Los Angeles County has 14 area codes. Not zip codes, area codes. (It has 320 zip codes.) Its population is larger than that of 42 states, its area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. It has two mountain ranges, five rivers, two deserts, six major valleys, and a boundary that runs 70 miles along the Pacific Ocean. Its 88 incorporated cities make for a decentralized power structure: No Tammany Hall or James Michael Curley calls the shots or doles out patronage. Only three things are common to all of Los Angeles: choking traffic, cloudless skies, and the Dodgers.
Since the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles from Brooklyn in 1958, and since Dodger Stadium opened in 1962, roughly 3 million people have attended games every year, perennially the most in the National League and 33 percent above the league average. That means, over the course of a season, a million more people go to Dodger home games than to games in other National League parks, even though Dodger Stadium has remained essentially unchanged for 55 years. For most people in Los Angeles, especially those born after 1958, it is impossible to imagine Los Angeles without the Dodgers.
Like the city fathers stealing water from the Owens Valley in Chinatown, the Dodgers’ move west has become American lore: Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers’ owner, broke the hearts of Brooklyn and brought his team to a minor-league town that opened its coffers and gave away hundreds of acres and millions of dollars in tax breaks in order to become a major city. The new stadium meant destroying a long-established Latino neighborhood in Chavez Ravine, but that was a small price to pay for big-league status. Besides, all was quickly forgotten, as Southern Californians, including Latinos, came to embrace the Dodgers.
As with most based-on-true-events stories coming out of Los Angeles, this one bears little resemblance to historical fact, and Jerald Podair sets the record straight here. Podair is a historian at Lawrence University, uninterested in polemics or dramatics; his eye is on bigger things. With exhaustive documentation he takes us through every step of the Dodgers’ move west. Far from abandoning Brooklyn, O’Malley was forced to leave by a combination of baseball economics—the Dodgers played in decrepit Ebbets Field and were falling behind their competitors, especially the Milwaukee Braves, in attendance—and an intractable city planner, Robert Moses, who cared not a whit for baseball, or its place in Brooklyn. For years O’Malley tried to find a way to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn and declined even to meet with delegations from Los Angeles, until he simply had no choice.
Why, then, was it Walter O’Malley, and not Robert Moses, who has been villainized all these years? Because O’Malley committed the most cardinal of sins: He left New York for
Los Angeles.
Nor was everyone in Los Angeles falling all over himself for the Dodgers. Los Angeles was already a major city in 1958, the third-largest in the country, and many Angelenos liked it just the way it was: a collection of neighborhoods with no civic core. To them, the function of government was to provide schools, sewers, and roads; anything else was a waste of taxpayers’ dollars. To be sure, the power centers of Downtown and the Westside went all out to bring the Dodgers to Los Angeles; but opposition to public money for the Dodgers was so widespread that the move came remarkably close to failing.
Just how much public money was O’Malley asking for? It turns out not much at all. O’Malley envisioned a public/private partnership, where he would swap 300 acres of Wrigley Field in South Los Angeles (that housed the Dodgers’ minor-league team) for 300 more valuable acres in Chavez Ravine, less than a mile from downtown Los Angeles. Beyond that, he would build the stadium with his own funds. The risk would be entirely his, and it was considerable, given that no new stadium had been built with private funds since Yankee Stadium in 1923.
The Giants, by contrast, moved to San Francisco around the same time, and their financial arrangement was much more conventional: The city owned the land and built the stadium, and the Giants paid rent and a share of concessions. That meant fewer obstacles along the way—the Giants played in their new ballpark two years earlier than the Dodgers—but San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, built for football as well as baseball, was a joke, while Dodger Stadium was a jewel. Los Angeles also received hundreds of millions in property taxes from the Dodgers over the years, much more than San Francisco received in rent from the Giants.
