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (4 page)

The most successful of these franchise shifts were
the Braves. County Stadium in Milwaukee was a wide-open facility
with a large parking lot and easy road access. The car culture was
in full swing. It was the Baby Boomer generation, a period of
post-war prosperity of unprecedented proportions. The Great
Depression, the Dust Bowl, the New Deal, the failed America of John
Steinbeck’s novels, was completely overshadowed by the success of
free market capitalism. In Oklahoma, Bud Wilkinson’s Sooners were
the dominant college football power; their games sold out,
eclipsing old stereotypes of Okie poverty. In Milwaukee, attendance
topped 2 million. Families of four came out to the park. They
bought expensive new cars, paid for gas and parking. They paid for
souvenirs and ballpark food. After the game they frequented local
restaurants and businesses. Baseball in Milwaukee was integrated
into the economy of an entire community.

Post-war success seemed to have resonated everywhere
except in Brooklyn. During World War II, blacks from the South
moved to big cities to work in the shipyards. It was a new, mobile
population, and the demographics of Brooklyn changed. Blacks and
Puerto Ricans began to replace the traditional Irish Catholic and
Jewish citizenry of Brooklyn. Levittown was built; a planned,
suburban community on Long Island. “White flight” took place.
Whites moved out of the city to Westchester, to Long Island and
Queens, to New Jersey and Connecticut. Retirees found new lives in
Miami.

Walter O’Malley and Branch Rickey had courted the
black and Puerto Rican fan base. When Robinson was signed and
brought to Brooklyn in 1947, they were an integral part of the
team’s support, financially and otherwise. But a fissure occurred
between O’Malley and Robinson. O’Malley, who had been born into
wealth and graduated from Fordham Law School, hated Rickey and
bought him out after annexing shares over a period of years. He had
total control of the Brooklyn franchise. O’Malley fired employees
who so much as mentioned Rickey’s name. Only those considered
indispensable to the club’s operation were retained from the Rickey
era. Robinson admired the “savior” Rickey and openly supported him,
which infuriated O’Malley.

The Dodgers of the late 1940s and 1950s were some of
the most successful in the club’s long history, but attendance
dipped. It perplexed O’Malley. Here he was, a smart, successful
attorney and businessman, living in America at a time of huge
economic growth, but he was not benefiting from it. Other cities
were. The new franchises out west, particularly Milwaukee, were
breaking new ground, creating paradigm shifts in what a sports
business could be. Just over the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan was
prosperous, a glamorous, Frank Sinatra town of Broadway shows, hot
night spots, business tycoons and their trophy women. Wall Street
executives lived posh country lifestyles in Greenwich and New
Canaan, Connecticut, or Westchester County; easy train access
whisking them back and forth from the city where they seemingly
ruled this brave new world; masters of the business universe,
patricians of the New Rome.

With all of this going on, O’Malley sat in his
office with Buzzie Bavasi and looked out his window. What he saw
filled him with despair. A long line of blacks and Puerto Ricans
were standing outside the welfare office, waiting for relief
checks. These were not people with discretionary income who were
going to spend what they did have on Dodger tickets.

“Why are we catering to these people?” O’Malley
asked Bavasi. There was no good answer to that question.

A conundrum developed. O’Malley wanted a new stadium
and new fans. There was little available land in Brooklyn, but
worse, there was no freeway access. The “new fans” were really the
old ones who had moved away. They would have to come from the
suburban enclaves of Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut. They
would need to come in cars. Without freeways, getting in and out of
antiquated Brooklyn was problematic. Little Ebbets Field only held
only 32,000 fans. O'Malley commissioned famed architect Buckminster
Fuller to draw plans for a domed stadium at Atlantic and Flatbush,
above the Long Island Railroad depot.

To New York City building czar Robert Moses, the
answer seemed obvious. He wanted a modern park built in Flushing
Meadows, adjacent to La Guardia Airport and across from the future
site of the World’s Fair. He formulated plans to erect a new
stadium in Queens. But the Dodgers were psychologically tied to
their Brooklyn identity. A move to any other borough was seen as
betrayal. Already struggling in a three-way battle for the New York
fan base with the Giants and Yankees, O’Malley was concerned that
if he lost the Brooklyn identity the team would suffer at the
gate.

