Spirit of '55
12-18-2007, 04:33 PM
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Gotta love that last sentence! :homeplate:
New Hall of Famer O'Malley still hated in Brooklyn
Joe Gergen
December 9, 2007
I can't wait to read the inscription on the plaque honoring Walter Francis O'Malley on the occasion of his enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame this summer. So much so that I've already begun work on my own appreciation of everything he has done for the sport, starting with these words: VISIONARY ENTREPRENEUR TRAITOR.
It took me a half-century to view O'Malley's contributions in this light. Dare say there remain residents of Kings County and graying fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers who would reverse the order, and that would be perfectly understandable. But 50 years after he spirited the franchise to Los Angeles, I propose to give the devil his due.
O'Malley could look beyond the Hudson River - actually, he did so after the 1955 season, when he scheduled seven home games in Jersey City for the next two years - and see the need to make baseball national by opening the West Coast to the major leagues. As a shrewd businessman, he also could envision the profit in such a bold move, particularly when the politicians were willing to part with a sizable plot of land adjacent to downtown Los Angeles for the willing pioneer. He wasn't the first person to strike gold in California, but no one before or since encountered less resistance in staking his claim.
Baseball always has been a business to those men who owned the franchises, dating to the time of Charles Comiskey, whose penurious ways created the environment in which the 1919 Chicago White Sox morphed into the Black Sox. The sainted Connie Mack twice sold off championship dynasties in Philadelphia to keep the Athletics in the black. But it wasn't until the 1950s that the public began to appreciate that it was more than a game.
The Braves departed Boston for Milwaukee, where they drew an unprecedented two million fans. The Browns left St. Louis for Baltimore. After 50 years of association, Mack sold the A's, who were transferred to Kansas City shortly thereafter. O'Malley took note of all the upheaval as he negotiated with New York City for a new ballpark to replace cramped Ebbets Field. He would build the stadium, he declared, if the city would only provide land on Atlantic Avenue adjacent to the LIRR terminal.
Civic-minded people have argued that professional sports franchises are not like most businesses, that in representing a city and its inhabitants, they should be treated as a public trust. Certainly, if any franchise could live up to such a noble sentiment - and the later experiences of the NFL's Colts and Browns demonstrated against it - it was the Dodgers.
It is instructive to point out that O'Malley did not become an owner the old-fashioned way, i.e. inheritance. Nor did he buy it outright.
At the time O'Malley became involved, the Brooklyn Trust Company served as trustee for the estates of the Ebbets and McKeever families, which held the rights to the then-debt-ridden National League club. George McLaughlin, a former New York City Police Commissioner, New York State Superintendent of Banks and vice chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, was the president of the Brooklyn Trust Company, and he did not believe a bank should be running a major-league baseball franchise. He had three protégés, all attorneys, who he thought might be interested in taking on the affairs of the Dodgers. They were Jim McLoughlin, Bill Shea and Walter O'Malley.
McLoughlin was a brilliant trial lawyer not particularly interested in business. Shea, whose firm handled the bank's legal affairs, had his sights set on corporate law and politics. But O'Malley, a partner in a small firm that performed some minor services for the bank, was intrigued by baseball, or at least the business of baseball.
"Walter was older than Jim and I," Shea recalled at the time of O'Malley's death in 1979, "and he was more interested in business than in practicing law. It wasn't my kettle of fish. And you couldn't do it unless you did it full-time."
So McLaughlin tapped O'Malley, a decision he was later to regret.
Through McLaughlin, O'Malley became a director of the club. Later he succeeded Wendell Wilkie, a defeated presidential candidate, as the team's legal counsel. And with McLaughlin's backing, he bought stock in the club. In short time, O'Malley, Branch Rickey and John L. Smith, president of Pfizer Chemical Corp., purchased 75 percent of the franchise.
The Dodgers grew prosperous under the new arrangement. O'Malley ran the business and Rickey handled the baseball, constructing a marvelous farm system, signing Jackie Robinson when no black men were engaged in organized ball and laying the groundwork for the great Brooklyn teams of the post-war era.
O'Malley, who had other business interests, was able to buy out Smith's share after the latter's death. After a battle for control, Rickey stepped down as president in 1950 and O'Malley stepped up, buying out his former partner and assuming full responsibility.
Although the team generated more revenue than any other team in the league, O'Malley sought new areas of income. And with the flight of so many Brooklynites to the suburbs, he worried about the future of the Dodgers in a 40-year-old ballpark with too few seats and a minimum of parking.
