When Baseball Went Coast to Coast

On September 29, 1957, the New York Giants played their final game at the Polo Grounds. The Brooklyn Dodgers had played their last at Ebbets Field five days earlier, on September 24. Both teams were moving to California. The Dodgers would go to Los Angeles. The Giants would go to San Francisco. Two of the three most storied franchises in National League history were leaving the city where baseball had been born.

The relocations were driven by money and ambition. Walter O'Malley, the Dodgers' owner, had been trying for years to build a new stadium in Brooklyn. He wanted public financing and a site near the Long Island Rail Road terminal at Atlantic Avenue. Robert Moses, New York's all-powerful parks commissioner, offered him a site in Flushing Meadows, Queens, instead. O'Malley refused. He wanted Brooklyn or nothing. He got nothing, and he got California.

Horace Stoneham, the Giants' owner, was facing similar problems at the aging Polo Grounds, where attendance had plummeted. When O'Malley told Stoneham about his California plans, Stoneham decided to follow. The two teams headed west together.

The moves devastated New York. Brooklyn lost not just a baseball team but a communal identity. The Dodgers were woven into the borough's sense of itself in a way that no modern sports franchise can replicate. Their departure left wounds that have not fully healed in nearly seven decades. The Polo Grounds sat empty until the expansion Mets arrived in 1962 as temporary tenants. It was demolished in 1964.

But the moves transformed baseball from a regional sport into a national one. Before 1958, no major league team existed west of St. Louis or south of Washington, D.C. The Dodgers and Giants brought the game to the Pacific Coast, where millions of potential fans had been watching minor league baseball and waiting for the majors to arrive.

The success was immediate and enormous. The Dodgers drew 1.8 million fans to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in their first season, playing baseball in a football stadium with a left field wall only 250 feet from home plate. When Dodger Stadium opened in 1962, it became the model for the modern suburban ballpark, designed for the automobile age. The Giants drew well at Seals Stadium and later at Candlestick Park, though attendance was more inconsistent.

The relocations opened the floodgates. In 1961, the American League expanded to 10 teams, adding the Los Angeles Angels and a new Washington Senators franchise (the old Senators had become the Minnesota Twins). In 1962, the National League added the Houston Colt .45s (later renamed the Astros) and the New York Mets, who were created explicitly to fill the void left by the Dodgers and Giants.

The 1962 Mets became one of the most famous teams in baseball history for all the wrong reasons. They went 40-120, the worst record of the 20th century. They lost their first nine games. They committed errors at a rate that suggested organizational sabotage. Their manager, Casey Stengel, who had won seven World Series with the Yankees, was asked about his new team and reportedly said, "Can't anybody here play this game?"

Seven years later, those same Mets won the 1969 World Series, completing the most unlikely transformation in baseball history. The expansion had worked. Baseball was a coast-to-coast sport, and the game's geography would never contract again.