OTR baseball games

[commercecomet536]

Thanks for the information on the Marr Archive. I did contact one group awhile back (I thought it was Radio Spirits) and they indicated they did not have his baseball recordings.

With both Miley and Danrick both over 70 years old, I wonder what happens when retire or pass away. Miley has donated his materials to the LOC and the public will have access to them (the LOC has indicated they can make copies for a fee but it will be expensive as they need to charge for an engineer's time.) Will MLB license someone else after Danrick retires or sells his collection?

I understand your concern about copyrights and I do not advocate the selling of these recordings by unlicensed parties. I can understand your concern about not using this forum to break copyright laws.

Your point about federal vs state copyright law is a valid one; however, I do not believe there is anything to fear as I put a lot of faith in government lawyers over at the Library of Congress. The LOC and federal attorneys must have examined these laws thoroughly before investing thousands of dollars to acquire the Miley collection and hundreds and possibly thousands of man hours to digitize them. This was a very public event; the purchase was reported in many newspapers across the country. If MLB believed they had the rights to this material or they would have stepped in. Again, I put a lot of faith in the Library of Congress attorneys and believe they know more about this matter than us common folk do.

MLB is actually heading in the opposite direction as they have begun posting their own televised recordings on youtube. Additionally, Archive.org has had about a dozen games available for free download for years. The same with the OTRR library which has a larger collection of materials available for download. The extensive holdings of the Mintz Collection has been posted online for over a decade for trading purposes. (those are not available for download) He has stated the U-Mass library will inherit his recordings eventually. All of this indicates to me either MLB believes they do not have any legal rights to this material or they are happy to have their fans have access to their rich history which doubles as free publicity for MLB.

What I do advocate is the hunt and search for new material not in possession of Miley or Danrick so that they can be passed on to one of them and legally made available to the public. I think there are more recordings to be had; they may be in the hands of collectors during those trades of the 1970s or as I stated previously in the hands of former announcers. I would not be surprised to see more recordings end up in the hands of libraries as Wolff and Harwell have done.

 

[commercecomet536]

.

As to what happened to Gillette's recordings, that's anybody's guess. The Library of Congress got the archives of WOR, but they aren't fully catalogued yet and nobody's quite sure what's there. Dave Goldin had a lot of random discs he'd scrounged from there and there, and those all went to the Marr Sound Archive in Kansas City.

According to the Marr Sound Archive "David Goldin gave those recordings to the National Archives. Unfortunately, the discs were part of the Goldin collection that was stolen and sold by a former director. They have never been recovered. "

*sigh*

 

[LizzieMaine]

According to the Marr Sound Archive "David Goldin gave those recordings to the National Archives. Unfortunately, the discs were part of the Goldin collection that was stolen and sold by a former director. They have never been recovered. "

*sigh*

The official in question sold stolen discs on eBay about ten years ago under the name "hifigal." I almost bought a couple of those items myself, bu fortunately got outbid.

 

[F. J.]

Which Programme?

I run a game over my midget AM station six days a week at 1:30pm, all the year round. It really helps to take the edge off winter.

Ms. McLeod,

I am curious as to how you manage to have a ballgame broadcast at precisely 1330, unless you control it manually. Might I ask what computer programme, if any, you use to broadcast? I myself have an AM transmitter that I use to listen to my '38 Emerson tabletop.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Ms. McLeod,

I am curious as to how you manage to have a ballgame broadcast at precisely 1330, unless you control it manually. Might I ask what computer programme, if any, you use to broadcast? I myself have an AM transmitter that I use to listen to my '38 Emerson tabletop.

I have an old second-hand Mac running a program called "Daypart," which automates I-Tunes playlists. Extremely easy to set up, and I think it cost me $20. It can be set to play any material you set up at any time of day without fuss. I've got an entire weekly schedule set up to run on it, and I don't have to mess with it at all unless I want to change some specific program material.

 

[F. J.]

Bought Daypart

Ms. McLeod,

I too have a Macintosh, and almost solely on your recommendation I put down the 160 bits for "Daypart". After only a little experimentation, I do believe it was precisely what I was looking for. Thank you very much.

 

[commercecomet536]

What is frustrating is that there are a lot of highlight recordings out there that have a minute or so of a game but for that is it. It would have been nice if the whole game had been preserved. How is it that they put out an album like the Impossible Dream with snippets of a bunch of Red Sox games but not have the entire game they took them from? Were they initially saved to play on the news or something and then combined into an album after they won the pennant?

