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| Walter O'Malley |
| by Andy McCue |
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Walter Francis O'Malley, the owner who dragged baseball franchises across the country and baseball management into the twentieth century, was born in New York City on October 9, 1903.
Having barely played the game as a boy, O'Malley wound up drawing comparisons to Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Mephistopheles after moving his successful Brooklyn Dodger franchise to Los Angeles for the 1958 season. He was called the most powerful man in baseball and the real commissioner during the 1960s, but his team wound up producing the free agent identified most closely with breaking the reserve clause and revolutionizing the economics of major league baseball.
Walter was the only child of Edwin O'Malley and Alma Feltner, a half-German, half-Irish heritage that led Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray to call him "half oaf, half elf." O'Malley's parents were both 19 when Walter was conceived and Edwin was working as a clerk in the dry goods business. O'Malley's paternal grandfather was a clerk and supervisor in the post office while his Feltner grandfather owned his own Manhattan tailor shop. Edwin subsequently moved to the distant reaches of Queens and entered real estate and Democratic politics. He spent a stormy seven years as Commissioner of Public Markets, a cabinet-level job under the mayor of New York City. While Commissioner, Edwin's Department was investigated several times by Republican state legislators, and accusations flew thick and fast, although no charges were ever proven.
During one such period, Edwin fled his home and left the 15-year-old Walter to handle a late-night visit from a newspaper reporter wondering whether anyone would like to respond to the corruption charges and rumors that Edwin had skedaddled. Soon thereafter, the increasingly affluent Edwin shipped Walter off to Culver Academy, an exclusive and expensive prep school in northern Indiana, far from daily headlines, nosy reporters and Republican investigations.
Walter played some baseball at Culver but made his mark as editor of the school paper. His 1922 yearbook predicted he'd be working as a newspaperman within a year.
From Culver, Walter moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he survived some early academic troubles and graduated in 1926. His main claim to fame at Penn was as a student organizer and politician. He built a machine that started with his Culver classmates and spread outward. He was the first Penn man ever elected class president in both his junior and senior years and was selected as "Spoon Man" by his classmates, one of Penn's high honors each year.
Walter moved to another Ivy League School, Columbia University back in New York, for law school. However, after one year, he dropped out of Columbia and moved his law studies to night school at Fordham University. O'Malley later said his father, who'd given Walter a boat that slept eight on his graduation from Penn, had lost all his money.
Edwin apparently hadn't lost all his influence in the city, however, for Walter immediately landed a job that paid the night school bills. It was in the engineering department, and O'Malley would subsequently claim he had studied engineering at Penn. His transcript, however, reveals no engineering courses and some early difficulties with mathematics. Nevertheless, he subsequently moved to an engineering firm that did business with the city and then opened Walter F. O'Malley Engineering Company while completing Fordham Law in 1930. He also moved into publishing directories and other books used by engineers around the city. O'Malley would later describe these ventures as highly successful, but as soon as he passed the bar exam in 1932, these businesses faded away in favor of his law practice.
The Depression was not a good time to enter the legal field, but O'Malley's opportunistic eye soon found a niche to suit the times. It started, he said, when a priest who needed a will done picked him out of the phone directory because O'Malley was a good County Mayo name. O'Malleys are thick on the ground in that poor West Ireland County, and the priest, himself a native, was looking for a fellow son of the sod. Among the dying man's assets were mortgage bonds on properties that were going bankrupt because tenants didn't have the money to pay the rent.
After working on several mortgage bond cases, O'Malley conceived of a scheme that reorganized these real estate investments to allow the debts to be paid off. He brought his idea to George V. McLaughlin, head of the Brooklyn Trust Company, which had made the loans that funded many of these real estate ventures. McLaughlin bought the idea. More importantly, he took on O'Malley as a protégé, steering business his way as other troubled companies brought their problems to the bank.
Over the years, O'Malley would become involved with utilities, railroads, hotels, a brewery and other firms as he helped them with financial problems. He would also marry Kay Hansen in 1931. They would have two children, Teresa, born in 1933 and Peter, born in 1937.
One of McLaughlin's biggest headaches was the Brooklyn Dodgers, a small business in financial terms, but one with a high profile that could bring the bank much adverse publicity. The deaths of Charles Ebbets and Edward McKeever back in 1925 had left the team's board split evenly between Ebbets' and McKeever's heirs. Negotiating decisions could be difficult, and the team slid further into debt. In addition, both families had borrowed money against the supposed value of their team stock, which made Brooklyn Trust's exposure even more perilous.
