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15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
Misses The Deeper Meaning, June 25, 2001
The problem with Neal Sullivan's book is not in the facutal information that he's gathered surrounding the events that led to the Dodgers move west. The problem lies in the fact that his desire to approach the subject with a cold detachment forces him to overlook the deeper emotional impact of this move, and ultimately avoid completely the ethical questions surrounding the Dodgers move west and the lasting scars it left on Brooklyn.Sullivan's thesis is that Walter O'Malley, the most reviled man in New York City, did not set out to move the Dodgers to Los Angeles and would have stayed in Brooklyn had he received the land he wanted. He makes a compelling case that ultimately Robert Moses, who wanted only the eventual Flushing Meadow site of Shea Stadium developed for stadium use, was perhaps the greater villain in the whole affair. And he argues that O'Malley was less the conniving evil figure that the tradtional view of works like "Bums" and "The Boys Of Summer" would indicate. This part of Sullivan's thesis has some merit to it. Where Sullivan ultimately loses me is his degenerating into something bordering on O'Malley sycophancy. He argues that Walter O'Malley deserves induction in the Hall of Fame for having supposedly had the the foresight to expand baseball to the west, a community that had long been denied baseball, and because the Dodgers achieved success in Los Angeles. And he argues that because Ebbets Field had been built under the "free market" model of baseball economics, Walter O'Malley ultimately had every right to do what he wanted to do with his own ball club. This however, is where Sullivan is dead wrong. First, Walter O'Malley does not deserve induction into the Hall of Fame simply for being the first beneficiary of an idea that other owners and men were envisioning much sooner. Nor for that matter does O'Malley merit induction simply because he presided over successful teams, because under that model George Steinbrenner should be a candidate for induction as well. The success of the Dodgers in Los Angeles ultimately rests with its players and front office management like Buzzie Bavasi and Al Campanis, not O'Malley. Finally, Sullivan's determination to prove that O'Malley was in the technical right to do what he felt was necessary to make more money for his franchise, conveniently overlooks a salient point. Walter O'Malley may have been the team's owner, but the Dodgers were not a longstanding family business as the Giants had been with Horace Stoneham. O'Malley was an outsider who had forced his way to the top and had been principal owner for less than a decade when he decided that he had the right to take something that had been the heart and soul of a community for 67 years away from them forever, even though his financial situation wasn't comparable to that of franchise owners in Philadelphia, St. Louis and Boston who had moved earlier in the decade (as well as that of Horace Stoneham). Technically, O'Malley had the right to move, but ethically and morally, the Brooklyn Dodgers did not belong to O'Malley the man, they belonged to the people of Brooklyn. If Walter O'Malley wasn't making good money from the team, then his first obligation was to cut his losses, sell and let other local ownership try their hand at improving the situation. This is ultimately the ethical side that should separate a sports franchise ownership apart from any other business, when it is a part of the community and Neal Sullivan misses the boat completely on this point in his determination to whitewash the heart of the matter and make O'Malley look good in the end.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Highly objective and wothwhile, August 28, 2005
I was a sad 10-year-old Brooklyn kid when I learned the dodgers were going to leave us. Like most everyone around, I tended to blame Walter O'Malley's greed. Yet in the end it may have been O'Malley's vanity more than his greed that was most responsible for the fateful decision.
As Neil Sullivan so well points out, a strong case can be made that O'Malley didn't really want to leave at first. If he just wanted to take off, he would not have had the Dodgers play some of their home games in Jersey City. That had to be nothing more than an attempt to get the indifferent New York politicos to take him more seriously. In addition, O'Malley's family roots were all in New York. O'Malley wanted to build a ballpark at the junction of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, an ideal location as many subway lines converged there as well as the Long Island Railroad. O'Malley, in other words, believed in public transportation that would make it easy for the average working person to get to the ballpark.
Robert Moses, who blocked O'Malley's path at every opportunity was determined to get the Dodgers out of urban Brooklyn and into what was then semi-suburban Queens. Moses hated the subway system and loved the automobile. It was he who insisted on building the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which tore the heart out of certain neighborhoods in that borough and today is both a bottleneck and an eyesore. Anything to accommodate suburbanites at the expense of the working stiffs. Moses claimeed that putting a ballpark at Flatbush and Atlantic would have caused many thriving businesses to relocate. In fact the Flatbush-Atlantic junction rapidly deteriorated and most of those thriving businesses went under on their own.
The bottom line was that the unelected Parks Commissioner Moses considered himself the czar of all recreation in New York and was not about to let anyone build a ballpark anywhere except where he (Moses) wanted it. In fact what O'Malley proposed was an urban renewal project that was none of the Parks Commissioner's business. But New York's mayor at the time, Robert F. Wagner had the backbone of a jellyfish and was not about to stand up to Moses.
O'Malley, who had invested considerable time and effort on the Flatbush-Atlantic site, finally got tired of being strung along and had no desire to become Moses' tenant and underling in Queens. He saw an opportunity in L.A. and took it. And so today we have ugly Shea Stadium, neo-Stalinist in design, named for a politico, and built under the aegis of Moses, far more unattractive than O'Malley's Dodger Stadium. People can't wait for Shea Stadium to be torn down and replaced by a building with some charm, while O'Malley's beautiful ballpark wil last indefinitely into the future.
Neil Sullivan's book is an excellent read and highly recommended.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A Reminder to a Forgotten Person!, August 9, 2003
I have recently read the book "Dodgers Move West" written by Neil Sullivan. On the whole, I must state that this is a good book to get a historical perspective and behind the scenes movers and shakers without having extensive knowledge of the topic. Where the book seems to lose some focus is when Mr. Sullivan repeats certain facts such as Walter O'Malley's position regarding the relocation of the Brooklyn Dodgers to California. However, Mr. Sullivan provides a good compare and contrast with the situation involving the New York Giants move to California. The strength of this long forgotten book is the role played by NYC Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses. With recent books supporting the same thesis it can be clearly stated that the most influential (and forgotten) person responsible for Brooklyn losing the Dodgers is Robert Moses. What this book has done is to provide me with the incentive to read a class called "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro. Can you guess whois the "Power Broker" ?
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
The O'Malley Bunko, May 25, 2001
Perhaps inevitably an academic who was not on the scene close up is the one would give us the O'Malley house version of why the the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn. Sullivan argues that Walter O'Malley would have kept the team in Brooklyn if only New York's big bad politicos had given him a site where he could erect a ball park with his own funds. But as Roger Kahn points out in "The Era", O'Malley did not actually have sufficient funds. Journalists around at the time -- the late 1950s -- were not fooled by O'Malley, whom Branch Rickey called "the most devious man I ever met." Sullivan has done some hard research but unfortunately it is wasted as he swallows the O'Malley line like a very hungry trout.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
The real reasons behind the dodgers move to Los Angeles, August 27, 1999
Sullivan's masterful research draws the reader into the battle, fiancially and politically, to keep the Dodgers in brooklyn. This book takes you behind the scenes like no other. It's not just O'Malley packing up and leaving. I'll guarantee you at the end of this book, you'll be blown away at the many chances the Dodgers had at actually staying in Brooklyn. Also, you'll look at Robert Moses in a different way, and how I feel that he is as much to blame for the move too.
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