Walter Proved to Be a Visionary Who Demonstrated to Baseball Owners How to Rack Up Profits

There was a World Series this year without the Dodgers, as it has for the past nine years--the team’s longest absence from the fall classic since the days of Brooklyn’s hapless “Daffiness Boys” in the 1930s.

Sometime soon, baseball owners will give their blessing to the $350 million sale of the team to Rupert Murdoch, the Dodgers will join Homer Simpson in the Fox lineup and after a period of transition, Peter O’Malley will leave a game that has been part of his life since birth.

And that will be the end of one-man, one-family ownership, the farewell to the last owner whose only business is baseball.

Then it will be up to some kind of conglomerate management to see if it can bring the Dodgers back to the National League dominance they enjoyed for so long under O’Malley’s late father, the jowly, Machiavellian manipulator, Walter.

Walter O’Malley, a visionary of the game without any sentimental passion for it, pioneered West Coast expansion, showed other owners how to rack up profits, ran the National League and, for all practical purposes, baseball, and kept up a winning tradition throughout his tenure. He was a man bred of New York’s Tammany Hall politics, a man who loved cigars and money, and a man whom Jackie Robinson called “viciously antagonistic” toward him.

Ask anyone in baseball what qualities about O’Malley made other owners listen and acquiesce to him, and the answer is similar to this one by his friendly adversary, former Players Association executive director Marvin Miller:

“First, he was brighter than most of them, if not all of them. Secondly, when I asked an owner why that great influence, he said, ‘The owners come to a meeting and they typically don’t even know what’s on the agenda. They just don’t even pay any attention to it, or any of the literature that was sent them. In contrast, O’Malley comes not only knowing what’s on the agenda, but prepared to speak on every point.”’

Miller’s assessment of Peter O’Malley is less favorable:

“Peter just didn’t measure up to his father’s abilities. . . . . What I thought was worst about Peter O’Malley is that he joined in the collusion conspiracy along with the other owners (in the 1980s) and swore that it never happened. I think that conduct was so unspeakable that it washes out an awful lot of good behavior.”

That misguided collusion conspiracy against the players cost the owners $280 million.

Peter O’Malley, a self-effacing, private man who said he was too busy to be interviewed for a story on his family’s legacy, never exerted anything close to his father’s clout. Though he assumed the president’s title in 1970 when his father made himself chairman, Peter O’Malley stayed quietly on the sideline regarding most league issues. He fought and lost one battle to preserve Bowie Kuhn’s job as commissioner in 1984, and he found himself alienated from the leadership of owners when they rejected an early settlement of the 1994 strike--an event that friends say took much of his enjoyment out of the game.

Still, Peter O’Malley ran the Dodgers smoothly and successfully after his father’s death in 1979, and he can claim during his reign World Series championships in 1981 and 1988 and five straight NL rookies of the year through last season.

Walter O’Malley ventured sideways into baseball as a young bankruptcy lawyer during the Depression. One of his clients was the Brooklyn Trust Company, which held most of the $1.2 million debt run up by the luckless Brooklyn Dodgers. The trust didn’t foreclose, but it effectively took control of the team and installed O’Malley as head of its legal affairs.

O’Malley stayed in the background while swashbuckling Larry MacPhail, fresh from reviving the Cincinnati Reds, arrived in Brooklyn in 1938 and did the same for the Dodgers. MacPhail refurbished shoddy Ebbets Field and installed lights, brought in good ballplayers and put the Dodgers on radio with announcer Red Barber. The Dodgers rose from seventh place in 1938 to pennant winners in 1941, and they averaged over a million in attendance for four straight years.

As much as O’Malley disliked MacPhail’s spending style, those kinds of changes would prove to be a cornerstone of the Dodger operation for decades.

After MacPhail resigned at the end of the 1942 season to join the Army, Brooklyn Trust president George McLaughlin sold 75% of the Dodgers’ stock over the next few years to three partners: John L. Smith, president of Pfizer Chemical Co.; Branch Rickey, the brains of the St. Louis Cardinals who became the Dodgers’ president; and Walter O’Malley, who paid $82,000 for his 25% stake, with the rest to come from future profits.

Rickey, who had pioneered the farm system, scouting, and the modern spring training camp for the Cardinals, created all that on an even grander scale for the Dodgers.