Robert Moses, New York's power broker, offered a parcel of land across from the old World's Fair site in Flushing Meadows. But that was in Queens, which might as well have been Los Angeles. Chavez Ravine was a much better proposition. So O'Malley took his club and shoved off for California.
A lot of people in Brooklyn never forgave the man his transgression, McLaughlin among them. The latter would help Shea bring National League baseball back to New York, securing the financing for the purchase of an existing franchise - a strategy that failed - before arranging a meeting between Shea and Rickey. They conjured the Continental League out of thin air, and its existence, on paper, spawned the birth of the Mets as well as the Astros (then the Colt .45s).
McLaughlin never again spoke to O'Malley, who owed him everything. O'Malley gained a fortune but in the process lost the man who once treated him like a son.
"He did everything for Walter," said Shea, who died in 1991, 27 years after his name was attached to the Flushing stadium that houses the Mets. "But after the split came, he never talked to him again. He thought the team belonged here, and it did."
Incidentally, the Hall of Fame plaque dedicated to Rickey, who was inducted posthumously in 1967, states simply, "Brought Jackie Robinson to Brooklyn in 1947." Certainly O'Malley's plaque should contain the information "Attempted to trade Jackie Robinson to rival Giants in 1956."
Walter O'Malley may have been the best businessman in baseball history, or at least until the emergence of George Steinbrenner. The ballpark he built in Chavez Ravine remains functional, even beautiful, to this day, and the Dodgers, under his ownership and that of his son Peter, were a model franchise. And Brooklyn's decline may have been inevitable, traced instead to the folding of the Eagle or the closure of the Navy Yard, whose existence once sustained my mother's family. It would be foolish to say the man didn't make the right call as a business executive. His Hall of Fame status only underlines the hard truth.
Alas, unlike enshrined players, celebrated executives aren't cast in bronze with identifying baseball caps. Otherwise, California residents and other Americans born in the last 50 years certainly might expect O'Malley's chubby cheeks to be topped off with the now-familiar interlocking "LA" logo when the plaque is unveiled at Cooperstown.
Personally, I would prefer the old- English "B" that the Dodgers wore in Brooklyn, provided it's preceded by an "S" and and an "O."
Copyright © 2007, Newsday Inc.
Gotta love that last sentence! :homeplate:
New Hall of Famer O'Malley still hated in Brooklyn
Joe Gergen
December 9, 2007
I can't wait to read the inscription on the plaque honoring Walter Francis O'Malley on the occasion of his enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame this summer. So much so that I've already begun work on my own appreciation of everything he has done for the sport, starting with these words: VISIONARY ENTREPRENEUR TRAITOR.
It took me a half-century to view O'Malley's contributions in this light. Dare say there remain residents of Kings County and graying fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers who would reverse the order, and that would be perfectly understandable. But 50 years after he spirited the franchise to Los Angeles, I propose to give the devil his due.
O'Malley could look beyond the Hudson River - actually, he did so after the 1955 season, when he scheduled seven home games in Jersey City for the next two years - and see the need to make baseball national by opening the West Coast to the major leagues. As a shrewd businessman, he also could envision the profit in such a bold move, particularly when the politicians were willing to part with a sizable plot of land adjacent to downtown Los Angeles for the willing pioneer. He wasn't the first person to strike gold in California, but no one before or since encountered less resistance in staking his claim.
Baseball always has been a business to those men who owned the franchises, dating to the time of Charles Comiskey, whose penurious ways created the environment in which the 1919 Chicago White Sox morphed into the Black Sox. The sainted Connie Mack twice sold off championship dynasties in Philadelphia to keep the Athletics in the black. But it wasn't until the 1950s that the public began to appreciate that it was more than a game.
The Braves departed Boston for Milwaukee, where they drew an unprecedented two million fans. The Browns left St. Louis for Baltimore. After 50 years of association, Mack sold the A's, who were transferred to Kansas City shortly thereafter. O'Malley took note of all the upheaval as he negotiated with New York City for a new ballpark to replace cramped Ebbets Field. He would build the stadium, he declared, if the city would only provide land on Atlantic Avenue adjacent to the LIRR terminal.
Civic-minded people have argued that professional sports franchises are not like most businesses, that in representing a city and its inhabitants, they should be treated as a public trust. Certainly, if any franchise could live up to such a noble sentiment - and the later experiences of the NFL's Colts and Browns demonstrated against it - it was the Dodgers.