 

[LizzieMaine]

What is frustrating is that there are a lot of highlight recordings out there that have a minute or so of a game but for that is it. It would have been nice if the whole game had been preserved. How is it that they put out an album like the Impossible Dream with snippets of a bunch of Red Sox games but not have the entire game they took them from? Were they initially saved to play on the news or something and then combined into an album after they won the pennant?

That's exactly it. So far as the Red Sox are concerned, WHDH always ran tape during the live broadcasts and used cuts during their sports reports. These cuts were preserved, but the full games weren't. Presumably this was the way other teams' flagships handled it as well.

"The Impossible Dream" was originally prepared as a special program aired on WHDH after the World Series, and was released by popular demand on LP by a Massachusetts-based company called "Fleetwood Recording." Every family in New England got it for Christmas that year, and Fleetwood went on to produce dozens of similar albums for other teams over the next fifteen years or so. Occasionally these albums might use the original broadcasters to recreate highlights for which no tape existed, but most of the excerpts used were authentic.

 

[commercecomet536]

I was watching the documentary "When it Was a Game Part 2" last week and they did a brief segment on baseball on the radio. Included in the short snippet was what sounded like the beginning of the 1938 WS game 1 and the 1944 WS game 2 which is interesting because neither game has been released by Miley. I wonder where they came from.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I was watching the documentary "When it Was a Game Part 2" last week and they did a brief segment on baseball on the radio. Included in the short snippet was what sounded like the beginning of the 1938 WS game 1 and the 1944 WS game 2 which is interesting because neither game has been released by Miley. I wonder where they came from.

The Baseball Hall of Fame has both of those games in recordings originally made for the Commissioner's Office.

 

[Neal Lavon]

I know that Miley used to be licensed for cassette sales -- I got a bunch of stuff from him back around the mid-90s with the MLB licensed product logo on the label. I haven't noticed if it's on the CD stuff I've gotten from Baseball Direct.

I've often wondered about Ewing's status. I suspect that if he isn't MLB looks the other way because he seems to be sitting on a very big pile of kinescopes and they want access to them for their own vaults.

As far as why stuff doesn't seem to exist between 1946 and the mid-fifties, it's because Judge Landis died. The reason the 1933-45 recordings exist is because Landis had a love-hate relationship with radio, and especially with the network sports announcers. He hired a Chicago recording studio to make airchecks of World Series and All Star Game broadcasts so he could have a permanent record of what the announcers were saying over the air -- and he would use these recordings to enforce his edicts over who could and couldn't be assigned to broadcast. He used the recordings of the 1934 World Series to enforce a lifetime ban from network baseball broadcasting against Ted Husing, whom he believed inappropriately questioned the decision of the umpire in the Medwick-Owen incident, and knowing that the Commissioner was paying close attention ensured that all of the broadcasters broadcast the way he wanted them to broadcast.

The stretch of July-August 1936 local Chicago broadcasts exists for the same reason. Hal Totten of WCFL was accused of prejudicing the local fans against the umpiring staff assigned to Comiskey Park, thus leading to a bottle-throwing riot. Landis had Totten's next five or six broadcasts recorded and examined to preserve a record of Totten's reaction to this charge -- which can be found in the 7/29/36 broadcast of the White Sox against the A's -- and to ensure that he didn't further arouse the fans.

Landis died after the 1944 season, and the Commissioner's Office moved from Chicago to New York the following year. The new commissioner, Happy Chandler, discontinued the recordings at that time -- he didn't believe they were necessary and it was a chance to save some money out of his office budget.

Recordings *were* made at WOR in 1947 for the Gillette Company, but other than a few familiar excerpts they haven't made it out of the vaults. The 1948 All Star and World Series recordings are also from WOR.