In Moses, O’Malley had met a man
he could not defeat in a political power struggle. As in Sun
Tzu’s
The Art of War
, O’Malley
understood that withdrawal might be his best option. There were
rumblings that the Dodgers might move, but nobody took it
seriously. It was out of the question, unthinkable, heresy. But
there were signs of impending doom. O’Malley played a series of
games in Jersey City, New Jersey, ostensibly testing the
waters.

Brooklyn’s great rivals, the Giants, also suffered
attendance downturns. Their stadium, the Polo Grounds, was located
in an even worse neighborhood. Coogan’s Bluff in Harlem was now
crime-ridden. Their Bronx neighbors, the Yankees, faced similar
problems, but the pinstripers were a dominant team that won the
battle for the Manhattan, New Jersey and Connecticut fan base
needed for success. Yankee Stadium also had the advantage of easy
freeway access, meaning suburban fans could pop in an out without
risking the mean streets as they did in Brooklyn.

A bitter novel,
Last
Exit to Brooklyn
, embodied the desultory
situation of the borough in the 1950s. O’Malley’s plans for a new
stadium, for a “geodesic dome” and other alternatives, were put
down at every turn. But he showed his hand when he turned down a
deal with a firm that planned to build a Brooklyn stadium. However,
the Queens stadium project did not appeal to O’Malley. He felt that
if he acquiesced to such a venture, not only would the club lose
its Brooklyn identity, but a palpable shift in power and even club
control might be lost to Moses, who ruled over all he surveyed in
New York like a modern Caesar.

When Jackie Robinson was traded to
the Giants and Sal Maglie, a longtime hated Giants pitcher, became
a Dodger, all seemed to have been turned around. It was a foretaste
of cataclysmic change. So it was during the 1956 World Series when
O’Malley saw Kenneth Hahn talking shop with Cal Griffith. He knew
the future was in Los Angeles. Whoever harnessed it would ride the
whirlwind. O’Malley could not stomach the prospect of Cal Griffith
being such a pioneering figure. New York literally was not big
enough for O’Malley and Robert Moses to co-exist. A three-team big
league city was apparently a failure, especially in the car
culture. O’Malley wrote a note to Hahn and had an usher deliver it.
It asked Hahn not to accept any deal with Griffith or anybody else
until he had a chance to speak with O’Malley.

"Being two miles away was the same as being 3,000
miles away," Buzzie Bavasi said. "Walter wanted to own his own
stadium, even in New York. And Los Angeles was prepared to help him
get it."

After losing a seven-game Series to the dominant
Yankees, the Dodgers immediately departed for an exhibition tour of
Japan. Disappointed over the World Series loss, nobody had the
heart for it. Jackie Robinson refused, and it was the last straw.
He was traded to the Giants, but chose to retire instead of
becoming a teammate of Willie Mays, possibly returning to his home
state to finish out a Hall of Fame career.

The team’s plane stopped in Los Angeles on the way
to Japan. O’Malley met with Hahn, who held some major cards. Aside
from Griffith, he was entertaining inquiries from Giants owner
Horace Stoneham, who was rumored to be ready to move his team
somewhere out west. O’Malley knew he needed a rival in California,
and that would naturally be Stoneham’s Giants. O’Malley also knew
that the jewel in the Golden State would be Los Angeles; not San
Diego, not San Francisco. He immediately set about securing L.A.
and steering Stoneham to San Francisco. San Diego, located 100
miles south of Los Angeles, would be “Dodgers country.” Its minor
league operation would fall by the wayside, replaced by media and
radio attention devoted to the new team in L.A.

O’Malley tried to keep his cards close to the vest,
but Hahn put on a full court press. Hahn played the Senators and
Giants against O’Malley, as if any big league operation would be of
equal value. In truth, he salivated over the Dodgers. They were by
far the most attractive prospect for a number of reasons. O’Malley
understood what he had and acted on it, secretly committing to the
City of Angels.

