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OC Register: What baseball’s move west teaches us about 1958 – and where it goes from 2018


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Major League Baseball has existed long enough in California that it is tempting to take it for granted. In the spirit of giving thanks, author Lincoln A. Mitchell offers a necessary reminder: MLB’s move to California didn’t have to happen in 1958 – at least, not then, and not the way it did.

In “Baseball Goes West: The Dodgers, the Giants, and the Shaping of the Major Leagues,” Mitchell offers a wide-lens look at the cultural, sociological and economic factors that predicted the Giants and Dodgers leaving New York for California in 1958, and how it could have happened differently.

Mitchell is an adjunct research scholar at Columbia University’s Arnold A. Salesman Institute of War and Peace Studies and the author of four books. In this Q-and-A, we discuss some fun alternate scenarios, some of the overlooked repercussions of the Dodgers’ move, and whether the broader societal conditions of the 1950s offer any predictions about a similar shakeup now.

Q: You touched on how fragile it was that the Dodgers and Giants moved to California at all, and how this was one of several scenarios that could have been in play in the years before 1958. When do you think that this move was finally set in stone for the Dodgers and Giants?

A: I think it was finally set in stone in 1957, probably early in the season, early in the year. The rumblings had been around for a while. If you look I believe it was the Brooklyn Eagle, when the Dodgers finally won the World Series in 1955, the headline is ‘Dodgers win,’ and down in the lower-right corner, it says about the borough president (John Cashmore), ‘this should send a message to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn.’ When they actually won that World Series in 1955, these rumblings were already out there. In ’56 and ’57, the Dodgers played some games in Newark. The Giants won the World Series in 1954, and attendance was terrible. Part of the story was it was clear that the Giants couldn’t really last in New York. So I would say by the mid-50s the writing was on the wall, and there were a fair amount of rumors that the Giants might be going to Minnesota, where they had a minor league team – this had been kind of going on for a while – but when the deal got finalized, it got finalized very quickly.

Particularly in Brooklyn, there was a sense that this was going to happen. In San Francisco, there was a period around ’85-93 when a rational person would have said the Giants are going to leave. They just can’t stick this out. And a lot of Giants fans were in denial. In that case, the Giants didn’t leave, but it was that same thing: eventually, something was going to give and eventually it did.

Q: You astutely noted that history’s winners get to tell the story, but there were losers in this move. You mentioned Minnesota. In the book, you mention thoughts of moving the Giants or Dodgers or both toward the suburbs – New Jersey or somewhere on the outskirts of New York City. Was there a loser that had a particularly viable case that should be mentioned in the same breath?

A: The Giants were gone but the Dodgers could’ve stayed. There was one proposal to make a lot of space in downtown Brooklyn to build a more state-of-the-art stadium for the Dodgers. Robert Moses kind of killed that one. There was another proposal to build on what became known as the World’s Fair site; it’s now out by where the Mets play in Queens. That didn’t work out. Queens isn’t a loser here because they get the Mets anyway. They’re very much beloved in that borough. The narrative is that the people of Brooklyn were the losers, but they stopped going to the games. And by the mid-1950s, people had been licking their chops to get to Los Angeles – people meaning Major League Baseball teams – for a while. This was too huge of a market to ignore.

At one point the Yankees – imagine the Yankees – in the early to mid-1950s being rumored to go to Los Angeles. This is a team that is minting world championships and leading the league in attendance every year. They didn’t go anywhere but the rumors that they might go to Los Angeles because that’s how much money was seen as being out there. The St. Louis Browns were pursuing Los Angeles much earlier in the 1940s. I believe the vote was December 6, 1941 – not a great day to vote on anything in the United States because things changed dramatically the next day. So L.A. was out there. People saw the money they could make there. O’Malley had the confidence and the fortitude to see it through and make it happen.