I know this is an old thread but it is really relevant to something I was working on for a while. I wondered why there were no recordings of the 1946 Dodgers-Cardinals Playoffs given that there are recordings of all the others before the switch to Divisional play. Now, I know why. Thanks, LizzieMaine, it's good to see you here (although I never expected to see OTR radio and baseball on a fashion blog) and somewhat surprising as we once corresponded a long time ago on a USENET channel recording historic radio broadcasts, a consuming interest for me. Your knowledge and back story expertise are incredible. Now on to a supposition---since the 1948 WS and AS games were recorded from WOR, is there any possibility that the 1946 playoffs, WS, and AS games were recorded in the same way? Would Mutual or a commercial sponsor have recorded those games on wire recorders and stored them somewhere? Would any of the announcers who worked these games--France Laux, Jim Bennett, Connie Desmond, Red Barber (nothing in his archives at University of Florida about this)--ever had them recorded on home wire recorders, which I see, were not an impossibility in the 1945-50 period before audiotape became the standard? I see there are tales of fans using recorders during AFRTS broadcasts, so I wonder if there are rumors of recordings in the 1944-48 period. Too bad no AFRTS recordings have ever surfaced. Maybe they are in a barn somewhere. I did learn that not only was the 1946 playoff broadcast on radio but WNBT-TV, the forefunner to WNBC, Channel 4 in NY, hauled its cameras to Ebbetts Field on Oct. 3, to broadcast the game. It's there on the NY Times Radio World page, with the broadcast scheduled at 1:15 pm. No record of that exists, not that I thought any would.

The 1946 playoff was broadcast on WHN in NY and WIL and WTMV in St Louis. I think WEW may have been involved as well. Any chance that WHN would have recorded it for Mutual or for posterity? Or any of the others?

Again, I have always respected your radio history work, and thanks for clearing up a huge mystery

 

[LizzieMaine]

Nothing has ever surfaced from 1946, from any source, but that doesn't mean there isn't anything out there. Most of the collections of performers and personalities have been pretty well picked over by now, either ending up in university archives or having long since been disposed of. Red Barber had very few recordings of his own work, other than the ones he picked up thru various sources long after his retirement, and it seems like when you do find stuff from a broadcaster's collection it's just fragments of his own innings that were saved, not complete broadcasts. But none of the broadcasters involved in the 1946 post-season games seem to have had such collections -- if they ever did they were likely lost or discarded long ago.

It's entirely possible Gillette had such recordings for the World Series -- recordings were made of much of their "Cavalcade of Sports" programming, and it may be that the 1946 series was pilfered long ago and is sitting at this very moment in someone's closet or attic. But I would doubt that there's anything other than, possibly, short excerpts recorded at home, for the playoff series. It was not nationally broadcast, it had only local sponsorship, and it was only heard in New York and St. Louis. There's no evidence to suggest that WHN ever recorded or preserved any of its sports programming, nor the St. Louis stations that carried games that season. The most likely format for home recordings to be found in would be Recordio-type discs -- which were usually 6 or 10 inches in diameter and were usually recorded at 78rpm, meaning anything longer than three or four minute disconnected clips would be highly unlikely. Wire recorders were not particularly common or popular in 1946 -- they were expensive and inconvenient to use, and most of the home wire recordings that do turn up seem to date from 1948 or so onward.

Like I say, anything's possible. A full recording of the WHN broadcast could turn up tomorrow. But much less is *probable* and much more is unlikely.

 

[Neal Lavon]

Well, thanks for that, particularly the part about wire recorders and Recordio. And I agree with you that if there's anything, it's sitting (molding away) in somebody's attic, basement, or barn.

But I do want to raise one question. In my meanderings, I ran across Radio Daily, 10/2/1946, P. 7, which noted that, "Approximately 300 Mutual stations carried the broadcast yesterday of the Dodgers-Cardinals playoffs in St. Louis."

I haven't checked individual papers' listings, but is Radio Daily wrong? The article also said:

"In addition, other networks came in with assistance in carrying the word about doings in the National League finale and ABC gave scores during station breaks. Galen Drake, in his 1:30 p.m., show over WJZ, devoted a portion of his program to last minute dope from St. Louis. And at 3:30 p.m., Walter Kiernan, also on WJZ, discussed at length the game's high spots. NBC carried a special resume (maybe report?) of the game last night in its 7:15 p.m., news roundup and will do the same when the teams move to Brooklyn. Many radio newscasts late yesterday inserted a special baseball resume. WHN abandoned its baseball ticker Tuesday and shipped Red Barber to St. Louis for eye witness coverage. Connie Desmond will rejoin Barber at Ebbets Field Thursday when WHN feeds the pair's play-by-play to the Mutual network."

For grins, I asked the Library of Congress through their "Ask a Librarian" option on their website to check on the NBC broadcast since it holds the NBC Collection (although I don't live far from the LOC) and Dave Sager of the Recorded Sound Research Center said that, "I have located the Evening News Roundup for October 1, 1946 and indeed there is a description of the game by Harold Grams. Its duration is 1 minute 30 seconds. There are no recorded excerpts of the game."