In 1938, McLaughlin pushed the heirs into providing better management. On a recommendation from St. Louis Cardinals general manager Branch Rickey, their first choice, the board hired Leland Stanford "Larry" MacPhail to run the team. MacPhail made a great deal of progress both on and off the field before resigning to serve in World War II. Late in 1942, the board turned again to Rickey, and this time he accepted. Rickey wanted a new lawyer for the team, as the team's current firm also handled matters for the National League and Rickey thought conflicts might arise. He knew the team needed a lawyer with financial acumen and sought McLaughlin's advice. McLaughlin recommended O'Malley, who joined the team in the winter of 1942-1943.
Rather quickly, O'Malley joined Rickey in recognizing the financial potential of the Dodgers. In late 1944, he, Rickey and Andrew Schmitz, a Brooklyn insurance man with ties to McLaughlin, were announced as buyers of the 25% of the team owned by the heirs of Edward McKeever. Schmitz soon disappeared, to be replaced by John Smith, a top executive of Pfizer, Incorporated, the Brooklyn pharmaceutical company which had made a fortune by being the first to figure out how to mass-produce penicillin during World War II. Pfizer was another big client of Brooklyn Trust.
In mid- 1945, the Rickey-O'Malley-Smith triumvirate bought the 50% of the team that had been owned by the Ebbets estate. The structure of the trio's agreement would play a major role in the coming years. While each member owned 25% of the team, they had agreed that all their stock would be voted as a 75% block to avoid the kind of 50-50 splits which had paralyzed Dodger management throughout the 1930s. Within the trio, whoever could get one other to support his position would effectively control the team.
The internal politics of the team quickly boiled down to a duel between Rickey and O'Malley, two strong-willed, highly intelligent men with a desire to run the team, for the vote of John Smith, an experienced and thoughtful business executive who approached his ownership with the eyes of a prudent fan.
The issues were financial. O'Malley opposed Rickey's investment in a training facility in Vero Beach, Florida. He was appalled at a proposal to give each member of the successful 1946 club a new car, and at several million dollars in losses suffered when Rickey took over a franchise in the fledgling All-America Football Conference. O'Malley wanted to grab as much revenue as possible from this new thing called television while Rickey was concerned too many ticket buyers would stay home and watch for free. Rickey had ethical concerns about accepting money from beer advertisers. O'Malley didn't. O'Malley wanted less money spent on Vero Beach and more income from television because he knew the team needed the funds to replace aging Ebbets Field soon.
The issue was slowly brought to a head by Rickey's contract as president of the team. The contract probably was baseball's most generous at the time, reflecting Rickey's skill at recognizing talent and preparing it for the major leagues. O'Malley thought it was too generous, especially in granting Rickey 10% of the annual profits, which O'Malley felt should be going back to the team and the new stadium fund. With Smith's concurrence, O'Malley managed to stall a new contract for several years.
Finally, in 1950, Rickey decided to force the issue, using another clause in the agreement between the three partners. He offered to sell his stock to the others. Smith, who was terminally ill, wasn't interested. O'Malley, outsmarting himself, offered Rickey the amount Rickey had paid for the stock five and six years before. That had been when World War II and its uncertainties still hung over team, and when people hadn't begun to perceive the financial potential of the team. Infuriated, Rickey found William Zeckendorf, a New York real estate man who was willing to pay $1 million for Rickey's 25%. The partnership agreement allowed O'Malley to match that price. So, he swallowed hard and paid, then announced a fine of $1 for every front office employee mentioning Rickey's name.
With the team fully under his control (he bought out Mrs. Smith a few years later and the last of the McKeever heirs in 1975), O'Malley moved to make changes. Unlike some other controlling owners past and present, O'Malley knew his limitations. He put his baseball people, notably Emil J. "Buzzie" Bavasi, in charge of the farm system and the major league team and concentrated on business operations and a new stadium.
He began an extensive promotion of group sales and city promotions. Group sales extended the team's contacts with youth, religious, corporate and service groups. City promotions brought fans to the ballpark from the suburbs that were springing up on Long Island, draining people from Brooklyn. He negotiated the broadcasting contracts and worked on the development of the Vero Beach property.
