THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (18 page)

On the way to Japan, the plane stopped in Los Angeles. O’Malley
met with Los Angeles City Councilman Kenneth Hahn, who had been at
the World Series trying to get Washington Senators’ owner Clark
Griffith to move to L.A. Only a few years earlier, the Boston
Braves made a successful move to Milwaukee; the Philadelphia A’s a
less-successful one to Kansas City. When Chuck Yeager broke the
“sound barrier” over the skies of Southern California in 1947, it
opened the door for jet travel and thus West Coast expansion.

In Japan, O’Malley was impressed with Tokyo’s Korakuen Stadium,
which featured lower-level luxury boxes for celebrity
ticket-holders, not unlike the concept of “courtside seating,”
later a staple at Madison Square Garden and the “Fabulous Forum.”
Negotiations ensued. In 1957 O’Malley secretly committed to Los
Angeles. O’Malley told Hahn he did not need the city to build him a
stadium. All he wanted was land. He would do the rest himself.

While O’Malley is viewed as the man everybody in Brooklyn loves
to hate, a great deal of blame is rightfully attached to Robert
Moses, New York City’s “building czar.” His political power was
almost totalitarian in the Big Apple. Moses said no to all of
O’Malley’s stadium plans, particularly any in Brooklyn. He was
absolutely bound and determined that a stadium be erected in
Queens, where La Guardia Airport was built and the World’s Fair
would be held.

For Brooklyn, any move outside of the borough was a betrayal,
even if it was to a neighboring New York City enclave. The team’s
entire identity was tied up in its Brooklyn image. O’Malley
portrayed himself as trying to defend Brooklyn’s fan interest. He
made a strange proposal for a “geodesic dome,” an early concept of
the later Houston Astrodome, to protect from “inclement weather.”
But Brooklyn had no freeways, no parking, and very little available
land. The future was in Queens. Half of Brooklyn had already moved
out there anyway, or to nearby Long Island. O’Malley is vilified,
but there was no practical future in Brooklyn and no way to keep
playing forever at Ebbets Field.

Moses wanted what eventually would be Shea Stadium. O’Malley
found in Moses a political player who held more cards than he did.
The layers of bureaucracy disgusted him. O’Malley endeavored to
design the building of a stadium with his own money, therefore
controlling his own destiny. This was impossibility in New York,
not with Moses involved. It became the key bargaining point with
Councilman Hahn. When it was agreed to, the deal was sealed.

O’Malley sold Ebbets Field to a commercial developer and the cat
was out of the bag. A competing interest had promised to keep the
team in Brooklyn or on the available land out by La Guardia
Airport, but O’Malley spurned the offer. He continued to
“negotiate” with New York, but went to L.A. and found the most
perfect site for a baseball stadium then imaginable. Chavez Ravine
sat on a hilltop overlooking downtown Los Angeles, criss-crossed by
a modern freeway system accessible to every part of city and
growing suburb alike. O’Malley bought the Cubs’ L.A. franchise in
the Pacific Coast League, completely undercutting the man who
originally had the region for the picking, Philip K. Wrigley.

In 1973, Martin Scorsese made a Mob movie based on his youth in
Little Italy. In the final scene of
Mean Streets
, Robert
DeNiro and Harvey Keitel made a suicidal drive, settling an old
score with a bad end that was metaphorically seen by the camera,
capturing the passing sign, “Last Exit in Brooklyn” (a bitter 1950s
novel-turned-into-a-movie was called
Last Exit
to
Brooklyn
).

The Dodgers’ last exit
from
Brooklyn plays out in the
minds of their fans like the Zapruder film, as if in showing the
footage over and over somehow the result will be different this
time. The Dodgers had a poor season in 1957, leading to poor
attendance, which O’Malley used as his excuse when in fact fans
knew the team was gone. That was the real reason they stayed away
from Ebbets Field.

O’Malley got New York Giants’ owner Horace Stoneham to agree to
move to San Francisco so the rivalry would be kept alive on the
coast. On May 29, 1957 the league approved the moves. The Dodgers
took much treasure with them. Brooklyn-born Sandy Koufax would be a
matinee idol in Hollywood instead of his hometown. California-born
Don Drysdale would be a Hall of Famer in L.A., not a true New York
Sports Icon.

California was a magnet, drawing not just the Dodgers but an
entire post-war, suburbanized, car-crazy nation to the growing
Sunbelt. If New Yorkers had refused to acknowledge the power and
influence of the Golden State, they had to now. Gladys Gooding
played “Auld Lang Syne” on the Ebbets Field organ. Dick Young wrote
scathing columns. O’Malley was unmoved. He had harnessed the
future.

