Was Walter O’Malley the villain who stole the Dodgers away from Brooklyn, or the visionary who brought baseball to the West Coast? Was he a ruthless opportunist who rode Branch Rickey out on a rail, or was he the man without whose support Rickey would never have been in a position to integrate baseball?
Actually, he was all of those things, according to author Michael D’Antonio’s comprehensive account. With unprecedented access to some 30,000 previously unseen documents, photographs and artifacts from O’Malley’s life, D’Antonio clarifies or, in some cases, debunks long-held beliefs about the man some New York critics have compared to Hitler and Stalin.
Easily O’Malley’s most controversial act was relocating the Dodgers to Los Angeles. New Yorkers have long contended that he was never serious about wanting to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn, and jumped at the first chance to head west. No so, D’Antonio discovered. “It is my sincere belief that the Dodgers belong in Brooklyn,” O’Malley wrote to Los Angeles Examiner columnist and California baseball booster Vincent X. Flaherty in 1955. “If the Dodgers are forced to move it will not be because I have failed to do everything in my power to bring our problem to the proper attention of the authorities and the fans.” Meanwhile, “day by day, O’Malley scrambled to find support for a new stadium” in Brooklyn.
Indeed, O’Malley spent over a decade working on various plans to replace the aging Ebbets field, one of which included a radical proposal for a domed stadium more than a decade before the construction of the Houston Astrodome. City Planner Robert Moses thwarted the plan. An old political enemy of O’Malley’s father supported a plan to build a publicly financed stadium in Queens instead. “With Los Angeles promising him everything he could want, and New York’s leaders talking but producing nothing, O’Malley seemed to have little choice.”
Nostalgia for Dem Bums paints O’Malley’s ultimate decision as one borne of greed, but D’Antonio is more sympathetic, noting that “in imagining the possibilities of California, O’Malley was not so different from the millions of Americans who had moved to the state since the end of World War II.”
As for Branch Rickey, he has rightfully received the credit for integrating baseball, but he was not the only member of the Dodgers’ brain trust eager to see baseball’s color line broken. Indeed, “the early search for a player who would break segregation included a secret mission carried out by O’Malley,” then the team’s legal counsel, “who flew to Havana to see a Cuban infielder named Silvio Garcia,” nearly four years before Jackie Robinson’s Major League debut. And rather than race, it was Garcia’s age – and the fact that he was committed to the Cuban military – that led O’Malley to counsel against signing Garcia.
Later, O’Malley was the first to integrate a Major League team’s coaching staff and even built a private golf course at the Dodgers’ Vero Beach spring training complex to provide recreational opportunities for black players who were banned from the private country club in town.
Rickey is often portrayed as a man done wrong by O’Malley because he was supposedly muscled out of the Dodgers’ ownership. In reality it was O’Malley who gave Rickey “the offer he had waited a lifetime to hear”: a chance to buy into the Dodgers’ ownership group in 1944, with O’Malley even fronting the money for the cash-poor Rickey. But when Rickey wanted to leave the Dodgers and join the Pirates, Rickey enlisted friends of the Pirates’ ownership to put up inflationary bids that he knew O’Malley would have to match in order to ensure his own continued control of the team.
After reading “Forever Blue,” even the most ardent Brooklyn Dodgers fans will have to ask themselves if they would have done anything different if they found themselves in O’Malley’s shoes. They’ll probably say “yes, I wouldn’t have left Brooklyn,” but still, they’ll ask themselves.
Forever Blue
The True Story of Walter O’Malley, Baseball’s Most Controversial Owner, and the Dodgers of Brooklyn and Los Angeles
by Michael D’Antonio
Riverhead Books