Former Chairman Gives Up His Seat at Dodger Stadium

If you’re sitting at a Dodger game next season and you can’t believe how much the guy sitting next to you looks like Peter O’Malley, it might be because it is Peter O’Malley.

O’Malley, whose family owned the Dodgers for nearly half a century until he sold the team last March, confirmed Thursday he will sever his ties with the club at the end of the year.

He’s giving up his position as chairman of the board, his office in Dodger Stadium and, yes, even his private box. He says he plans to continue to attend Dodger games on a regular basis but will sit in various parts of the stadium among the fans who supported him for so long.

“I see myself in Dodger Stadium a lot next year,” O’Malley said.

This would figure to be a sad time for O’Malley, who is not only giving up the last connection to the baseball powerhouse his father, Walter, built, but is leaving at a time when his dream of putting pro football back in Los Angeles seems to be close to reality, but with others in the owners’ seat.

“Our family crossed the emotional bridge when we put the team up for sale,” said O’Malley, who has cited the high cost of doing business in baseball as a prime reason for his exit. “Once we did that, the other bridges have been a lot easier to cross. There is no bitterness at all. . . . There are more happy days ahead.”

As for football, O’Malley and Bob Graziano, now the Dodger president, put in a solid year trying to pave the way for a football stadium to be built adjoining Dodger Stadium. They backed off, however, when city officials asked O’Malley to instead throw his support behind the bid to put a team in a renovated Coliseum.

“It was a big disappointment,” O’Malley said Thursday. “But there’s an old saying that you don’t fight city hall. I hope Los Angeles gets a team and the city gets the benefit. I think the [NFL] not only liked us, but they liked our site. But that window has closed for me.”

O’Malley is in Vero Beach, Fla., at the team’s Dodgertown spring training complex, trying to help determine if that window also will close for the Dodgers. The Fox Group, new owners of the team, might sell the facility.

“Even if it is not sold,” O’Malley said, “Dodgertown and Dodger Stadium have to be reviewed in today’s economic environment. When players are getting 70, 80, 90 million dollars, all sources of revenue and all sources of expenses have to be reviewed.”

O’Malley said he leaves with appreciation of his treatment by Fox Group officials, who, he said, told him, “If you want to keep your office, keep your office. If you want to keep the box, keep the box. If you want an office at our studio, you can have one.”

Said O’Malley, “That was incredible. They didn’t owe me that. But there is a time to move on and this is the time.”

O’Malley says he can see himself getting involved either in international baseball or even minor league baseball, although he has no specific plans at this point. But he can’t envision getting involved with another major league team.

“The Dodgers have given me an incredible amount of happiness,” he said. “Whatever I do, I can’t see myself rooting against them.”

And what did he imagine his father would have thought of the Dodgers and the O’Malleys going their separate ways.

“I have never pretended to be as smart as my father,” O’Malley said. “He would have seen the [financial] storm coming before I did. He had great foresight. I don’t think he would have stayed in there as long as I did. If he were alive today, he would say, ‘Peter, you have absolutely done the right thing.’ ”