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April 24, 2008

Blazing the O'Malley Trail

50 Years Later, Part One

by Gary Gillette

If a recent immigrant listened casually to accounts of the Dodgers’ move west in the 1950s, they might think that Walter O’Malley was an old-fashioned pioneer—a man who literally blazed a trail across prairie, plains, mountains, and desert. In their imagination, “The O’Malley Trail” might be a latter-day entrepreneurial version of the nineteenth-century Oregon Trail, enabling enterprising baseball executives to seek a better life on the baseball frontier.

This past week marked the 50^th anniversary of the first big league games on the Left Coast. A half-century ago, the two sets of refugees from Gotham opened the 1957 season with home-and-home series in LA and San Francisco. The first three-game set was played at Seals Stadium; the three-game return match was played at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Neither was a first-rate venue for major league baseball.

Few could predict then that the futures of the two powerful franchises from New York were about to diverge dramatically. Though many of the iconic “Boys of Summer” were already gone, and others were reduced to supporting roles, the Dodgers were rebuilding by the time they reached the West Coast. They would luck out in 1959 with one of the worst teams ever to win the World Series before more fully returning to dynastic status in the early 1960s. Concomitant with their on-field success, the Dodgers have been a perennial gold mine financially in the Golden State.

The Giants, in stark contrast, are still searching for their first world championship since they left the Big Apple after being one of two dominant teams in the NL for the first half of the twentieth century (the other being the Cardinals). From 1901–57, New York won five World Series and 15 NL pennants. However, in the past 50 years, the Giants have won only three pennants, six division titles, and one wild card. Even allowing for the NL’s expansion from eight to 16 teams, that is an incredible disappointment. Off the field, the club struggled financially until the 1990s, when new ownership righted the foundering ship. The great leap didn’t work out so well for the Giants, obviously.

The man given universal credit for this watershed event is Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, who will be inducted posthumously into the Hall of Fame on July 27. As one of the most powerful and dynamic executives in baseball history, like so many other aspects of Hall of Fame voting over the years O’Malley’s recognition in Cooperstown is so long overdue that it defies explanation. It’s not at all clear whether O’Malley would have ever been elected under the old rules, so the keepers of Cooperstown rearranged the Veterans Committee in 2007 to make O’Malley’s election—along with ex-commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s—a done deal.