Walter O'Malley

Walter Francis O'Malley trained as an engineer and a lawyer, talked his way into the Brooklyn Dodgers' front office as the team's attorney during World War II, bought into the club in 1944, and forced out Branch Rickey in 1950 to take control. He won the only World Series in Brooklyn history in 1955, then moved the franchise nearly 3,000 miles to Los Angeles after the 1957 season and built Dodger Stadium with his own money, turning the Dodgers into the most profitable operation in the sport. Brooklyn never forgave him for the move, and it never stopped arguing about whether he was a visionary or a thief. Rickey's old broadcaster Red Barber called him "about the most devious man I ever met." The Veterans Committee elected him to the Hall of Fame in 2008.

The Bronx and Fordham

O'Malley was born on October 9, 1903, in the Bronx, the only child of Edwin O'Malley, a businessman with Democratic political connections, and Alma Feltner O'Malley. He grew up comfortably, attended Culver Military Academy in Indiana, and went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1926. He started law school at Columbia, but the 1929 crash wrecked his father's finances, so he switched to night classes at Fordham and finished his law degree in 1930 while working days as an engineer. He ran the Walter F. O'Malley Engineering Company and built a profitable practice steering bankrupt companies through Depression-era reorganizations, and through that work he met the bankers who would one day hand him a baseball team.

Brooklyn Trust

O'Malley reached the Dodgers through George V. McLaughlin, the president of the Brooklyn Trust Company, which held the mortgage on a club that spent the 1930s deep in debt. McLaughlin knew O'Malley's father and brought the younger man in to protect the bank's interest in the team. O'Malley became the Dodgers' attorney in 1943, and from that seat he watched Branch Rickey run the baseball side and build the farm system that would integrate the major leagues with Jackie Robinson in 1947.

The Buyout

O'Malley bought his way in gradually. In November 1944 he joined Rickey and a partner in purchasing a 25 percent block of Dodgers stock from the McKeever estate, and the following summer the group enlarged its stake with a second purchase from the Ebbets estate that brought in John L. Smith, the president of the Pfizer chemical company. By 1945 Rickey, O'Malley, and Smith each controlled about a quarter of the team, with Dearie McKeever Mulvey holding the last share. The arrangement held together until Smith died in 1950, and his widow turned her stock over to the Brooklyn Trust Company, which O'Malley controlled. That left Rickey and O'Malley facing each other across the boardroom, and the two men could not stand one another.

Rickey's contract as general manager expired in the fall of 1950, and he wanted out at a steep price. O'Malley offered $346,000 for Rickey's quarter of the team, and Rickey, knowing the partnership agreement let him sell to any outside bidder O'Malley would have to match, produced a real estate man named William Zeckendorf willing to pay $1 million for the stock. O'Malley had to match that figure and pay Zeckendorf a $50,000 fee besides, so Rickey walked away with more than a million dollars while O'Malley took the club for far more than he wanted to spend. O'Malley became president of the Dodgers in October 1950 and barred his staff from so much as speaking Rickey's name in the office.

Ebbets Field and Robert Moses

By the mid-1950s O'Malley had a problem at Ebbets Field, a park that held barely 32,000 people, offered around 700 parking spaces, and sat in a Brooklyn steadily losing population to the suburbs. Attendance slid from the 1.7 million of the immediate postwar years toward a million a season even as the Dodgers won pennant after pennant. O'Malley wanted a new stadium at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, next to the Long Island Rail Road terminal, and he hired R. Buckminster Fuller to sketch a domed ballpark for the site.

Robert Moses controlled public construction across New York, and he wanted the Dodgers in a park he would build in Flushing Meadows out in Queens. O'Malley meant to own his stadium rather than rent a public one, and he refused the Queens site even after he lined up support from Governor Averell Harriman. Moses would not let him assemble the Brooklyn land through condemnation, and neither man gave way until O'Malley settled it by leaving the state entirely.

Los Angeles

Los Angeles spent years courting baseball, and O'Malley listened. In 1956 he bought the minor league Los Angeles Angels and their ballpark, Wrigley Field, from Philip Wrigley, which handed him the territorial rights to the city, and that October he sold Ebbets Field to a developer on a lease that let the team stay until a new park was ready. The National League approved his move west after the 1957 season on one condition, that he bring a second club along so the coast teams would have someone nearby to play. O'Malley talked Horace Stoneham, whose New York Giants were drawing almost nobody at the Polo Grounds, into taking San Francisco instead of the move to Minnesota he was weighing, and the two franchises went west together despite the reservations of Commissioner Ford Frick.

The Dodgers spent their first four seasons in Los Angeles at the Memorial Coliseum, a football and Olympic stadium so ill-suited to baseball that the team strung a 42-foot screen across a left field fence barely 250 feet from home plate. The Coliseum opener on April 18, 1958, drew 78,672 fans, a record for a major league game, and the club turned a larger profit in its first California year than any team in baseball.

Dodger Stadium

O'Malley wanted a hilly tract north of downtown called Chavez Ravine, where the city cleared a Mexican American neighborhood years earlier for a public housing project it never built. The land deal went to a public referendum in 1958 and survived a string of taxpayer lawsuits before the courts finally cleared it. He paid for the ballpark himself, roughly $23 million, and opened Dodger Stadium on April 10, 1962, a clean 56,000-seat park terraced into the hillside with parking on every level and not a single pillar to block a sightline. He retired the construction debt within a few years out of gate and concession money, and the Dodgers settled into a stadium that has outlasted nearly every park built since.

The Dynasty

Under O'Malley the Dodgers won the 1955 World Series in Brooklyn, the franchise's only title there, then won three more in Los Angeles in 1959, 1963, and 1965. He ran the club on the belief that stability beat turnover, and he had the results to argue it. Walter Alston managed the Dodgers for 23 years on a string of one-year contracts, Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale anchored the pitching, and Vin Scully called the games for so long that he became as much a fixture as anyone in uniform. When Koufax and Drysdale held out together before the 1966 season and hired an agent to bargain for them, a tactic almost unheard of at the time, O'Malley let them sit until they settled for one-year deals worth $125,000 and $110,000.

The Boss of Baseball

Within the game O'Malley carried more weight than any other owner, enough that writers took to calling him the Boss of Baseball. He sat on the sport's executive council for 28 years, helped install Bowie Kuhn as commissioner in 1969, and generally got his way on the questions he cared about. He opposed the amateur draft and resisted the expansion he helped make possible, and when the pitcher Andy Messersmith played the entire 1975 season without a contract and won the arbitration ruling that broke the reserve clause, O'Malley argued that bidding wars for players would ruin the sport because fans had only so much money to spend.

Legacy

Brooklyn never stopped hating him for the move. The columnists Pete Hamill and Jack Newfield, each asked to name the three worst human beings who ever lived, both wrote down Hitler, Stalin, and O'Malley. Over the decades more people came to believe he wanted to stay in Brooklyn and was beaten by Robert Moses rather than driven by simple greed, but few who grew up on the grievance ever let it go.

O'Malley handed the Dodgers presidency to his son Peter in 1970 and stayed on as chairman, and he bought the last 25 percent of the club in 1975 to become its sole owner. His wife Kay died in the summer of 1979, and Walter followed her weeks later, on August 9, 1979, at Methodist Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, where he was being treated at the Mayo Clinic, at 75. Tommy Lasorda, who managed the Dodgers for two decades, called him a pioneer who "made a tremendous change in the game, opening up the West Coast to Major League Baseball." The Veterans Committee elected him to the Hall of Fame in 2008, nearly 30 years after his death and more than 50 years after he broke Brooklyn's heart.