Q: One of the alternate scenarios you got me to consider was, what if the PCL had integrated before the National or American League? Like, say, the Hollywood Stars or Los Angeles Angels had signed Jackie Robinson first. Or even if a Japanese or Spanish-speaking player had signed with one of the California teams, with that built-in fan base that might have embraced the player, could that have allowed the PCL to compete with the AL or NL as a viable major league?

A: There are two components to that. If the Los Angeles Angels, or the Seals or Stars had signed Jackie Robinson or an African-American player with roots in California, that’s one scenario. The other is what if they started to sign these Japanese-American players, because there were Japanese semi-pro leagues. They were kind of but not entirely excluded from the PCL. But the problem was, particularly in the immediate post-war period, with Robinson what if they had done this in 1945 or ’46 … the African American population, and the density of the African American population, wasn’t there in California or the West Coast at the time. When the Los Angeles Angels traveled up to Portland, who’s getting excited about seeing that game? Say they happen to have this hypothetical African-American player or even Jackie Robinson himself? I don’t know that that could’ve kept it going. If you really want to think about scenarios, what about had you brought in Latino players where there is a large Spanish-speaking population on the West Coast, and then added a couple teams in Mexico where there was money, there was interest? This is very much in the realm of what might have been, and of course we don’t know the answer to those questions.

There was very briefly what was then known as a Negro League on the West Coast in ’46, which was the exact wrong thing to do. It didn’t last for a lot of these reasons. The population bases were essentially L.A. and the Bay Area. There wasn’t much in between and there weren’t too many other cities. What is an African American team in Portland or Seattle, which were big cities but didn’t have much of an African American population? The Dodgers were a huge draw in Brooklyn but also on the road everywhere in ’47. African Americans came into those cities, whether it was Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, Pittsburgh. They came because they wanted to see Jackie Robinson play, and also Larry Doby later with the Indians, and Satchel Paige with the Indians in ’48. That brought attendance in. Then you’re going to Detroit and the Bronx, you’re going to where your audience is. But not on the West Coast.

Q: Another scenario I couldn’t help but conjure: Southern California in the ’30s and ’40s had people with the technological know-how for film and television. Not only that, the terrain with all the mountains that made terrestrial broadcasts logistically possible, arguably more than New York. What if the Hollywood Stars or Los Angeles Angels were on TV regularly – was that scenario ever a realistic path for the PCL to do bigger business?

A: I never read that scenario, so I can’t say it was, but it’s an interesting scenario because where the PCL as a league was not going to compete with the American or National League, but the better teams in any given year – the two best teams year in and year out were the Los Angeles Angels and San Francisco Seals. Not every year, but as a general rule for most of what we think of as the life of the PCL. In any given year, those two teams were better than a third to a half of the major league teams. I can’t prove that, but if you look at the numbers closely, that’s a finding that you have. The worst teams in the PCL could not compete with the worst teams in the major leagues most years. But the better teams could, and if you did something like that that raised the profile of the better teams, then I think the natural thing to do would’ve been, ‘well look, the Angels, we’re not walking away from that fanbase,’ they would have integrated the major leagues earlier, the Dodgers would’ve probably ended up staying in Brooklyn, the Giants would have gone to Minneapolis or wherever. I can easily see a scenario like that. But again, who knows.

Q: You described Willie Mays as the first crossover African American baseball star, and Koufax as the first Jewish star, at least for the generation that didn’t grow up with Hank Greenberg. Reading that, I can’t help but think of what the first openly gay player might mean for Major League Baseball today, and for the sport, for the league. Do you think the cultural forces are in play to allow that to happen and is that a valid comparison?

