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April 29, 2008

Blazing the O'Malley Trail

50 Years Later, Part Two

by Gary Gillette

Another problem with evaluating O’Malley’s legacy is that many revisionists, consciously or unconsciously, make a big deal out of the Dodgers’ Brooklyn attendance, then and now. Disparage the Dodgers’ support in the 1950s as a way of rationalizing O’Malley’s gambit, they write phrases like “the Dodgers barely drew a million fans” in Brooklyn in the 1950s, as if that were some kind of crime. The fact is that both major leagues in the 1950s were in deep trouble, with overall attendance declining for a multitude of reasons. It is neither fair nor instructive to compare today’s attendance, when the US population is double what it was in 1950, with five decades ago unless one also puts those numbers in context. Furthermore, the Los Angeles market of the twenty-first century is more than four times the size of Brooklyn’s market in 1950.

The myth of weak attendance in Brooklyn undergirds the popular understanding of O’Malley’s inspiration to go west. Despite the misconceptions that have obscured the facts since the move, the Dodgers had drawn better than the NL average (excluding Brooklyn) in every season from 1938 through 1956. Only in 1957, the Dodgers’ last year in Brooklyn—and a season throughout which rumors swirled that the team was headed west—did O'Malley's team fall a few thousand fans short of the league mean in attendance.

A glance at the attendance graph shows that Brooklyn attendance was far from embarrassing. The Dodgers’ attendance in LA when they were playing in Memorial Coliseum in 1958–60 is only a tiny bit better than it was in Brooklyn’s from 1950–52, even while the Dodgers were enjoying a honeymoon period in their new market. Attendance spiked upward once Dodger Stadium opened in 1962, but one can’t reasonably compare the crowds at a brand-new ballpark in virgin territory to a 45-year-old park in a city with three big league teams (and two in the same league). Within four years of Dodger Stadium’s opening, normalized attendance there was indistinguishable from the early 1950s in Brooklyn. Taking a longer-term view, Dodgers attendance from 1967–72 varied from 125-150 percent of the NL average, which was not really different from attendance in Brooklyn between 1945–53, which varied from 116-151 percent of league average.

All of this occurred in two very different backdrops, Brooklyn and LA. In Brooklyn, O’Malley chose very early—in 1948—to broadcast every Dodgers home game, reaping a huge profit from his big media market while depressing attendance at Ebbets Field. In California, O’Malley made the opposite choice, refusing to televise home games for decades as a way of pumping up the gate, the LA Dodgers would eventually perennially lead the league in attendance, and set single-season attendance records not broken until the 1990s. This critical factor is never mentioned when deprecating the loyalty of Brooklyn fans in the 1950s.