He turned marketing into a year-round function for the front office at a time when some teams still closed their offices for several months during the winter. He began to expand the number of promotions and jumped on opportunities for publicity. In 1951, a musicians local in Brooklyn decided to enforce union membership on the Dodger Sym-Phony, a motley band of fans who played with a great deal of humor and enthusiasm, but marginal musical skills. They were part of the color that made Ebbets Field so memorable. O'Malley countered with "Music Depreciation Night" when everyone bringing some kind of a musical instrument to the park would be let in for free. A chorus of kazoos playing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" routed the union.
But all of O'Malley's promotions weren't enough to stem the steady attendance decline that affected all of baseball in the decade after World War II. More important from O'Malley's perspective, the Dodgers hadn't led the league in attendance since 1952, despite five years which saw three pennants and Brooklyn's first World Series victory. Television and flight to the suburbs were the big trends, and O'Malley came to regret his earlier decision to maximize television revenue by putting as many games on television as possible. "We found that our increase in TV revenue was in direct proportion to our decline in attendance," O'Malley told Melvin Durslag. And the fans bought their beer at the A&P, not the Dodgers' concession stands.
Strong performance on the field, a legacy of the players Rickey had left in the system, helped keep the team performing well and drawing better than most other teams in the National League. But that couldn't slow an overall attendance decline. When the Dodgers won their first World Series, in 1955, attendance that year was less than 60% of what it had been eight years earlier. And Ebbets Field was eight years older as well.
When Charles Ebbets had opened his stadium in 1913, he'd boasted that it would last 30 years. By 1955, it was 43 years old, and despite extensive maintenance expenses, was showing its age. In addition, O'Malley's customers now came from their suburban homes in cars rather than on subways, and there were barely 500 parking spaces.
O'Malley had been concerned about the stadium since he'd moved into ownership. Now, with full control, he moved to do something about it. He floated plans for a modern stadium in Collier's magazine. He began talking up the team's need, and possible locations. He was willing to pay for the stadium; he sought the city's assistance in putting together the acreage he would need for both the structure and adequate parking. The city was not responsive.
The key figure in city government was Robert Moses, and O'Malley's relationship with Moses was complex. Moses had begun his career in public service as one of a group of reformers clustered around Governor Al Smith. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, Smith, Moses and other reformers had battled to control the graft of people such as Edwin O'Malley. Moses, with his Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and other bodies, had sought to insulate public planning and administration from graft and politics. That left him immune to the pressure that O'Malley could bring to bear through his extensive political contacts and to the pressure of elected officials anxious to keep a high-profile, high-emotional-attachment business in the city. Even O'Malley's connection with George McLaughlin, who sat with Moses on the board of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and strongly wanted to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn, couldn't break through Moses' indifference. And, since Moses controlled land use planning in the city and the federal funds needed to assemble the necessary land, his indifference to O'Malley's ideas was crucial.
Moses was willing to bargain only if O'Malley would fit into Moses' plans, one of which was the redevelopment of some swampy land near La Guardia Airport into a World's Fair site and large park. He was willing to build the Dodgers a stadium there. O'Malley pointed out the site wasn't in Brooklyn and he wouldn't be able to own it. Moses said, "too bad."
O'Malley tried to raise the pressure on the city in a number of ways. In 1955, he announced the team would play seven 1956 home games in Jersey City. In late 1956, he sold Ebbets Field and its land to a housing developer. In 1957, he ostentatiously entertained Los Angeles officials at spring training in Vero Beach, Florida. Los Angeles badly wanted a major league team, and the mayor was only too happy to crow that talks had been very positive.
Somewhere during this period, as Moses' intransigence persisted, Los Angeles' offer shifted from bargaining chip to real possibility in O'Malley's eyes. Some thought O'Malley had made his decision to move early. Los Angeles officials were sure he didn't make it final until after the 1957 season, when the National League finally gave O'Malley and New York Giants' owner Horace Stoneham permission to move.
Led by newspaper reporters and columnists who were losing two-thirds of the biggest sports franchises in town, New York reacted with vitriol. Dick Young of the Daily News, the paper with the nation's largest circulation, would lead the pack for 25 years, throwing off accusations of bad faith and greed whenever the name O'Malley could be brought into the conversation. "He was like Mephistopheles to those guys," said Leonard Koppett, a New York Post reporter when the Dodgers moved.