A: I think it very much could happen. I don’t know the name of that player, but I think if you had a guy who was a very good baseball player, who came up through the processes that produce young baseball players, particularly if they were American, I think they could very easily do well. I say that as a 50-year-old straight man, so I don’t know exactly. My first book, I wrote a lot about youth baseball, and I’ve been around youth baseball a lot. I know that the degree of the politics reflect the place. … If a gay player who was very good got recruited to go to USC or UCLA or Berkeley or Stanford, I suspect that player, it would be OK. Having said that, I am sure there are many closeted ballplayers that we don’t know about. I have no idea, but the data would suggest that, the way numbers work, and that player would confront bigotry, they would be a person of great social import, the interaction between society and sport. The Mays/Koufax comparison is the right one. It’s not Jackie Robinson. There already has been Glenn Burke, who came out so shortly afterward. There already has been Billy Bean, who came out. There have been gay players in other sports, but it would still be a very big deal. I hope it happens.

Q: You wrote something that, if not controversial, at least isn’t in the story the Dodgers tell about themselves, which is that in Los Angeles “the Dodgers were gradually rebranding themselves as a whiter, more glamorous, and more winning version of what they had been during their last few years in Brooklyn.” To what extent was that rebranding intentional and, considering the relationship the Dodgers enjoyed with the film and TV industry, would you say it worked?

A: It definitely worked. The Dodgers in the late ’40s in Brooklyn were the trailblazers bringing in African American players, no question. By 1949, they had Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe – three guys who were superstars for the better part of the decade, African American players, and they continued doing that through the 1960s. Those ’60s teams that were very good, that won three World Series between 1959 and ’65, had Maury Wills, had John Roseboro. … Willie Davis was a great African American player for a while. Tommy Davis. Al Downing. But they really fall behind in scouting the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean in general. The Giants took a much bigger lead on that. Then, you know, (Don) Drysdale is this great pitcher, but if you’re the Los Angeles Dodgers this is the guy you want. That it’s your second-best pitcher speaks to the good fortune of having Sandy Koufax. He’s this good-looking, camera-ready Hollywood kind of guy. Koufax is Jewish and is also very good-looking, camera-friendly, and presents as the right person, too. That begins to help. The winning part is great; that’s not about race, that they won. You really see this in the ’70s.

To me, having watched those Dodger teams in the ’70s and looked at the numbers a lot in the late ’70s to the present: why is Steve Garvey the face of this team in the late ’70s?  Don Sutton? Tommy John? Reggie Smith was the better player by any measure. Why is Davey Lopes not viewed as good as Steve Garvey? You don’t have to be Bill James in 1978 to figure out that Garvey is overrated and Davey Lopes is underrated. In the national context, you never heard from Reggie Smith, from Davey Lopes, from Dusty Baker, who – I don’t know that Dusty Baker is the greatest in-game manager in the world, but Dusty Baker is charming, erudite, fun, when he talks on the radio now seems like a great guy – why is Dusty Baker not being heard from? The politics of Glenn Burke? Glenn Burke’s story is being a semi-closeted gay man at a very homophobic time, in a very homophobic industry, at a moment when the gay rights moment is beginning its first level of advance. But Glenn Burke is also African American, and that to me is a part of that story.

The two things I would point out about Glenn Burke’s story which strike me as interesting: one is that people always think he was compared as the next Willie Mays. Without talking about the racial component that every African American player is ‘the next Willie Mays,’ every African American outfielder with a little bit of speed and a little bit of pop. Which is first of all completely unfair. You shouldn’t compare anybody to Willie Mays. It always struck me as racial profiling. Secondly, Burke has this relationship with Dusty Baker. A lot of the Dodger players are really decent to Glenn Burke, and that really comes across in Burke’s writing. But Dusty Baker – with whom he has the first high-five, an historic moment – is an older African American player who is mentoring Glenn Burke. I write this in the book because it’s not part of the story, but it should be. Henry Aaron had mentored Dusty Baker. That’s a really important and great story. Instead in the ’70s it’s always ‘Steve Garvey is going to run for the U.S. Senate,’ which was crazy. I know that (Tommy) Lasorda is beloved in Los Angeles, but there’s very little in his record to suggest he was a progressive person on issues of race, ethnicity and diversity.

