Long before the dawn of superdomes and luxury boxes, Walter O'Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, set out to build a modern stadium to replace the small and aging Ebbets Field, treasured by Brooklyn fans but with only 23,000 seats and little parking. New York City's planning bureaucrats thwarted him at every turn. By 1957, O'Malley was desperate for a land deal, and Los Angeles was a city in transition with wide-open spaces and big-league dreams.
So, after 68 seasons, and a 1955 World Series win over the Yankees, O'Malley moved the Dodgers to L.A., where he could get what he couldn't get at home: a site to build what would become the finest stadium of its time. The deal not only broke Brooklyn's heart, (the old joke was if you were in the room with Hitler, Stalin, and O'Malley and had only two bullets, you'd shoot O'Malley twice) but forever changed baseball, pushing its boundaries 1,800 miles beyond St. Louis to the West Coast.
It also changed forever the way the rest of the country saw California. With the arrival of the Dodgers (as well as the San Francisco Giants, who also defected from New York as part of the Dodger deal), the land of new beginnings and Hollywood fantasy hadn't just become part of the national pastime; it had become part of the nation. "The Dodgers' move to L.A. was hugely symbolic. It was representative of the whole shift west that was happening in the country," says Kevin Nelson, author of The Golden Game, the Story of California Baseball. "It also finally made easterners aware that California existed."
Read Full Article »