Baseball Goes West

A. Mitchell Lincoln

Description

Following the 1957 season, two of baseball's most famous teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants,left the city they had called home since the 19th century and headed west. The Dodgers went to Los Angeles andthe Giants to San Francisco. Those events have entered baseball lore, and indeed the larger culture, as acts of betrayal committed by greedy owners Walter O'Malley of the Dodgers and Horace Stoneham of the Giants. The departure of these two teams, but especially the Dodgers, has not been forgotten by those communities. Even six decades later, it is not hard to find older Brooklynites who are still angry about losing the Dodgers.This is one side of the story. Baseball Goes West seeks to tell another side. Lincoln A. Mitchell argues that the moves to California, second only to Jackie Robinson's debut in 1947, forged Major League Baseball (MLB) as we know it today. By moving two famous teams with national reputations and many well-known players, MLB benefited tremendously, increasing its national profile and broadening its fan base. This was particularly important following a decade that, despite often being described as baseball's golden age, was plagued with moribund franchises, low wages for many players, and a difficult dismantling of the apartheid system that had been part of big league baseball since its inception.In the years immediately following the moves, the two most iconic players of the 1960s, Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays, had their best years, bringing even greater status and fame to their respective ball clubs. The Giants played an instrumental role in the first phase of baseball's global- ization by leading the effort to bring players from Latin America to the big leagues, while the Dodgers set atten- dance records and pioneered new ways to market the game.Sports historians, baseball fans, and historians of American culture on a broader scale will appreciate Mitchell's reframing of baseball's move west and his insights into the impacts felt throughout baseball and beyond.

Sujets

• Béisbol
• USA
• History of sport
• États-Unis
• Baseball

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 12 novembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781631013232
• Langue: English

Extrait

BASEBALL GOES WEST
BASEBALL GOES WEST
The Dodgers, the Giants, and the Shaping of the Major Leagues