The team had the biggest farm system--26 clubs with 780 players under contract at one point in the ‘50s--and it maintained continuity with Walter Alston as manager for 23 years and Tommy Lasorda as manager for nearly 20 years after that.

“Everybody wanted to copy the Dodger organization because of Mr. O’Malley’s leadership,” says Lasorda, now a vice president. “And everybody in baseball listened to him. He gave them ideas. He told them what was best for baseball, and how to do it.

“He was a great businessman, but baseball wasn’t his forte. He delegated leadership, and he built what we felt was an organization with a heart. An industrious organization, and a family type organization. He wanted it that way.”

Walter O’Malley is never mentioned in stories about Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers 50 years ago. Rickey is given all the credit, even though O’Malley, as a part owner, had his money at stake if the experiment failed.

“I’m sure they talked it over,” Lasorda says. “There’s no question that Mr. O’Malley should have shared in the credit. He was the guy who did everything for Robinson and the black players in spring training that they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. He made them all feel like they were an important part of the organization. He was color blind. He treated everybody alike.”

Lasorda, who has bled Dodger blue for 48 years and would like to see Walter O’Malley’s name join his someday in the Hall of Fame, cites O’Malley’s construction of a golf course for the team at spring training in Vero Beach, Fla., as evidence of his concern for the black players.

“When the black guys couldn’t play on the golf courses down there, he built a golf course for that reason alone and allowed them to play,” Lasorda says. “That was in the early ‘50s. Guys like (Jim) Gilliam and (Roy) Campanella, they all thought the world of him.”

But Jackie Robinson thought very differently.

“O’Malley’s attitude toward me was viciously antagonistic,” Robinson wrote in his autobiography, “I Never Had It Made.”

“I learned that he had a habit of calling me Mr. Rickey’s prima donna and giving Mr. Rickey a hard time about what kind of season I would have. . . . To put it bluntly, I was one of those ‘uppity niggers’ in O’Malley’s book.”

For all the talk about the “Dodger family” that O’Malley encouraged, he showed little attachment toward Robinson, dumped the very popular Red Barber to hire a talented and much lower-paid kid named Vin Scully, and abandoned Brooklyn.

O’Malley wanted to build a domed stadium in Brooklyn, paying for it himself but on land that would have to be condemned by the city and given to the Dodgers. Turned down by the city on that plan, and rejecting its suggestion that he move to the site of 1939 World’s Fair in Queens where Shea Stadium would later rise, O’Malley took up an offer from Los Angeles.

Los Angeles had been shopping around for a team and had an eager customer in Calvin Griffith, owner of the sorry Washington Senators. But O’Malley beat Griffith to the West Coast and quickly shook hands on a deal after the Dodgers lost to the Yankees in the 1956 World Series.

O’Malley kept the move secret through the 1957 season while supposedly still listening to New York’s ideas about a new stadium. He then snookered Chicago Cubs owner Phil Wrigley into a swap of the territorial rights to Los Angeles, where the Cubs had the triple-A Angels, for the Dodgers triple-A team in Fort Worth, Texas. O’Malley’s final coup in securing his fellow owners’ approval of the move was in convincing Horace Stoneham, the popular owner of the New York Giants, to forget about his idea of going to Minneapolis and look instead at San Francisco.

With that move, and with the unprecedented success of his team at the gate and on the field when Dodger Stadium was built, O’Malley consolidated his influence over the other National League owners in a way that would eventually lead to dominance of the game as the power behind the throne of Kuhn.

“At the time I began as executive director of the Players Association in 1966, Walter O’Malley was really running the game,” Miller recalled from his home in New York. “His fellow owners relied on him in terms of direction and major policy decisions to an extent you wouldn’t believe until you looked into it.

“There’s no question that whatever O’Malley wanted, Kuhn did.”

Miller said that despite his adversarial relationship with O’Malley, he was very fond of the Dodgers’ owner.

“He certainly was not pro-union, but he had an approach that was different from the other owners,” Miller said. “Most of the owners took the coming of the union, and my coming there, as treason against the United States. . . . O’Malley thought that was nonsense.”

Walter O’Malley gave baseball national scope and the keys to fat profits in the ‘50s, and he gave it the pragmatic guidance it needed in the ‘60s and ‘70s.