In '57, final days of summer moved New York

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One by one, owners of the six other teams cast their votes at the National League's midseason meetings in Chicago: Phil Wrigley of the Cubs, Gussie Busch of the Cardinals, Lou Perini of the Braves, Bob Carpenter of the Phillies, Powel Crosley of the Reds and John Galbreath of the Pirates.

The vote was unanimous, and so Walter O'Malley of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Horace Stoneham of the New York Giants had permission to move their ballclubs to the West Coast.

The date was May 28, 1957, 50 years ago today, and to some the idea was unthinkable. New York without National League baseball? Without the Giants of John McGraw and the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson? Without the most intense rivalry in all sports?

It seemed like a dream, a nightmare to many. But although O'Malley and Stoneham claimed it was far from definite that their teams would move -- after all, they still had four months of bills to pay in what later would be called the Big Apple -- the deed essentially was done. And that September it became official.

O'Malley, the Dodgers' devious boss, was responsible. For years he had demanded that New York build him a huge stadium in Brooklyn to replace decaying, 33,000-seat Ebbets Field, making impossible demands of Mayor Robert Wagner and parks commissioner Robert Moses. Finally, Moses agreed to let him have "a nice parcel of land" in Queens.

"But then they won't be the Brooklyn Dodgers," said O'Malley, shedding crocodile tears.

In truth, O'Malley had no intention of staying, even though the Dodgers were the second-most profitable team in the league behind the Milwaukee Braves, who had cashed in big after abandoning Boston. The vast Los Angeles area had only one major professional sports team, the NFL's Rams, and was sure to be a baseball hotbed.

Besides, the concept of teams moving no longer was foreign in baseball. The Braves had moved in 1953, the St. Louis Browns to Baltimore in 1954 and the Philadelphia Athletics to Kansas City in 1955 -- the game's first franchise shifts since 1903. Clearly, tradition was taking a beating from the promise of untold riches elsewhere.

Before asking permission to move, O'Malley set the stage. First, he scheduled seven "home" games in Jersey City for each of the 1956 and 1957 seasons, dropping a broad hint that he wanted a new stadium or else. Second, he bought the Class AAA Pacific Coast League's Los Angeles franchise from Wrigley, giving him rights to that area. Then he persuaded Stoneham to move west with him, a vital factor because the distance to the Coast made it imprudent for visiting clubs to play only one series a visit there.

The selling job wasn't hard. Stoneham, a heavy drinker, was no match for the smooth-talking O'Malley. Though both clubs had decaying parks in declining neighborhoods -- Ebbets Field in downtown Brooklyn, the Giants' Polo Grounds in Harlem -- their attendance figures varied widely. Despite slipping to third place after winning six pennants in 10 years, the Dodgers drew 1,028,258 in 1957, not far below the 1,213,162 attracted by the 1956 NL champions.