And yet, though the risk was almost entirely O’Malley’s, mistrust for the land swap ran so high that the proposal passed the Los Angeles city council by only one vote. The opponents then petitioned to have a referendum on the new stadium; it was touch-and-go to the end, and the measure finally passed (52-48 percent). Unbowed, the opponents challenged the arrangement in court, and a superior court judge declared it unlawful and halted construction. The California supreme court unanimously reversed that decision; but had it affirmed the decision, or the referendum failed, or one member of the city council voted the other way, there most likely would have been no Los Angeles Dodgers.
What of the Latinos pulled from their homes to make way for major league baseball? In fact, their land had already been condemned for a public housing project in 1951, and the families lived there rent-free and tax-free for eight years. When one family, the Arechigas, was forcibly removed from their home, they set up across the street under a banner, “Where will we sleep tonight?” Sympathy swung strongly against the Dodgers until a reporter discovered that the Arechigas owned 10 other homes in Los Angeles, including four deeded to immediate family members, and therefore had plenty of sleeping options every night.
What often gets lost in the tale of the Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles, and Podair makes clear, is that Walter O’Malley was a visionary, and not only with his willingness to relocate. (Before 1958, no major league team was based west of the Central time zone; now there are eight.) Before Dodger Stadium, those attending baseball games were “fans” who paid their money and left unhappy if the home team lost. O’Malley viewed his patrons as customers and made going to games a family experience. Prices were kept low. The radio announcer he brought with him from Brooklyn, Vin Scully, made the game personal to every listener and became the most beloved man in the history of Southern California. O’Malley hired Jaime Jarrin—now entering his 60th year as a broadcaster—to call Dodger games for Spanish-language listeners. O’Malley’s model for Dodger Stadium was Disneyland, not Yankee Stadium. As with most visionaries whose ideas become commonplace, we can easily lose sight of his impact; but in his approach to fans, O’Malley was the first.
If one wanted only to learn the real story of the Dodgers’ move west, City of Dreams would be well worth reading. But the battle over Dodger Stadium also has lessons as a microcosm of American politics. Downtown corporatists, mostly Republican, and Westside liberals, mostly Democrats, both wanted the Dodgers in Los Angeles (albeit for separate reasons), but the Folks—Podair’s name, borrowed from the late California historian Kevin Starr, for the middle-class whites who made up most of Los Angeles’s sprawling neighborhoods—hated the land swap. Not only did it violate their notion of government’s proper role, but they deeply resented the Downtown and Westside establishments. It was a battle for the soul of Los Angeles, and Podair shows how this conflict goes all the way back to Hamilton and Jefferson, and is part of the American DNA.
One might dismiss the Folks as racists, but their resentments went well beyond that. Indeed, the Folks had no problem joining up with Latinos when it suited their purposes.
This book does have its shortcomings. Podair tends to make his points over and over again, like a professor with undergraduates. I also would have liked him to draw a contrast not only with what came before Dodger Stadium (which he does quite well) but with what came after. O’Malley’s son, Peter, sold the club to Fox News Corp. in 1998 because he felt family owners could no longer compete. As if to make his point, the Dodgers’ new owners immediately traded away a future Hall of Famer in a contract dispute. After a Voldemort-like owner too loathsome to mention here, the Dodgers were sold in 2012 to a hedge fund group for $2 billion, the highest amount ever paid for a sports franchise.
Dodger Stadium is no longer geared toward families. Parking is $20. Tickets for field and loge boxes between the bases exceed $100. Advertising, taboo under O’Malley, covers every inch of the outfield walls, scoreboards, and electronic rims around the stands. Organ music has been replaced by heavy metal as the standard fare. The new owners sold broadcasting rights to Time Warner, who overpaid and could not pass along their folly to satellite providers. As a result, only 30 percent of the homes in Southern California could hear Vin Scully’s final three years broadcasting Dodger games, while the new owners sat by and did nothing. Any of these developments would have been inconceivable under Walter O’Malley.
But these complaints are minor, more than outweighed by the information and insights Podair provides. Baseball is Life. And Los Angeles, and the story of the Dodgers moving there, is America.
Marshall Goldberg is the author, most recently, of The New Colossus.
