Failure™ Magazine

Stay It Ain’t So

Could New York have done more to keep the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants?

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Sports

In the book you note that the standard interpretation of events bothers you.
What I have tried to do is revise the revisionists. The historical tendency has been to blame Robert Moses for the Dodgers leaving. In his biography of Moses [“The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York,” 1974], Robert Caro tries to establish that Moses was a brilliant man who started off on the side of the little guy and gradually got power hungry and became ruthless. I believe that when Neil Sullivan [author of “The Dodgers Move West”] went back to look at why the Dodgers left Brooklyn, he was very much under the influence of Caro and was all too willing, in my opinion, to blame Moses, without balancing all the people involved. Then another book was written [“The Last Good Season,” by Michael Shapiro], which again said it was Moses’ fault, and then HBO did a television special, which quoted Caro and Shapiro liberally. By 2007 everyone who had an opinion on the subject was convinced that Moses ran the Dodgers out of New York.

What role did Moses play?
Moses wasn’t as uncooperative and uncaring about the fate of the Dodgers as the above-named authors suggest. He simply didn’t feel it was appropriate to let [Dodgers owner] Walter O’Malley get exactly what he wanted for the purpose of getting rich. And I think he was right about that. The responsibility has to go back to O’Malley, who was single-minded about getting the best ballpark and making himself the most successful sports owner in America.

Could the city of New York have done more to keep the Dodgers and Giants?
You could make the case that the city of New York failed to keep the teams. But it was a battle between forces that were completely different. What Los Angeles was willing to do to steal a team from another city was very different from what New York was prepared to do to keep one.

But another way to look at it is that New York almost had to fail because what Los Angeles offered was so attractive that O’Malley—being the person that he was—would have to have taken it. What ultimately happened is that Moses put up his hands and said, “If that’s what we’re up against, what are we going to do? We can’t offer that. We’d be voted out of office.” No other city could do what Los Angeles did because its motivation was different. Los Angeles swapped 300 acres in downtown L.A. for a minor league ballpark that was on two or three acres. So in his own way, Moses was very principled. He said, “There are things we can do and things we can’t do. We are more than willing to work with you on things that we can do.”

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