Between 1958 and 1961, fans of the Dodgers and Giants were like
parents who had lost their children to a terrible disease. They
were heartbroken. Something had been torn from the very fabric of
their souls. They reacted in different ways.

Some went out to Yankee Stadium to heckle the Yankees, which was
like booing an F-16 as it bombs the enemy into submission. The
Yankees won the 1958, 1961 and 1962 World Series. But as great as
they were, the loss of the Dodgers and Giants was a void they could
not fill. Very few really and truly switched allegiance to the
Yankees. The Yankees “did not benefit from having the city all to
themselves,” said longtime New York baseball scribe Jack Lang. They
failed to fill the vacuum, maintaining a sense of complacency.

Dodgers and Giants supporters were “staunch National
League fans.” Some rooted for the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San
Francisco Giants; some hated them. Despite everything, rooting for
the Dodgers and Giants was made slightly palatable because both
teams were strong. The Dodgers, with many ex-Brooklyn players, won
the 1959 World Series. By 1963 they were in Dodger Stadium and had
established a strong Los Angeles identity, but they still had
Koufax and Drysdale. Sweeping the
Yankees
in four straight
in 1963 created “mixed emotions,” as Michael Douglas, playing
Gordon Gekko in
Wall Street
says, “like Larry
Wildman driving over a cliff . . . in my new Ferrari.”

If that was strange, the 1962 season was even stranger. The
Dodgers and Giants re-enacted the 1951 dramatics complete with
three-game play-off won again by the Giants. That might have been
described as two ex-wives fighting it out . . . over the guy you
lost both of them to.

“I was a little disgusted with Giant and Dodger fans who
remained fans of the teams that had left,” said Stan Isaacs of
Newsday
. “They were traitors. I could see rooting for Pee
Wee Reese and Sandy Koufax. But not for O’Malley’s Dodgers.”

“The three most hated people in the history of the
Universe, were Adolf Hitler, Genghis Kahn, and Walter O’Malley,”
columnist Pete Hamill said. He somehow left out Joseph Stalin and
Mao Tse-Tung. (“Fellow travelers” of the era apparently found tacit
agreement with Stalin’s breezy equivocation: “You need to break a
few eggs in order to make an omelet.”)

No sooner had the Dodgers and Giants departed than talk began of
replacing them. There was mixed reaction to this. These
time-honored traditions could not be replaced, but then again
something
had to be done
. The concept of franchise shifts
and expansion was obviously in the air. Four teams – the Braves,
A’s, now the Dodgers and Giants – had switched cities. The West lay
open for modern Lewis’s and Clark’s. Two teams could survive in one
city; or in New York, three teams. Los Angeles would get the
expansion Angels in 1961. The Washington Senators moved to
Minneapolis and became the Twins, an inevitable move that Horace
Stoneham says he would have made had California not opened up. A
new expansion Senators franchise filled their place.

Pro basketball would move out to L.A., with the Lakers leaving
Minneapolis. Pro football was at the forefront, first with the Los
Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers; the merger of sorts between
the National Football League and the All-American Football
Conference; and then the creation in 1960 of the AFL. Teams rained
like Manna from Heaven on Los Angeles (then San Diego), Oakland,
and other virgin territories.

In 1958, New York City Mayor Robert Wagner formed a study group
called The Mayor’s Baseball Committee, a “blue ribbon” panel of
political heavyweights. One of its members was a leading New York
powerbroker named William A. Shea. A partner in a major Manhattan
law firm, he was considered Mayor Wagner’s top advisor. Shea’s
circle of influence was as “blue blood” as it gets. There was New
York’s Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller, one of the
wealthiest men in the world, with ambitions for the Presidency.

Then there was U.S. Senator Prescott Bush (R.-
Connecticut). Bush lived in tony Greenwich,
the place
to
live in the 1950s (if not still today). He was a member of the “old
money” Bush-Walker clan, a distant relative to British and Dutch
royalty. His family founded the Walker Cup golf tournament that Tom
Seaver’s father had won in 1932, and ruled over the oldest, most
prestigious Wall Street stock brokerage firm, Brown Brothers
Harriman. The Bush family would be part of the ownership group of
the team that eventually came into being. Bush’s son, George H.W.
Bush, had been a World War II flying ace and eventually President
of the United States from 1989 to 1993.
His
son, George W.
Bush, would occupy the White House eight years later.