O'Malley had always suffered a tenuous relationship with the press. When he took over from Rickey, the initial reaction was positive, as Rickey had a reputation for being sanctimonious and cheap. But that soon soured. He was, said Red Barber, after leaving the team's radio booth, "a devious man, about the most devious man I know." O'Malley's interviews are littered with statements gilding his past, and Barber's sentiment was echoed by many others from newspaper reporters to former employees.
In its most famous expression, the story circulated of a party game in New York intellectual circles. Challenged one evening to come up with the three worst characters of the twentieth century, writer and editor Pete Hamill and Village Voice columnist Jack Newfield delighted each other with an identical list-Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Walter O'Malley.
It would take decades for all the factors in O'Malley decision to become both clear and accepted. Attendance had been in decline for a decade. Ebbets Field needed replacement, or at least a multi-million dollar rebuilding. The city was offering no hope of aid in creating a ballpark, and its key player was privately ridiculing O'Malley and his project. Faced with declining sales, flat costs and no hope of the stadium he felt would revive his position, O'Malley had done what many other businessmen were doing in the 1950s. He left New York.
New York in the middle of the twentieth century was the central city of the world. Yet, this small-time businessman and bankruptcy lawyer was taking away major jewels in the crown of New York's civic image. Worse, he was taking his own jewel to Los Angeles, that upstart where Hollywood was challenging New York's hegemony in sculpting and polishing America's image of itself.
Certainly, the Dodgers' first year in Los Angeles was an indication that even if O'Malley had made his decision earlier, he had done no planning for any move. The team didn't know where it would play until January. It had no idea where to locate its offices (which wound up scattered over three sites), how to price the seats in whatever stadium it chose, and where its executives and players could live.
It didn't matter. Los Angeles was so hungry for major league baseball that people flocked to the Los Angeles Coliseum, a large, airless bowl built for track and football. They set records for an opening day crowd and a day game crowd. They doubled the Brooklyn single-game record. A million people had come out by early July, when they also passed the 1957 attendance in Brooklyn. Despite a putrid team on the field, and steadily declining crowds through the season, the organization broke the Dodgers' annual attendance record by September.
The next year, O'Malley got lucky, as a combination of Brooklyn veterans and the first big crop from the Bavasi farm system produced a team that wasn't as good as the Braves, but always seemed to get the big hit they needed. The 1959 team drew over 2 million people, plus over 90,000 for each of three World Series games, each day setting a fresh record.
While the crowds were highly gratifying, the new stadium-the reason for moving to Los Angeles-was mired in muck. In late 1957, before the Dodgers even set up Los Angeles offices, a referendum challenging the city council's deal with the Dodgers had been put on the ballot for June 1958. The opponents argued the city hadn't made a good deal by agreeing to trade over 300 acres in the hills just north of downtown for a Pacific Coast League ballpark site. O'Malley originally ignored the measure, thinking he would win easily, but as the antis gained momentum, he waded into the fight. He was aided by the major downtown media, especially the Los Angeles Times and its television station, which strongly supported the city's deal, and gave O'Malley time to do a telethon with many Hollywood stars just before the voting. The referendum was narrowly defeated.
But O'Malley barely had time for a sigh of relief before he was slapped with a taxpayers' lawsuit charging that the city's deal was illegal because the land being traded to the Dodgers had been purchased with federal funds specifying that the land bought had to be used for a public purpose. The antis argued a private business enterprise wasn't a public purpose. The city argued the land they got in trade was to be used for a park-a public purpose-and that bringing major league baseball to Los Angeles served a civic need. The judge ruled in favor of the taxpayers, but was overturned on appeal to the state supreme court. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.
The Supreme Court's ruling didn't come until October 1959, and by then O'Malley had lost two years in the process of building his new stadium. The estimated price had continued to escalate, and O'Malley wasn't sure of his financing until he struck a long- term agreement with Union Oil Company to sponsor Dodger radio and television broadcasts.
With anti-stadium opponents fighting every step of the city's approval process, the start of construction dragged out even further. Dodger Stadium wouldn't open until April of 1962, two years after O'Malley's planned debut.
Both the stadium and the team that played there were an immediate success. From dugout seats to in-stadium restaurants, to a message board to terraced parking lots removing the need for people to climb stairs or ramps to their seats, Dodger Stadium was full of new ideas. It was the first large baseball stadium built without pillars that blocked the view from some seats. The price was upper decks much farther from the playing field than in traditional ballparks.