It is instructive to point out that O'Malley did not become an owner the old-fashioned way, i.e. inheritance. Nor did he buy it outright.
At the time O'Malley became involved, the Brooklyn Trust Company served as trustee for the estates of the Ebbets and McKeever families, which held the rights to the then-debt-ridden National League club. George McLaughlin, a former New York City Police Commissioner, New York State Superintendent of Banks and vice chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, was the president of the Brooklyn Trust Company, and he did not believe a bank should be running a major-league baseball franchise. He had three protégés, all attorneys, who he thought might be interested in taking on the affairs of the Dodgers. They were Jim McLoughlin, Bill Shea and Walter O'Malley.
McLoughlin was a brilliant trial lawyer not particularly interested in business. Shea, whose firm handled the bank's legal affairs, had his sights set on corporate law and politics. But O'Malley, a partner in a small firm that performed some minor services for the bank, was intrigued by baseball, or at least the business of baseball.
"Walter was older than Jim and I," Shea recalled at the time of O'Malley's death in 1979, "and he was more interested in business than in practicing law. It wasn't my kettle of fish. And you couldn't do it unless you did it full-time."
So McLaughlin tapped O'Malley, a decision he was later to regret.
Through McLaughlin, O'Malley became a director of the club. Later he succeeded Wendell Wilkie, a defeated presidential candidate, as the team's legal counsel. And with McLaughlin's backing, he bought stock in the club. In short time, O'Malley, Branch Rickey and John L. Smith, president of Pfizer Chemical Corp., purchased 75 percent of the franchise.
The Dodgers grew prosperous under the new arrangement. O'Malley ran the business and Rickey handled the baseball, constructing a marvelous farm system, signing Jackie Robinson when no black men were engaged in organized ball and laying the groundwork for the great Brooklyn teams of the post-war era.
O'Malley, who had other business interests, was able to buy out Smith's share after the latter's death. After a battle for control, Rickey stepped down as president in 1950 and O'Malley stepped up, buying out his former partner and assuming full responsibility.
Although the team generated more revenue than any other team in the league, O'Malley sought new areas of income. And with the flight of so many Brooklynites to the suburbs, he worried about the future of the Dodgers in a 40-year-old ballpark with too few seats and a minimum of parking.
Robert Moses, New York's power broker, offered a parcel of land across from the old World's Fair site in Flushing Meadows. But that was in Queens, which might as well have been Los Angeles. Chavez Ravine was a much better proposition. So O'Malley took his club and shoved off for California.
A lot of people in Brooklyn never forgave the man his transgression, McLaughlin among them. The latter would help Shea bring National League baseball back to New York, securing the financing for the purchase of an existing franchise - a strategy that failed - before arranging a meeting between Shea and Rickey. They conjured the Continental League out of thin air, and its existence, on paper, spawned the birth of the Mets as well as the Astros (then the Colt .45s).
McLaughlin never again spoke to O'Malley, who owed him everything. O'Malley gained a fortune but in the process lost the man who once treated him like a son.
"He did everything for Walter," said Shea, who died in 1991, 27 years after his name was attached to the Flushing stadium that houses the Mets. "But after the split came, he never talked to him again. He thought the team belonged here, and it did."
Incidentally, the Hall of Fame plaque dedicated to Rickey, who was inducted posthumously in 1967, states simply, "Brought Jackie Robinson to Brooklyn in 1947." Certainly O'Malley's plaque should contain the information "Attempted to trade Jackie Robinson to rival Giants in 1956."
Walter O'Malley may have been the best businessman in baseball history, or at least until the emergence of George Steinbrenner. The ballpark he built in Chavez Ravine remains functional, even beautiful, to this day, and the Dodgers, under his ownership and that of his son Peter, were a model franchise. And Brooklyn's decline may have been inevitable, traced instead to the folding of the Eagle or the closure of the Navy Yard, whose existence once sustained my mother's family. It would be foolish to say the man didn't make the right call as a business executive. His Hall of Fame status only underlines the hard truth.
Alas, unlike enshrined players, celebrated executives aren't cast in bronze with identifying baseball caps. Otherwise, California residents and other Americans born in the last 50 years certainly might expect O'Malley's chubby cheeks to be topped off with the now-familiar interlocking "LA" logo when the plaque is unveiled at Cooperstown.
Personally, I would prefer the old- English "B" that the Dodgers wore in Brooklyn, provided it's preceded by an "S" and and an "O."
Copyright © 2007, Newsday Inc.