The Republican Senator Bush reached across the aisle
and got the support of the Democrat Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon
B. Johnson of Texas, and Democrat House Speaker Sam Rayburn, for a
New York franchise. The
quid pro quo
was reciprocal support
for a second franchise in Houston, where Senator Bush’s son George
was a millionaire oilman, planning to run for Texas’s U.S. Senate
seat in 1964.

Shea himself was not from money. His family was hit hard during
the Great Depression, but he married well, worked hard, and his
Irish wit stood him in good stead. He worked his way through law
school and to a job with the state of New York. He wanted to enter
politics but his wife insisted he not, so Shea resolved to always
be a “mover and shaker” behind the scenes. His clients and contacts
included the Brooklyn Dodgers and urban planner Robert Moses. When
Larry MacPhail left the Dodgers, ostensibly to join “Wild Bill”
Donovan’s famed OSS, the pre-cursor of the Central Intelligence
Agency, a “sweetheart deal” to buy cheap shares of Dodgers stock
was made available. In the end, Walter O’Malley got the Dodgers,
but it allowed Shea to maintain a broader political scope. When
O’Malley and the Dodgers departed, they left all their power and
influence in New York City. Shea filled that vacuum.

Shea knew sports, having played football and lacrosse in
college. He cultivated the press, but had an obstacle to overcome.
Commissioner of Baseball Ford Frick did not want another team in
New York. The Yankees’ ownership influenced him on this issue. But
the powerful New York media, led by Red Smith, Dan Parker, Dick
Young, Barney Kremenko and Jack Lang, created a steady drumbeat of
interest in getting a team.

There were eight teams in the National League. It was not
considered plausible that an American League franchise could shift.
Only three clubs, Philadelphia, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, were
doing poorly enough to consider New York, but each remained out of
loyalty to their traditions. But the expansion of pro football and
basketball was already happening. The focus went to this
avenue.

Then Shea came up with the idea of a whole new baseball
organization, called the Continental League, to be run by none
other than Branch Rickey. This gambit was probably just a ploy, a
form of “blackmail” to force the issue in his favor. Also, being a
lawyer by trade, Shea went with his best pitch: the law. He brought
up Constitutional issues and court cases; anti-trust laws that
previously exempted baseball from standards others had to uphold; a
1922 court Supreme Case he said could be overturned; and the
question of the game’s business monopoly.

“Bill Shea looked to Senators and Congressmen from states that
didn’t have teams,” said his law associate, Kevin McGrath. “He
became allies with the most powerful people at that time in
Congress, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Sam Rayburn, who were from
Texas. No baseball team there. He made allies with men from
Washington, D.C. . . . From Florida, no
baseball team.”

Minneapolis. Dallas/Ft. Worth. Houston. Atlanta.

“Shea knew if they put teams in those towns, they would get the
politicians to back him,” said McGrath.

Between Shea and the highly respected Rickey, an attorney in his
own right, they were well received in Washington. Shea is obviously
credited with creation of the New York Mets. In so doing he also
deserves some credit for creating the Houston Astros, the second
Washington Senators, the Minnesota Twins, the Texas Rangers, and
the Atlanta Braves.

Shea put together a consortium of rich, powerful people that
included Edward Bennett Williams, and Jack Kent Cooke from the
ownership standpoint; then such baseball men as Bob Howsam. The
Continental League had financing and was planning to open for
business in 1959 or 1960 with proposed franchises in Denver,
Dallas/Ft. Worth, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Buffalo, and Houston; with
more to follow in New Orleans, Miami, Indianapolis, San Diego,
Portland, Seattle, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.

At the heart of all this maneuvering was one primary motivation:
a team in New York. It was the “jewel in the crown.” Pete Davis,
one of the creators of the Davis Cup tennis competition, was
approached. He in turn recommended the wildly wealthy heiress, Mrs.
Joan Whitney Payson. Mrs. Payson did not need to invest in a second
rate baseball league. She and Rickey already understood that the
Continental League would be just that. They were doing it all to
force Major League Baseball’s hand. Rickey explained this to Mrs.,
Payson, who admired the art of the deal. She consequently brought
her wealthy circle into the game: Dorothy Killiam, William Simpson,
and Senator Prescott Bush’s nephew, G. Herbert Walker. Mrs. Payson
and Davis then bought Dorothy Killiam’s shares. At $4 million she
owned 80 percent of the stock in a “New York baseball franchise,”
which is like a movie producer who buys an unproduced screenplay,
paying $4 million for “120 pieces of paper.” M. Donald Grant and
Herb Walker owned the remaining 20 percent.