The team lost a heartbreaking playoff series in 1962 (Attendance 2.75 million), won the World Series in 1963 (Attendance 2.5 million) and 1965 (2.5 million again). Walter O'Malley paid off the $18 million it had taken to build the stadium. As these numbers were reported, the idea of greed was constantly linked with the admission of superior management. It was not noted that O'Malley passed up several opportunities for extra revenue by keeping his stadium virtually advertising-free. It would only be grudgingly noted that this paragon of greed didn't raise ticket prices for 14 years. When his considerable management skills were noted, it was in the context that the result was a reward for greed.
Now in his 60s, O'Malley was being hailed or condemned as "the real commissioner of baseball." In 1962, Bill Veeck tabbed O'Malley "Boss of Baseball." He probably was the most powerful figure in the game, but that didn't mean he always got what he wanted.
In late 1960, while he was still worried about building and financing his stadium, an American League expansion team was thrust into his territory as a tradeoff for the National League's return to New York City. O'Malley made lemonade, requiring that the new team, to be owned by Gene Autry and called the Angels, be a tenant in his new stadium. Their rent would give O'Malley more cash to pay off the stadium's building costs.
O'Malley unsuccessfully opposed such measures as the amateur draft, which was begun in 1965, and further expansion in 1969.
Still, he won far more than he lost. Supporters and critics acknowledged he won so much not just because of his intelligence and business sense, but because he was the one owner who spent most of his time actually managing the team. He didn't come to an owners' meeting from the board of a brewery that took most of his time. He'd been thinking about the issues for much longer. At one National League meeting, when a new issue surfaced, Cubs owner Phil Wrigley, who had a chewing gum company to run, started the discussion by asking, "Well, Walter, what do I think of this?"
When owners stalled over selecting a new commissioner in 1969, it was O'Malley's proposal of Bowie Kuhn that carried the day.
The Dodgers, meanwhile, had been creating the business model other franchises were following. There were a beautiful stadium and a successful baseball operation, but there was also a strong front office emphasizing marketing and promotion. The Dodgers worked on their sales efforts year round, spent the money to produce a quality team on the field and rode the popularity of broadcaster Vin Scully for all it was worth. Significantly, O'Malley was also the first owner to pay extensive attention to the Hispanic market, broadcasting Dodger games in Spanish from the team's first year in Los Angeles.
By 1970, Walter O'Malley was 67 and ready to hand over the reins to his son Peter. Peter had been groomed running minor league operations and then Dodger Stadium. In early 1970, he became president of the team, running it on a day-to-day basis and putting an even stronger emphasis on marketing.
Walter became chairman of the board, and continued to represent the team in baseball-wide discussions. As the 1970s progressed, it became clear that baseball's biggest issue was its relationship with the Major League Baseball Players' Association, surging under the leadership of Marvin Miller.
While executives such as the Cardinals' Gussie Busch and the Reds' Bob Howsam were hardliners, O'Malley counseled a much more moderate course. At one point, finding that his team's player representative had supported the owners while the rest of the team supported the union, O'Malley quietly got rid of him. He didn't mind the player's support, but he didn't want to keep a man on the team who was so out of step with his teammates. With increasing age, and a younger group of owners who didn't appreciate O'Malley's influence, his ability to influence events declined.
With O'Malley's perceived role as both eminence grise and labor moderate, it was ironic that the case which broke the back of the owner's economic position arose on the Dodgers. After Curt Flood lost his case against the reserve clause before the Supreme Court, Miller had convinced union members that the way to break the clause was to challenge its language in arbitration. The key interpretation was whether the language under which a team could renew a player's contract for a year meant the annual renewal could be continued indefinitely or was good only for one year. The owners had held to the former for nearly a century. Miller publicly stated (and the owners privately knew) a court would interpret the wording to mean one year only.
Throughout the early 1970s, a few players each year refused to sign contracts and were renewed. If they made it through the second season without signing, there would have to be a court judgment about whether they were free agents. Each year, the players' owners had finally broken down and thrown so much money at the potential free agent that he had signed. A few were also released before the issue could be adjudicated.
In 1975, Andy Messersmith asked the Dodgers to give him a no-trade clause. The Dodgers, citing long-standing policy, refused. After acrimonious exchanges with general manager Al Campanis, the issue was bucked up to Peter O'Malley. By the time Peter passed the negotiations on to Walter, Messersmith already was strongly committed to testing free agency. More important from O'Malley's point of view, Miller had persuaded Dave McNally to join the fight.
