Alexander: Walter O’Malley, visionary, gets his flowers from Dodgers

LOS ANGELES — Walter O’Malley was added to Dodger Stadium’s Ring of Honor Saturday evening, alongside broadcasters Vin Scully and Jaíme Jarrin and the 12 men who have had their uniform numbers retired by the club.

My feeling? What took the club so long?

O’Malley was a seminal figure not only in Dodgers’ history but the histories of, in order, major league baseball, all of professional sports, the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco and the entire West Coast. (Maybe, even, America in total, although I’m sure people from New York will debate that to this day.)

By moving the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958 – and not incidentally convincing Giants owner Horace Stoneham to move his team from the Polo Grounds to San Francisco, after Stoneham had considered transferring his team to Minneapolis – O’Malley maintained one of baseball’s most historic rivalries and transformed pro sports’ map forever.

Remember, when the Dodgers and Giants got to California, the Rams and 49ers were already here but the NFL was still a secondary attraction, hard as that is to believe.

Everything else that we have? That would be 22 of what would be considered big league franchises throughout California. The Dodgers and Giants paved the way. And many of them play in facilities influenced by the concepts that architect Emil Praeger used in designing Dodger Stadium

None of this, I’m sure, was part of Walter O’Malley’s thought process. His dilemma? The Dodgers had outgrown tiny Ebbets Field, and O’Malley’s desire to build a new domed stadium in Flatbush – a dome, by the way, a full decade before Houston would actually build one – was blocked at every turn by New York’s urban planning czar, Robert Moses.

(Incidentally? The reason the Houston Astros and New York Mets came into being via expansion in 1962, five years after the Dodgers and Giants left New York? Credit – or, if you prefer, blame – O’Malley.)

Yes, he transformed pro sports’ map. And yet, as his son pointed out Saturday, when Walter O’Malley sought and received approval to move the Dodgers to Los Angeles – the official announcement was Oct. 8, 1957 – he didn’t have a place to play.

“The Coliseum was an option,” Peter O’Malley said. “The Rose Bowl was an option and (the minor league) Wrigley Field was an option. But he didn’t have a handshake with any of them. And they (the league) approved the move. Somebody must have said, ‘Hey, Walter, where are you going to play?’ They believed that he could get it done. But it took courage to move here without a place to play.”

The Coliseum turned out to be the Dodgers’ temporary, if misshapen, home from 1958 through 1961, and the three games of the 1959 World Series played there set postseason attendance records that for obvious reasons (i.e., number of seats available) still stand: 92,394 for Game 3, 92,650 for Game 4 and 92,706 for Game 5.

But Walter O’Malley didn’t want to be anybody’s tenant. His concept in Brooklyn was for a stadium that would belong to the team and not the city. The same was true here.

“He wanted to own it, maintain it, secure it, etc.,” Peter O’Malley said, noting the contrast with Stoneham, who wanted a publicly built and financed park and got it in San Francisco, with Candlestick Park. And we will avoid snickering about what San Francisco wound up with all of those years, except to note that during the debate over building Dodger Stadium, there was an argument that giving O’Malley the land to build his own park was a more wasteful use of resources than having the municipality build it and pay for it.

Sounds strange now, doesn’t it?

The rebuttal then? The late Roz Wyman, who as a young city councilwoman in the 1950s was one of the point people in the city’s attempt to bring the Dodgers west, noted in a 2020 interview that “if we (the city) owned it, there’s no taxes, there was nothing (we) could get from it if we own the stadium. Their first year they paid up to half a million on something that had produced nothing. It had stayed dormant for years, the land up there.”

Imagine how much the tax bill is today.

The helicopter ride over Chavez Ravine that O’Malley took with then L.A. county supervisor Kenneth Hahn sold him on L.A. The controversy over the eviction of the last residents of the area, largely Latino, festers in some quarters to this day, though in fairness the property had been targeted for a public housing development in the early 1950s. It’s not inconceivable that O’Malley stepped into a touchy situation not of his making.

But the Dodgers had to win a referendum on the stadium, fought not on behalf of the affected residents but of those convinced that O’Malley was getting 300 acres of land in a sweetheart deal. After the opponents’ final legal appeals were shut down, construction began in September, 1959, the stadium opened April 10, 1962, and the process in between involved moving millions of cubic tons of dirt to achieve a ballpark built into a hillside.

“I remember he got off an airplane (in L.A.) and he was served” with legal papers, Peter O’Malley said. “So he got surprised. He got surprised by the referendum. He got surprised by the legal challenges … I didn’t really detect a lot of focus (on that). More than focus, it took a lot of belief that what he was doing could work and would work out well, which it has.”

Oh, has it. Let it be noted, as former Dodger pitcher and current broadcaster Orel Hershiser noted in his remarks at Saturday’s ceremony, that Dodger Stadium is more than four years older than the Oakland Coliseum, yet one is as vibrant as ever and the other is about to be abandoned.

Or consider this trend: Every major professional sports facility in Los Angeles built since Dodger Stadium has been privately built, financed and maintained – the Forum, which opened on the final weekend in 1967, the arena originally known as Staples Center in October, 1999, SoFi Stadium in September 2020 and the Clippers’ new Intuit Dome, which opens this coming Thursday with a Bruno Mars concert.

“My dad can’t get credit for that,” Peter said. “But that is wonderful.”

jalexander@scng.com