Q: I find it interesting that Roberto Clemente was a Dodger for like two seconds in the 1950s before the Pirates got him in the Rule 5 draft. How would that history have played out from a baseball standpoint for one, but also from a cultural standpoint if you have arguably the biggest Latino star in the game when you move to L.A.? How would that have been different for the Dodgers?

A: One way to think about that question would have been to the Giants: they had (Orlando) Cepeda and (Juan) Marichal, not when they moved but pretty much when they moved. And Cepeda and Marichal were huge; Clemente was pretty much an established player in 1958. But they had the Alou brothers, particularly Felipe, and that helped them a lot in San Francisco but it also made the racial question very complicated. There were articles in legitimate magazines and newspapers saying ‘the team is too diverse. How can they win with so many black and Latino players?’ The word for that is racism, right, and the Giants confronted that. Alvin Dark did not handle this with great decency. ‘You can’t speak Spanish in the clubhouse’ – can you imagine saying that in Los Angeles? That could have created more problems. Roberto Clemente was obviously one of the great, great players and great people in baseball history. If Orlando Cepeda didn’t like being told not to speak Spanish, can you imagine saying that to Roberto Clemente?

The Pirates team that won in 1960 was not as diverse. (Willie) Stargell wasn’t there yet, for example. Clemente always felt he got treated unfairly, or not respected enough for his contributions to that team. The data suggests he was right about that interpretation. I think it would’ve been a great boon for the Dodgers. But also you and I are not Latino. Clemente’s Puerto Rican. Cepeda and Marichal are Puerto Rican. That only gets you so far with a community that is Mexican American, as most Latinos in these two West Coast cities were and still are. That opens the door for this enormous role played by Fernando Valenzuela a little bit later.

Q: You do a masterful job portraying the cultural shifts, the population shifts, in the 1950s that made this move logical. In the present day we’re seeing population shifts from smaller towns into bigger cities, cultural changes like cord-cutting, and I wonder if there isn’t another big move in baseball – maybe not East Coast to West Coast – but if the backdrop of culture changes now would predict some kind of a shift.

A: I did write a whole book about this question, called “Will Big League Baseball Survive?” That book is about just that. My sense is that the biggest change in baseball, which began I think with this move but has accelerated dramatically in the last 20 years, is that baseball is an increasingly big industry and a decreasingly relevant part of our culture. I have an experiment on my Facebook page in the World Series: ‘How many of you know who’s playing in the World Series?’ About a third of my friends didn’t. The role it’s played in the culture is really changing. I think that will drive baseball to try to solve the following question: Instead of how do we continue to find ways to continue to watch the World Series, to continue to watch the playoffs … how do you separate the intense baseball fans from their money more aggressively? That’s one set of challenges.

We haven’t had a franchise move since the Expos became the Nationals, and a longer time since we’ve had expansion. I think that the problem that baseball faces now is that if you expand, you’re looking at three-year cities – cities where, once the excitement wears off, the team doesn’t last. Think of the Milwaukee Braves, the Kansas City Athletics, as examples. For me, something baseball has done really well the last 20 years, is globalization. I continue to think that the bold move they would do is put one team in Tokyo, one team in Seoul  – two in East Asia where there is money and people are passionate about baseball, and put them in the Western Division, whether it’s the AL or the NL. It wouldn’t matter, particularly. You’d have to make it so they would have longer home and longer road trips and teams would add on a 10-day trip to those cities as part of the trip. The scheduling would be complicated but the amount of money they could bring in would be enormous.

We’re in a much more global world now. I wonder about moving toward a model of a shorter season with more tournaments and/or barnstorming. The World Baseball Classic, they’re really fun, and they really help globalize the game, but you have these problems of the best players aren’t there, it’s spring training for the pitchers so they don’t want to hurt their arms. You can address some of those problems if you move away from the longer season. I’m not advocating for that, but I can see baseball thinking in those terms. The other scenario is that baseball recedes for a little bit … not in terms of fewer teams, but baseball for most of its history was played in front of one-third empty, where the money wasn’t this crazy and it was a beloved institution – and for some of that time a beloved institution that generated a lot of income. Baseball’s a little bloated now. If baseball had less money in the game, it would survive that. I’m not advocating that, I’m just thinking about scenarios.

