The Dodgers Move West

Sullivan's thesis is that Walter O'Malley, the most reviled man in New York City, did not set out to move the Dodgers to Los Angeles and would have stayed in Brooklyn had he received the land he wanted. He makes a compelling case that ultimately Robert Moses, who wanted only the eventual Flushing Meadow site of Shea Stadium developed for stadium use, was perhaps the greater villain in the whole affair. And he argues that O'Malley was less the conniving evil figure that the tradtional view of works like "Bums" and "The Boys Of Summer" would indicate.

This part of Sullivan's thesis has some merit to it. Where Sullivan ultimately loses me is his degenerating into something bordering on O'Malley sycophancy. He argues that Walter O'Malley deserves induction in the Hall of Fame for having supposedly had the the foresight to expand baseball to the west, a community that had long been denied baseball, and because the Dodgers achieved success in Los Angeles. And he argues that because Ebbets Field had been built under the "free market" model of baseball economics, Walter O'Malley ultimately had every right to do what he wanted to do with his own ball club.

This however, is where Sullivan is dead wrong. First, Walter O'Malley does not deserve induction into the Hall of Fame simply for being the first beneficiary of an idea that other owners and men were envisioning much sooner. Nor for that matter does O'Malley merit induction simply because he presided over successful teams, because under that model George Steinbrenner should be a candidate for induction as well. The success of the Dodgers in Los Angeles ultimately rests with its players and front office management like Buzzie Bavasi and Al Campanis, not O'Malley.

Finally, Sullivan's determination to prove that O'Malley was in the technical right to do what he felt was necessary to make more money for his franchise, conveniently overlooks a salient point. Walter O'Malley may have been the team's owner, but the Dodgers were not a longstanding family business as the Giants had been with Horace Stoneham. O'Malley was an outsider who had forced his way to the top and had been principal owner for less than a decade when he decided that he had the right to take something that had been the heart and soul of a community for 67 years away from them forever, even though his financial situation wasn't comparable to that of franchise owners in Philadelphia, St. Louis and Boston who had moved earlier in the decade (as well as that of Horace Stoneham). Technically, O'Malley had the right to move, but ethically and morally, the Brooklyn Dodgers did not belong to O'Malley the man, they belonged to the people of Brooklyn. If Walter O'Malley wasn't making good money from the team, then his first obligation was to cut his losses, sell and let other local ownership try their hand at improving the situation. This is ultimately the ethical side that should separate a sports franchise ownership apart from any other business, when it is a part of the community and Neal Sullivan misses the boat completely on this point in his determination to whitewash the heart of the matter and make O'Malley look good in the end.


The O'Malley Bunko   May 25, 2001
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Perhaps inevitably an academic who was not on the scene close up is the one would give us the O'Malley house version of why the the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn. Sullivan argues that Walter O'Malley would have kept the team in Brooklyn if only New York's big bad politicos had given him a site where he could erect a ball park with his own funds. But as Roger Kahn points out in "The Era", O'Malley did not actually have sufficient funds. Journalists around at the time -- the late 1950s -- were not fooled by O'Malley, whom Branch Rickey called "the most devious man I ever met." Sullivan has done some hard research but unfortunately it is wasted as he swallows the O'Malley line like a very hungry trout.