Miller judged O'Malley to be "a realist, the most rational businessman among the owners." He was more interested in keeping the game going and the turnstiles humming than in challenging the union on dubious legal grounds.
McNally had changed the legal battlefield completely. Messersmith was one of baseball's top pitchers and would be worth the likely cost of satisfying his demands. McNally, once a dominant pitcher, had retired with arm miseries. His last team offered him an outrageously large contract just to short-circuit the suit, but McNally refused, feeling his career was over anyway and wishing to pursue the issue. With McNally in the game, O'Malley knew satisfying Messersmith's demands was pointless from a legal point of view. He passed. Messersmith took his case to court, and the judge ruled as everyone expected him to, opening the free agency era.
By the end of the Messersmith crisis in early 1976, O'Malley was in declining health. He retired even further from management of the team, although he still attended spring training for many years. Kay O'Malley died in July 1979. Walter died on August 9, of heart failure while being treated for cancer at Methodist Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota.
The O'Malley image over the years has focused on the morality of his moving the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. The Dodgers undoubtedly were baseball's most profitable franchise in the mid-1950s, and the critics assume that should have kept O'Malley happy. Similar profits at that time certainly convinced the large American car companies that they had nothing to worry about.
The difference in management foresight was apparent a decade later. The car companies were facing declining profits and enervating competition from the foreign carmakers they had chosen to ignore. Walter O'Malley was basking in higher profits in the Los Angeles sunshine because he had recognized that his 1950s profits cloaked problems that needed to be solved. When he decided he couldn't solve those problems in New York, he moved to the West Coast.
The revelations about Robert Moses, and especially the correspondence revealing Moses' unbending dismissal of O'Malley's need for a new stadium, have uncovered the stumbling blocks, unperceived at the time, that pushed O'Malley out of New York.
What has been lost in the focus on greed and morality is recognition of the other effects, good and bad, that O'Malley had on the game.
His management practices turned the Dodgers into the unchallenged model other sports franchises would follow. His emphasis on customer service, promotions and relentless marketing radically changed the way not just baseball teams, but all sports franchises, did business. Bill Veeck won justified plaudits as an imaginative promoter. O'Malley was not as creative as Veeck, but he was much more relentless about promoting his product.
O'Malley's willingness to leave the biggest market in the country (albeit for the second biggest) sent shock waves through every American city. Before O'Malley, owners looking to move had threatened fans by arguing that if they didn't get more support, they'd have to move. This argument had been used in the relocations of the Braves, Browns and Athletics in the mid-1950s. It was the argument used by Horace Stoneham in New York. After 1958, baseball owners would go to a city and argue that unless the city built a stadium for them, the team would leave. Walter O'Malley, who was willing to pay for his own stadium if the city would just help him assemble the land, had made every such threat credible.
The move also was a part of the public's diminishing interest in baseball. Baseball always was a business, but its small scope and entertainment value had prevented that fact from sinking in with most fans. With the Dodgers' and Giants' departure, it was thrown in the face of the largest city in the country, a city which would export talented, disillusioned Dodger fans around the country for decades, and a city where media perceptions were formed and broadcast. To this day, baseball markets itself with a great deal of nostalgia despite the growing intrusion of real world economics. The contrast between shrewd marketing of nostalgia and the need for profits burst a whole generation of bubbles with the Dodgers' move.
And, as Jerome Holtzman has argued, the timing of O'Malley's move contributed to the decline in baseball's popularity. Television's top executives were sports fans, and fans who, in the late 1950s, were still trying to figure out their medium. Now, baseball was deserting them. It was, perhaps, only natural they would turn to other sports and find in them games more congenial to being boxed up on a small screen.
Roger Kahn, who probably observed O'Malley more than any other writer, summed him up: "an earth force lightly filtered through a personality."
Sources
This profile draws from The Sporting News (1941-1979), the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Herald Express, and Los Angeles Herald Examiner (1957-1979), the New York Times (1919-1979), the O'Malley files of the Hall of Fame and The Sporting News, the Branch Rickey papers at the Library of Congress, and the Allen Roth collection, now at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. It draws on the clip files of the Los Angeles Herald Express and Herald Examiner at the Los Angeles Public Library. It draws on O'Malley's files at Culver Academy and the University of Pennsylvania and the Moses-O'Malley correspondence in the Moses papers at the New York Public Library.
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