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Great article.

I really do think that globalization is the future of baseball. In the future, I could see a professional team in Mexico City, Cuba, Puerto Rico, The Dominican Republic, Tokyo and Seoul. Because of the current climate, I foresee minimal expansion, but more than anything, teams moving. When the league does expand, you have to figure Montreal will get their beloved Expos back, and we'll likely add a team in the Dominican Republic, where there's already an infrastructure of baseball. 

Then you figure the Angels won't get the new ball park and will move to Mexico City where we'll already have a strong Mexican contingent from the states. The Rays if they don't get that beautiful new ball park they designed actually funded may move to Cuba where baseball is popular and they'll be able to take a large chunk of Miami's market from them.

The A's will already have a strong Japanese contingent of fans and could move to Tokyo, and two teams that have struggled to gain traction with the fans like the D-Backs and Royals could move to Seoul and Puerto Rico. 

I don't think it'll happen right away, but over the next 20 years I could see that. And really, it would just take some creative scheduling by MLB. Have the Latin American teams in the AL, and move the PNW and Asian teams in the NL. Make 12 day Latin American road trips or home games in Mexico City, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, and make 12 day trips where they play in Seattle, Tokyo and Seoul. 

It can be done, and while it might be a challenge logistically, the World Series would suddenly become a Worldwide phenomenon. Can you imagine Tokyo vs Cuba is the World Series? That would be absolutely nuts. 

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On ‎11‎/‎21‎/‎2018 at 9:49 PM, Blarg said:

There will never be a Mexico City team simply because of altitude. 

This

It's bad enough how games end up in Denver.   Now add 2,000 feet to that altitude.  The fences would need to have distances of 370/410/430/450/430/410/370 to make up for it, and that would create a ton of XBH's with too much ground to cover. 

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On 11/21/2018 at 9:02 PM, Second Base said:

I really do think that globalization is the future of baseball. In the future, I could see a professional team in Mexico City, Cuba, Puerto Rico, The Dominican Republic, Tokyo and Seoul.

Mexico City's elevation is >2000 ft higher than Denver. Tokyo and Seoul are a 13 hour flight from the Los Angeles, add another 5 hours from New York... I don't see this happening until the airlines get a new SST.

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1 hour ago, Ace-Of-Diamonds said:

Mexico City's elevation is >2000 ft higher than Denver. Tokyo and Seoul are a 13 hour flight from the Los Angeles, add another 5 hours from New York... I don't see this happening until the airlines get a new SST.

Yeah you're probably right about that. But I do think globalization will be inevitable. Maybe not Tokyo and Seoul, but more than likely Montreal, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. There are definitely barriers there though, which fans could afford tickets, players willing to relocate their families to less built up or safe places. But I think it will happen eventually.

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9 hours ago, Blarg said:

What would make more sense is to sync the leagues and have a true world series between them all. It would require reducing the MLB season to make it work. 

I'm not sure that's very fair though. The level of play from Korea to Japan increases a ton. And every Japanese star that comes to the United States immediately notices just how much more physically gifted the players are here. Players are faster, stronger, throw harder. If the best Japanese team played in the major leagues for a full season, they'd lose 90+ games. In small series, anything can happen, but over 162 games, teams tend to separate. 

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Regardless of the passion for baseball in the DR, Cuba, Mexico City, etc., I’ll go on record as saying that there will never be any MLB franchises in those locations. The economic, political and other logistical barriers are just too high. That’s not how the business of professional sports works. There is a reason why the Sun Belt has more NHL teams than Canada and it’s not because they love their hockey more.

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