The Vine

Two of my great passions are community development and baseball. Occasionally they come together, as with Michael D’Antonio’s soon to be published book, Forever Blue, which is excerpted here in Sports Illustrated.

For over 50 years, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley has been one of the most reviled figures in all of sport for moving his team from Brooklyn—where it was the very soul of the working-class borough—to Los Angeles. Recently, however, another side of the story has come to light: O’Malley never wanted to leave.

In what might have been a predecessor to more recent ballpark-inspired revitalization (SoMa in San Francisco, LoDo in Denver, SoDo in Seattle, to name a few), O’Malley envisioned a 500-acre redevelopment in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene district, which would have included a mass-transit hub, housing, parking garages, and an iconic stadium.

As D’Antonio writes: “If Brooklyn had held on to its autonomy instead of becoming part of New York City in 1898, O’Malley’s [political] connections would have guaranteed him his dream ballpark. Instead, his friendships brought him only to the door of Robert Moses, the most powerful unelected official ever to serve in a U.S. city.”

Moses had his own vision for a new municipal ballpark, and it was in Queens, not Brooklyn. O’Malley could not have known it, but his bid was doomed before it ever got off the ground. After years of stalled, fruitless negotiation in New York, he was courted aggressively by the city of Los Angeles, offering land and a new stadium in Chavez Ravine. The rest, as they say, is history.

It’s a fascinating story—and one that, until now, only a handful of people ever knew.