LINCOLN A. MITCHELL

The Kent State University Press
KENT, OHIO
© 2018 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Number 2018008750
ISBN 978-1-60635-359-2
Manufactured in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced, in any manner whatsoever, without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of short quotations in critical reviews or articles.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mitchell, Lincoln Abraham, author.
Title: Baseball goes west : the Dodgers, the Giants, and the shaping of the major leagues / Lincoln A. Mitchell.
Description: Kent, Ohio : The Kent State University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018008750 | ISBN 9781606353592 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Baseball--United States--History. | Brooklyn Dodgers (Baseball team)--History. | New York Giants (Baseball team)--History. | Los Angeles Dodgers (Baseball team)--History. | San Francisco Giants (Baseball team)--History.
Classification: LCC GV863.A1 M55 2018 | DDC 796.357/640979409045--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008750
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Baseball Then and Now
2 The Oldest Rivalry in Baseball
3 New York in the 1950s
4 Baseball on the West Coast
5 The Move
6 First Seasons in California
7 After Mays and Koufax
8 Globalization, PEDs, and the Rivalry since 1990
9 The Giants and Dodgers Today
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful for the many people who contributed to Baseball Goes West: The Dodgers, the Giants, and the Shaping of the Major Leagues . Susan Wadsworth-Booth, Will Underwood, and their team at Kent State University Press were patient and helpful to me as I wrote it. John Horne at the National Baseball Hall of Fame assisted in finding the photos used in the book. Joseph D’Anna, Christian Ettinger, Charles A. Fracchia Jr., Charles Karren, John Maschino, and Tova Wang have been my baseball sounding boards most of my life. It was with my late brother Jonathan Mitchell that I first experienced the rivalry between the Giants and Dodgers. The Baseball Freaks Facebook group continues to be a source of support, humor, and insight into the game for me. My wife, Marta Sanders, has encouraged my writing for more than 20 years. My sons, Asher and Reuben, have indulged their father’s stories about baseball players of long ago for years, although they remain more interested in improving their own skills on the diamond. My writing companion, Isis the dog, has slept quietly by my side while I wrote and revised this book, and was always ready for a walk when I needed a break.
This book arose in part out of a lifetime of being a baseball fan in San Francisco and New York. Over the years, there were two conversations that I overheard periodically—at ballgames, all over the borough of Brooklyn, occasionally even from older Manhattanites, in the cafes and ballfields of San Francisco, on the New York City subway, and on the old ballpark express in San Francisco. One conversation was that of older New Yorkers still bemoaning the loss of the Giants and, more frequently, the Dodgers. The other was from San Franciscans of the same generation who had grown up rooting for the Seals and felt compelled to remind younger fans that, in their view, there had been big league baseball in San Francisco long before the Giants ever got there. The Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, Hollywood Stars, and San Francisco Seals are not coming back, but this book is dedicated to the fans of those long-gone teams, particularly those who decided to give the San Francisco Giants, Los Angeles Dodgers, and New York Mets a chance.
INTRODUCTION
All baseball fans with a sense of the game’s history are familiar with the events of October 3, 1951. That was the day when the New York Giants completed a comeback from what had at one time been a 13-game deficit, and clinched the National League pennant on the final pitch of the final game of an exciting three-game playoff against their archrivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers. That game ended with perhaps the most dramatic and famous single play in baseball history. The Giants went into the bottom of the ninth inning trailing 4–1, but managed to get one run in and two runners on with one out and Bobby Thomson, one of their best players, at bat. Thomson hit a clutch three-run home run to give the Giants a 5–4 victory and the National League pennant. In the almost 70 years since, millions of baseball fans have seen the video of that home run and heard Giants radio announcer Russ Hodges, famously repeating the phrase “The Giants win the pennant.”
It is an eerie coincidence, and one about which most fans are entirely unaware, that the two teams met again in the final game of a three-game playoff to decide the National League pennant 11 years later. That game also occurred on October 3. The Dodgers led the third game of the 1962 playoff against the Giants in the ninth inning as well, but this time by two runs, and, like they had done 11 years earlier to the day, found a way to lose that game—and the pennant—to the Giants. In 1962, no single play was as famous or important as Thomson’s home run. Instead, the Giants sent ten players to the plate in the top of the ninth inning, and managed to stitch together four runs on two singles, four walks, and one Dodgers error.
There are other similarities between these two series. In both years the Giants won the first game, the Dodgers won the second, and the Giants the third. The Giants in both 1951 and 1962 went on to lose in the World Series to the New York Yankees. Alvin Dark, who was part of the winning rally in 1951, managed the Giants in 1962. Willie Mays was a rookie and on deck when Thomson hit the home run in 1951; he got a big single in the 1962 winning rally. Duke Snider, the Dodgers’ star center fielder in 1951, was still on the club in 1962, but only as a useful backup outfielder.
A glaring difference between the events of October 3, 1951, and October 3, 1962, is that while the earlier game is something that almost every more-than-casual baseball fan knows, the later game is something that few people know—unless they are big Giants or Dodgers fans and over 60 years old. This is partially due to the unparalleled drama of Bobby Thomson’s home run, but also because the first series occurred in New York City and the second series in California, after the Dodgers and Giants had moved west. The disparity between how the 1951 and 1962 Dodgers–Giants playoffs are remembered reflects how the history of those two teams, and of baseball in general during these two decades, is usually understood. This is particularly true in New York and the Northeast, but it is also the case in the United States as a whole.
The year 1951 may have been the high point of baseball’s long history in New York City. The Dodgers and Giants ended the 154-game season with identical records of 96–58, fully 15 games ahead of the third-place Cardinals. In the American League, the Yankees went 98–56 and won the pennant, their third of what would be five consecutive pennants, by five games. Thus, the New York teams had the three best records in baseball.
The 1951 season was also significant because both the Yankees and the Giants had rookie outfielders, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, respectively, who not only helped their team win the pennant, but went on to become the biggest stars of their generation. Mantle played 86 games in the outfield that year, but only appeared in center field three times. The primary center fielder on that Yankees team was Joe DiMaggio, who in 1951 was in the last year of his storied career. DiMaggio started 113 games for the Yankees that year, all in center field. The Dodgers center fielder that year was Duke Snider, who was just entering the prime of his Hall of Fame career. Thus, 1951 was both the beginning of the era of Willie, Mickey, and the Duke and the end of the Joe DiMaggio era in New York. 1
By 1962, as any baseball fan knows, that golden era of New York City baseball was over. The Dodgers and Giants had been ripped out of the bosom of central Brooklyn and northern Manhattan and moved across the continent to Chavez Ravine and Candlestick Point. Admittedly, 1962 was also the year National League baseball returned to New York—but the hapless Mets, winners of 40 games that season, were, at the time, hardly a replacement for the Giants and the Dodgers.
The story of what happened between October 3, 1951, and October 3, 1962, is too frequently framed as one of loss for New York, often one that takes on a symbolic import beyond simply baseball. Much of this expresses a sense that New Yorkers were exploited by greedy team owners Walter O’Malley of the Dodgers and Horace Stoneham of the Giants, and that baseball suffered a big blow when the Dodgers and Giants moved west. The implicit opinion in many accounts—whether in journalism, fiction, or even music—is that baseball and America would have been better off if the Giants and particularly the Dodgers had never moved. 2
Sam Anderson summarized this received view of the Dodgers’ departure in a 2007 essay in New York Magazine:
The baseball gods murdered the Dodgers with a poisonous cocktail of postwar affluence, the automobile, television, suburban Long Island, stubborn city-planning mastermind Robert Moses, and—the greatest villain of all—a greedy owner named Walter O’Malley. (Old Brooklynites still joke that, if you were to find yourself in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and O’Malley, armed with only two bullets, you’d have to shoot O’Malley twice.) It was a brutal hit, since the team didn’t just leave, they went on to an eternal and victorious afterlife