So at least that assertion in the Radio Daily article stands up to scrutiny. Doesn't mean the rest is right, I suppose.

I am a little confused, though, by another brief report in Radio Daily of 10/8, p.6, in its Radio Main Street column, which says: "An error in this col'm Friday had WHN airing the World's Series exclusively in N.Y., when what we meant to say was that they had the rights to the playoff series between St. Louis and Bklyn. Our apologies to Mutual and WOR."

Can you intepret that for me? Did WHN have the rights in NY so Mutual could not broadcast the playoffs there? As for the WS, was WHN not a Mutual affiliate back then, but WOR was? I can upload those pages if you don't already have them as well as the NY Times Radio Today schedules for 10/1 and 10/3.

Thanks again and great to be talking with you.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That's right -- WOR was the sole Mutual outlet in New York, and was in fact the East Coast key station for the network. WHN aired the regular-season Dodger games sponsored by P. Lorillard & Co, and since the special playoff was considered part of the regular season, it fell under their contract. There was no "Brooklyn Dodgers Network" in 1946 -- Dodger games were heard *only* on WHN.

Keep in mind that there was no "post season" package as such in 1946. The only "post season" baseball was the World Series, and that was solely owned by Gillette, which signed a ten-year contract with Mutual as the sole outlet for the World Series in 1939.

Mutual didn't pick up the WHN broadcast, since the rights to that belonged solely to Lorillard and WHN. They would have had their own broadcasters on the scene, probably Arch McDonald and Bill Slater, who were already scheduled to do the World Series, but that broadcast would have been blacked out in New York, where Lorillard/WHN held the sole radio rights, and in St. Louis, where the local Cardinal broadcasts were heard over WIL and WTMV.

The same caveats would apply to this broadcast as to any of the others. There would have been no reason for any station along the network to make a recording -- it would have taken 4 to 6 16-inch discs to record each game and without a specific order to make such recordings, such as for time-shifting, or a specific order to do so from someone connected to the broadcast, none would have been made.

The most interesting morsel in the coverage you quote is that Red Barber was sent to St. Louis in person to broadcast back to Brooklyn -- it was not the custom at that time for teams to send their broadcasters on the road with the teams. All road games were broadcast via telegraphic recreation. It wasn't until halfway thru the 1948 season that Barber was sent on the road with the team on a regular basis.

 

[Neal Lavon]

OK, that all makes sense to me.

But there was that small sentence at the end of the first Radio Daily report which said that, "Connie Desmond will rejoin Barber at Ebbets Field Thursday when WHN feeds the pair's play-by-play to the Mutual network."

Could WHN have "sold" the play by play to Mutual, making it cheaper to Mutual rather than send two broadcasters, engineer, etc., to Ebbets Field? Was it possible that Desmond and Barber's account on WHN was fed to Mutual?

I also got a Google Snippet from Radio Daily, Vol. 37, p.17, that, "Cards-Dodgers Series To Be Carried By MBS Post season play-offs for the National League pennant between Brooklyn and St. Louis will be broadcast by Mutual with the first airing scheduled today at 2:25 p.m., EST., from the Missouri City. France Laux and Jack Bennett will handle the play by play in St. Louis. Broadcast from Cardinals' home town will be sustaining but Thursday's game in Brooklyn will be spon--", I couldn't get the rest. P. Lorrilard the sponsor for the Dodgers?

The snippet reads as if Laux and Bennett were the Mutual announcers in St Louis. A St Louis broadcast history website says that Dizzy Dean and Johnny O'Hara were the Cardinal announcers in 1946 on WIL; Harry Caray and Gabby Street for WEW/WTMV. So would people in St Louis have heard coverage from Dean, O'Hara, Caray, and Street rather than Mutual? Did WIL and WEW/WTMV hold exclusive rights in St Louis like WHN did in NY? I was surprised to learn that WEW was a University of St Louis radio station that carried Browns and Cardinals broadcasts.

I have Red Barber's book, "The Broadcasters," about early radio coverage of baseball and its personalities. Nothing in there about 1946 though. I'll have to go back and read the section where he talks about recreated games. I do remember hearing them as a kid, even up to 1969 when Ralph Kiner recreated a few out of town games during the Mets' pennant run. My dad also listened to Les Keiter do the Giants games on recreation on WINS.

