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| Re: What if the Dodgers had never moved? (1182254) | |||
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Re: What if the Dodgers had never moved? |
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Posted by MATHA531 on Sun Oct 21 01:58:35 2012, in response to Re: What if the Dodgers had never moved?, posted by mcorivervsaf on Sun Oct 21 01:10:59 2012. Yes attendance was declining but of course everybody has to throw out 1957 as it became apparent midway through the season that it was a lame duck season. Actually, what apparently had happened was that in 1956 when the Dodgers unexpectedly came from behind and won the NL pennant on the last weekend of the season, the Dodgers went to Japan after the World Series and on the way home, stopped off in LA where O'Malley was taken on a helicopter ride over Chaveez Ravine and reportedly told LA city officials at that time he was coming and not to be concerned as he still had a season to play in Brooklyn to make all the arrangements. Of course he lied to the people in Brooklyn throughout the early part of 1957 that there was still time to do something but he was a goner.The only thing to add is to check the attendance of other teams at the same time. They were all declining. Baseball had reached its heights just after the war. The country in many areas was suburbanizing. People were leaving the inner cities throughout. Dodger attendance in 1957 was third in the NL and was still over 1,000,000 the nagic number for acceptability at the time. And revenue wise, the Dodgers were still making more money than Milwaukee despite the attendance differential and the Braves were the only team outdrawing the Dodgers in the National League. Since the fan base were moving in droves to Long Island, wasn't Flushing Meadows a much more viable location? The big question still remains if LA had not made that totally immoral offer to O'Malley, would he have accepted the Flushing Meadow site? And of course 20/20 hindsight shows clearly (as the Mets later proved) that it would have been a complete success. And whether you just want to throw out the eminent domain argument, as Barclay Center has shown there would have been years and years of litigation over the use of Title I funding to condemn land for a ball park to benefit an entity already making more money than they knew what to do with! |
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