Omission Impossible but True for O’Malley

This fall’s baseball playoffs have stretched marvelously from coast to coast, from a grimy subway to a golden gate, from clam chowder to key lime pie, a national pastime renewed.

Walter O’Malley had something to do with that.

This fall’s baseball teams feature rosters that stretch from continent to continent, different languages, many colors, diversity in their clubhouses far greater than on our streets.

Walter O’Malley had something to do with that too.

This fall, baseball is enjoying a resurgence of old-fashioned teams playing in old-fashioned ballparks, winning with old-fashioned smarts.

Today being his 100th birthday, wouldn’t Walter O’Malley be proud.

“He was kind of the godfather of baseball,” Don Sutton once said, and, indeed, O’Malley’s fingerprints can be found on many of the best parts of today’s game.

Everywhere except the place they belong most.

Walter O’Malley is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame, an oversight even more glaring when you consider who is.

Tom Yawkey, the Boston owner who resisted integration while his Red Sox became the last team to have a black player on their roster, is in Cooperstown.

O’Malley, who helped engineer the debut of Jackie Robinson, is not.

Bill Veeck, the gimmicky owner best known for exploding scoreboards and a midget player, is in Cooperstown.

O’Malley, who introduced the gimmick of a clean ballpark at a fair price, is not.

There are five owners in the Hall of Fame, none with O’Malley’s on-field success and off-field credentials.

But, also, none with the stigma of having moved a team from the myopic neighborhood that is New York.

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The Dodgers’ 1958 move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, while it may have saved baseball, is strangely still hurting O’Malley’s legacy nearly five decades later.

“Hurting him, hurting us all,” former executive Buzzie Bavasi said.

Last winter, in balloting by a revamped Veterans’ Committee made up of Hall of Fame players and writers, O’Malley received only 48% of the vote while needing 75% for election.

They won’t be voting again until 2007, and each year the odds grow longer.

“Walter did a lot of great things for baseball,” said Hal Lebovitz, Hall of Fame writer from Ohio. “But I can’t vote for him the way I could never vote for Art Modell for the football Hall of Fame.

“In a way, they were traitors to their cities.”

It is this sort of belief that was challenged Wednesday when Peter O’Malley announced the launch of what could be considered a unique birthday present.

It’s walteromalley.com, a Web site containing reams of text, letters and photos commemorating the life of a baseball pioneer.

The son essentially created a modern-day presidential library for the father. Not bad for somebody who has never used the Internet.

“It’s the wave of the future,” O’Malley said after a Dodger Stadium news conference unveiling the site. “All you have to do is log on.”

He paused. “That’s the right term, right? Log on?”

O’Malley hired a team of experts to produce the definitive story of his father’s career, at no cost to the Internet user and -- he says -- without Cooperstown aspirations.

“This is not about the Hall of Fame, I think only players and umpires should be in there,” O’Malley said. “This is about telling the story of my father’s life. We’re just presenting what we have found in his files, without spin.”

But the Hall of Fame is exactly what this can be about. It can set the record straight for voters. It can offer assurances to fans.

If nothing else, it’s an awe-inspiring work of Dodger history, the most compelling part being Walter O’Malley’s move from Brooklyn.

“Ninety percent of the old Dodger fans from Brooklyn are dead, but they still hate him there,” said Jack Lang, a Hall of Fame writer from New York. “He was a good friend, but there’s not much hope for him getting into the Hall of Fame because of the scars he left behind.”

Numerous reprinted letters between O’Malley and Brooklyn officials, however, shed light on a different truth.

O’Malley tried to stay in Brooklyn, offering to buy new land and even build the first domed stadium there. But city officials could never make it work.

O’Malley left only when he saw that the area and Ebbets Field were deteriorating, and that the only other option was moving to Queens.

“I remember looking out of his office window with Walter, and we thought we were watching a parade,” Bavasi said. “But we were looking at the unemployment line.”

So O’Malley left, and took the Giants’ Horace Stoneham with him, the only major league owners with the foresight and fortitude to chase the gold in California.

It was that same foresight, incidentally, that earlier convinced O’Malley to build Dodgertown in Florida into baseball’s first modern spring training complex.

“Walter always had this foresight about everything,” Lang said. “The team in Brooklyn was successful, but it wasn’t going to remain successful, and Walter knew that. Everyone was moving out, and he knew exactly where to go.”

Brooklynites were shaking their fists at O’Malley when he left, and Chavez Ravine residents were jeering him when he arrived, but he somehow made it work.

It’s called Dodger Stadium.

It remains Walter O’Malley’s jewel, baseball’s only older stadium that is still as beautiful and essentially functional as the day it opened.

Clean and relatively cheap, it has brought together Angelenos in ways that nobody thought possible.

“It turns out, Walter O’Malley was a very, very brilliant man,” Lang said.

His presence is felt there today in the most diverse crowd on the Los Angeles sports landscape. He wanted to build a baseball home for everybody, and he did.

His presence is also felt on the field, on the current Dodger team, from the likes of rookie pitcher Edwin Jackson to veteran Kaz Ishii.

O’Malley was part-owner of the Dodgers when Jackie Robinson made his debut, a fact that was overlooked by some, but not all.

Roy Campanella once said, “Mr. O’Malley had as much to do with the integration of baseball as Branch Rickey did. Mr. O’Malley was the team’s attorney then, he did all the legal work, and there were many battles going on.”

Also overlooked is that O’Malley was the team owner when the Dodgers became the first major league club to reach out to Japan in a 1956 visit.

The Dodgers built on those roots until Peter O’Malley engineered the arrival of Major League Baseball’s first Japanese star, Hideo Nomo.

If the Hall of Fame doesn’t want the memories of Walter O’Malley, well, they’ll be cherished just fine right here.

“I remember, the last year of his life, I would drive him to Dodger Stadium every day,” Peter said of his father, who died in 1979. “Some mornings it would be foggy, other mornings it would be clear. But every morning, Dodger Stadium was shining.”

A reflection of its creator, and as shiny as any Cooperstown bust.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.