Walter O’Malley Voted into Baseball Hall of Fame

Some folks are Catholic, some Baptist, some Presbyterian. Others are Jewish, Muslim or Hindu. About 50 years ago, a strange sect known as Brooklyn Dodger Fans, as rabidly fanatical as any Inquisitor or jihadi, experienced their own Apocalypse In 1957, team owner Walter O’Malley moved the Dodgers from 55 Sullivan Place in Brooklyn, New York, to 1000 Elysian Park Avenue Los Angeles, California. His name was cursed, his image defiled, and his memory blackened as the Evil One. Monday, Major League Baseball admitted him into the Hall of Fame. Brooklyn can’t believe it.

Of course, Mr. O’Malley was a businessman and was in it for the profits. Wikipedia explains what happened, “But the Dodgers were soon victims of their own success, because only a limited number of eager fans could cram into minuscule Ebbets Field, and it had almost no automobile parking for Dodger fans who had moved east to suburban Long Island, NY. Club owner Walter O'Malley announced plans for a domed stadium for his Dodgers at the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, where a large market was being torn down, but New York City Building Commissioner Robert Moses wanted the stadium located in Flushing Meadows, NY, located in the borough of Queens, NY (the site of the current Shea Stadium). O'Malley refused to consider Moses' position, and Moses refused O'Malley's. As a result, O'Malley began to flirt publicly with Los Angeles, California, using a relocation threat as political leverage to win favor with his desired Brooklyn stadium. Ultimately, O'Malley and Moses could never come to agreement on a new location for the Dodgers, and the club moved west to Los Angeles.”

Pete Hamill, as fine a writer as Brooklyn ever produced, opened a column in the Daily News yesterday with “Forget the dithering about Barry Bonds. Send apologies to Pete Rose. Warm up a place for Shoeless Joe Jackson. All moral arguments about who belongs in Cooperstown are over forever. Walter O'Malley has been voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.” He explained what the team meant to Brooklyn, “Baseball was one of the great factors that unified Brooklyn, as it did for almost everybody else in the larger city. Ethnicity and religion didn't matter as much as coming out of the subway, hurrying home and asking someone with a radio: ‘How are they doing?’ In Brooklyn, you never had to ask who ‘they’ were.”

Borough President Marty Markowitz (he’d be mayor of a city of 2 million if Brooklyn weren’t part of New York City) was “flabbergasted” by the news. He was 12 when Dem Bums left. “For O'Malley, the bottom line was that it was his team to do what he wanted with, and he did it at the expense of breaking our hearts, at the expense of ripping out the hearts of the most enthusiastic fans in baseball.” Ever the politician, though, he did have a constructive idea a few years ago, “"if you're going to elect O'Malley, then give Brooklyn some respect by putting that great Dodger, Gil Hodges, in the Hall of Fame as well.” Mr. Hodges Hodges batted .273 in his career with a .487 slugging average, 1921 hits, 1274 RBI, 1105 runs, 295 doubles and 63 stolen bases in 2071 games. His 361 home runs with the Dodgers remain second in team history to Snider's 389.

The Dodgers aren’t what they were in Brooklyn – they’ve gone Hollywood. And Brooklyn isn’t what it was either -- too much Wall Street money washing into the Heights and Park Slope, and a new wave of immigrants have changed the restaurant menus. The Mets have taken on the National League fans of New York to a large degree, and for two generations of New Yorkers, the Dodgers have always been a West Coast team. The sect of the Brooklyn Dodger Fan still has one article of faith that survived the move – “Yankees suck!”

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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