What clinched the deal was O’Malley’s declaration
that the city would not be required to build him a stadium. In
bureaucratic New York, old school corruption going back to the days
of Democrat-controlled Tammany Hall was still in place, embodied by
Moses. The concept that a private corporation could secure a plot
of land large enough for a ballpark, build it on its own, and
operate such a venture in an act of unfettered capitalism, was
unheard of. It would certainly take Moses out of the picture, and
that was not to be.

But Los Angeles was still a Republican city; a
wide-open, business-friendly atmosphere in which entrepreneurial
capitalism was the driving force of a growing, unbounded,
we-can-achieve-anything culture. It was O’Malley’s kind of place.
Hahn and the L.A. politicians knew their biggest hurdle would be
the stadium issue, resulting in the inevitable, age-old complaints
about such an expense when schools, hospitals and the poor needed
the money instead. Then O’Malley delivered a bombshell; Manna from
Heaven.

He would
build the ballpark.
He would also
reap the benefits. The city of course would be spared the initial
costs, but the value, public relations and monetary, would be
incalculable.

All O’Malley wanted was land. The city and county of
L.A. had plenty of that. It was a huge, wide-open swath of
mountains, hills, valleys, and basins, all criss-crossed by new
modern freeways, courtesy of a visionary highway act signed by
President Dwight Eisenhower. O’Malley seemingly had his choice, but
that choice was not a hard one to make. A couple of miles from
downtown Los Angeles was a pleasant hill and wide plateau
overlooking the city. It was perfect. He originally found it on a
map at a gas station. It was called Chavez Ravine. The city had
tried to make it a recreation site, but squatters' shacks and
scattered herds of goats still roamed amid the refuse. O'Malley
swapped the Watts property where Wrigley Field was for the 300-acre
landfill. A close referendum would grant it to the Dodgers, and
groundbreaking would take place in 1959.

But first O’Malley had to deal with the exodus from
New York. It was an incredible high-wire act of deception, all
designed to slowly, imperceptibly prepare the public for an
inevitable outcome in a manner with as little shock to the system
as possible. Throughout 1957, O’Malley pretended to negotiate with
the powers that be, but eventually played his hand when he sold
Ebbets Field to a commercial developer. When no alternative was
effectuated – a Brooklyn stadium site or the Moses site in Queens –
the writing, as in the Old Testament, was on the wall. O’Malley
would be the modern Moses who led the Dodgers to the Promised Land
of California. Robert Moses would be left to pick up the pieces in
a city he ruled like a Pharaoh.

Fans observed this; one small step followed by
another, instead of a single announcement. They began to accept the
inevitable. Both the Dodgers and Giants had disappointing seasons
in 1957, so attendance was down at both Ebbets and the Polo
Grounds. O’Malley pointed to this as reason for the move.

When the news hit that O’Malley had purchased the
Cubs’ minor league franchise in Los Angeles, along with L.A.'s
Wrigley Field, the cat was out of the bag. Then O’Malley got
Stoneham on board. Stoneham was painted a dark scenario. If he went
it alone in New York, or moved to Minnesota, he would not have his
main rival to help power the transition. Stoneham was doing so
poorly financially that he owed money to the stadium
concessions.

The Giants’ owner was completely fed up with the
ancient Polo Grounds, now a war zone. He was prepared to move to
Minneapolis anyway, regardless of O’Malley’s departure. O’Malley
simply made him change his plans for the better; San Francisco,
California, a New York-style town steeped in the traditions of Joe
DiMaggio and the PCL Seals, the most legendary of all minor league
teams. The rivalry would flourish on the West Coast.

The Boston Red Sox owned the San Francisco Seals.
Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey sold his territorial rights to Stoneham in
exchange for Minneapolis, at a price of $25,000. On May 29, 1957
the Dodgers announced the move. In August, the Giants followed
suit.

"I feel sorry for the kids, but I haven't seen much
of their fathers lately," Stoneham said.

For Brooklyn fans, the re-telling of this story
resembles the Zapruder film, as if in watching it somehow it will
turn out differently, but it never does. Their team was a beloved
institution. There was a sense of family in Brooklyn that had not
existed with the Giants (at least not recently), and certainly not
with the corporate Yankees, who like the Americans in Iraq simply
prevailed in a war of attrition and strength because they were too
big, powerful and rich to be toppled.