BTW, hope you don't mind me asking you all this stuff. It's fascinating to me.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Multiple stations carried both the Cardinals and Browns at that time -- it would be a few more seasons before both teams decided to go with granting one station exclusivity. This is the same situation that prevailed before the war in Chicago, where any station that wanted to broadcast was allowed to do so. Local breweries were the big sponsors in St. Louis -- Griesedieck Bros. sponsored the Caray-Street broadcast, while Hyde Park carried the Dean-O'Hara broadcasts. (Anheuser Busch didn't get involved until 1953.) These beers didn't have a national presence, so there was no point in them airing their broadcasts outside the market where their beer was sold.

France Laux was an old-time broadcaster in St. Louis -- he had been the first broadcaster for both the Cardinals and the Browns in the late twenties at KMOX, and eventually became KMOX sports director. He was often featured on CBS network broadcasts from St. Louis, and called both the 1940 and 1948 All Star games. But in St. Louis he was very much a back number by the late forties, eclipsed by Caray's excitement and Dean's wackiness.

It's possible Lorillard, which was a national company, could have exported its broadcast to Mutual, but it still would have been heard in New York only on WHN. I question this, though, because when CBS began carrying selected Dodger games in 1950 using the local broadcasts as their source, Barber specifically states on the first of these that it's the first time the regular Dodger broadcast has been carried outside of New York.

 

[Neal Lavon]

Lizzie, hope you are still followings this, or at least, get some e-mail updates that someone has posted.

Do you know of any recordings of either the NY Giants last game at the Polo Grounds, 9/29/57, or the Dodgers last game at Ebbets Field, 9/24/57? I've seen images on YouTube of Dusty Rhodes grounding out for the last NY Giants out in a 9-1 loss, and a more generic shot of the last game at Ebbets Field with a turnout of around 6,700.

I have searched around and have yet to find anything.

Also, do you know how to get in touch with Aaron Mintz? I think he lives in S. Deerfield, Massachusetts, and I have an old UMass e-mail address. He has some post-game interviews with the Giants after the game in the clubhouse but nothing else. Anyway, hope things are going well and I deeply respect your work and breadth of knowledge.

Neal Lavon
Takoma Park, MD

 

[LizzieMaine]

That post-game clip is all that exists of the final Giant game. It starts with the final out of the game itself, called by Jim Woods, and then switches immediately to the clubhouse, where Russ Hodges interviews various players and soliloquizes about the end of the Polo Grounds. It can be heard, all sixteen minutes of it, on Yoo Toob --

There is nothing whatever from the last Dodger game at Ebbets Field, other than the newsreel footage of the final out, but the last Brooklyn Dodger game period, the 9/29/57 road game in Philadelphia, exists in its entirety. The version on Yoo Toob inexplicably cuts off the opening of the broadcast and the pregame setup, picking up with the national anthem, although these opening segments do exist.

This game is not Mr. Scully's finest hour. He goes out of his way not to acknowledge what everyone knew was the fate of the Dodgers, no doubt because he still didn't know if Walter F. O'Malley would want him to go to Los Angeles. Al Helfer, who conspicuously refused an invitation to go west with the team, is not heard on this broadcast.

 

[Neal Lavon]

I had found the 8 31 game on the archive.org site. But try as I may to find the Giants last game in the PG on YouTube, I had no luck. I suppose I didn't enter the right syntax, but I did look carefully through the classic games on YT for 1957 and must have missed this. Thank you for providing it. It is very sad to listen to, particularly, the fans chanting in the background. It's heartbreaking, really. The City of New York did practically nothing to help the Giants stay in NY. Robert Moses was more interested in demolishing the PG for a housing project. I did see one Moses letter posted to a NY Giants forum and it basically said, why don't you share Yankee Stadium with the Yankees, and by the way, can you do it next season? A group led by Bill Terry (with future Mets owner and Giants board member Joan Shipman Payson) offered to buy the team and would have moved it to Yankee Stadium but Giants owner Horace Stoneham turned them down. I don't know precisely if Flushing Meadows was dangled in front of the Giants, but I did read that Stoneham thought it was Dodgers territory, and expressed no interest. A post on a Brooklyn Dodgers forum said the northern part of Queens were mainly Yankee fans while the southern part were Dodger fans, so not much room for the Giants.

