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| Re: why Yankee vs Mets baseball games are called ''Subway Series''? (248086) | |||
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Re: why Yankee vs Mets baseball games are called ''Subway Series''? |
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Posted by Brighton Private on Mon May 1 15:13:50 2006, in response to Re: why Yankee vs Mets baseball games are called ''Subway Series''?, posted by Steve B-8AVEXP on Sun Apr 30 18:12:49 2006. As a 1953 Brooklyn-born baseball fan who went on to play under the lights of Braves Field (in its reincarnation as Boston University's non-baseball athletic field) I have a little something to contribute here.The account of the reasons for the Braves move is correct, though it should be said that despite having what was originally the larger ballpark, the Braves had for many years been Boston's second team. If you look at major league attendance figures for the early 1950's, however, you will see that the Braves' attendance, though poor, was not as bad as it sounds when compared with modern day stats. in those days, most teams averaged well under 10,000 per game; in 1962, the World Champion Yankees led the league with an average of only 14,800, compared with 50,000 last year. The story of the Dodgers' departure is more complicated and there has been a great deal of revisionist history written with the recent opening by the O'Malley family of archives related to the transaction. Since this is a subway chat site and not one devoted to baseball, suffice it to say we have a common enemy: Robert Moses. While it is true that LA made O'Malley a terrific offer, it does appear he made more than a token effort to remain in Brooklyn provided he could replace increasingly decrepit (and parking-less) Ebbets Field, where attendance was declining after a post-war spike. Moses refused O'Malley's efforts to use eminent domain to condemn the land under what is now, ironically enough, the publicly owned LIRR terminal for a stadium O'Malley was otherwise willing to pay for himself. Moses wrote that it would be an improper use of eminent domain (this is before it became commonplace for cities to spend $$$$ on ballparks, as my adoptive hometown of Washington is now doing, and for which it is employing eminent domain proceedings). Moses offered the city-owned land where Shea Stadium is now, but O'Malley said no, reasoning that the team playing in Queens could no longer be considered the "Brooklyn" Dodgers. The rest is history. As for why "Subway Series?" All us subway nuts are taking it too literally. The simple fact is that the subway is a symbol of New York (and of New Yorkers), it emphasized the closeness of the two teams' homes compared to the usual distance between World Series opponents, and perhaps most important, the phrase is alliterative. No one cared about whether you could really take a subway from one stadium to the other (which, as one poster pointed out, was irrelevant anyway), or whether the players actually took the subway to games. |
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