As far as Vin Scully goes, I suppose he was not a free agent to say what he wanted. The Dodgers had not officially announced the move like the Giants did in mid-August, so you could say he didn't want to get ahead of his skis. And besides, didn't sportscasters either work for the team or the sponsor? Or, as I remember, the team approved their hire with the station, so they were not journalists but part of the organization. If he wanted to go to LA with the team, he had to be a good soldier. Remember how George Steinbrenner fired Red Barber for daring to show acres of empty seats during a telecast of a Yankee game. And you can go back to Ted Husing being blacklisted by Kennesaw Mountain Landis for his reporting on the Joe Medwick affair in the 1934 World Series.

Lately, I've been reading and watching a lot of documentaries on this, and it was sad that Dodger fans in Brooklyn and the greater NY area, were apathetic about the team's move. There are reasons given--the fan base moved to Long Island, no Brooklyn Eagle to rally support, the borough had been deteriorating--but a measly, subdued crowd turned out for the last home game, and there were no chanting fans imploring the Dodgers to stay like in the Polo Grounds. You can argue that the fams were numbed to the move happening. But I think at that point in Brooklyn history, neither the fans nor the borough's elected officials, really cared that much if they stayed. The Dodgers time had come and gone.

I was ten years old when all this was going on but I do remember it. My dad took me to a Giants-Dodgers game at the Polo Grounds in 1957. I looked up the box score because I remembered it was a day game with lots of scoring. The Dodgers won, 7-6. It was August 14, five days before the Giants announced they were leaving. Nearly 14,000 people showed up. I can still recall pieces of it.

Thanks again, and when it comes to radio and television--particularly dealing with baseball, you are the authority. Best,

Neal Lavon

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think a case can be made that Dodger fans were not so much apathetic as they were exhausted. The rumblings of a move had been very loud starting in 1956 -- and had been building up as far back as 1953, after the Braves left Boston and after O'Malley had made "first contact" with Norris Poulson in Los Angeles. Once the success of the Braves move to Milwaukee was evident, it was a dead certainty someone would be moving to LA -- it was just a question of whom, and there's evidence to suggest that O'Malley was manipulating affairs behind the scenes to ensure that no other club got there before he had a chance to size up the scene. The Browns, the Athletics, and the Senators all had their eyes on LA at various points, but O'Malley's early attempts to build ties in that city made it unlikely that any of these clubs would get there ahead of him.

O'Malley made no secret of the fact that he wanted out of Ebbets Field as far back as 1948 -- and when he took control of the club in 1950, everyone knew he wasn't going to be staying there much longer. In asking for the condemnation of a very specific piece of property that he couldn't be granted -- and likely *knew* he couldn't be granted -- he deliberately created a situation where he "had no choice" but to leave, even though the limitations he claimed were binding him were limitations he created himself. It was he who sold the full slate of Dodger home games to television, giving fans every reason to stay home and watch the games for free, while guaranteeing him that the team would finish the season in the black without a single ticket being sold. It was he who sold Ebbets Field to Marvin Kratter, and it was he who insisted he wouldn't play there after 1957, even though he held a lease on the property that ran to 1960 with options for extensions. It was he who said he wouldn't accept the Flushing Meadow site offered by Robert Moses for reasons he himself established, and it was he who rejected other sites, such as the Parade Grounds, that could have been developed in Brooklyn proper, or any plan to renovate and improve Ebbets Field while temporarily playing in, say, Jersey City. Thus he carefully and deliberately manufactured the "intolerable situation that forced him to move."

Brooklyn fans saw all this happening. It played out in the press -- even without the Eagle, the Daily News followed the story closely -- and there was building resentment. By 1957 there were plenty of fans who were so fed up they weren't going to put another cent in Walter F. O'Malley's pocket if they could help it. But even with all that, the Dodgers still drew over a million to a 34,000 seat park with only 63 home dates (minus the seven games played in Jersey City and accounting for seven single-admission doubleheaders) in their final year -- at a time when drawing a million really meant something in baseball.

The best book ever written on the politics of the move and the general situation in baseball in 1957-58 is "After Many A Summer: The Passing of the Giants and Dodgers," by Robert Murphy. It's a definitive study, drawn from original documents, as to exactly what Walter F. O'Malley did and intended to do, and how he accomplished it. None of that was particularly surprising to me, but what did surprise me was just how pro-active Horace Stoneham was to get out of New York. Jolly old Horace with all his drinking and his "hiya pally" was in his own way as Machiavellian as O'Malley himself. He wasn't conned out of New York -- he went enthusiastically and actively, and in the end it ended up costing him nearly everything he had.