A Year in Mudville: Revised Edition -- The Full Story of Casey Stengel and the Original Mets

By David Bagdade

A Year in Mudville is the full and complete story of the 1962 New York Mets, the worst team in modern baseball history, as told through the words of those who were there: players, coaches, sportswriters and fans. The Original Mets lost three-quarters of their games, and yet, they remain one of the most beloved baseball teams of all time. They were, in the immortal words of their equally-immortal manager, Casey Stengel, "Amazin'." Originally published in 2010, A Year in Mudville has now been revised and greatly expanded, with fifty percent more information about the players who made it all possible, the writers who covered the team, and the results on and off the field. Jay Hook, who was the winning pitcher in the Mets' first victory, called A Year in Mudville "the ultimate clearinghouse for information about the 1962 Mets."

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Bagdade
• Release date: May 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005451011

David Bagdade

David Bagdade is an author and musician from Indianapolis. Working as a freelance writer, he has contributed dozens of features and reviews to publications such as Country Standard Time, the Independent Music Guide, Bluegrass Music News, Bluegrass Music Profiles and The Portrait.Mr. Bagdade’s first book is “A Year In Mudville – An Oral History of Casey Stengel and the Original Mets,” a narrative-driven look at the 1962 New York Mets, widely regarded as the worst baseball team of all time. This work examines how and why the team was created, the people involved with the first season (not only players, but officials, broadcasters and fans), and why the Original Mets are such a fascinating topic more than four decades after their debut season. As with any oral history, “A Year in Mudville” depends heavily on the actual words of the participants and offers a compelling look at a legendary collection of characters and events.Mr. Bagdade is also an accomplished performer and recording artist. He has recently released a new CD, “Rocky Shores of Home,” a collection of original and traditional Celtic music performed on various stringed instruments.

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PROLOGUE

I been in this game a hundred years but I see new ways to lose I never knew existed before. – Casey Stengel, manager of the New York Mets

June 17, 1962, the Polo Grounds, New York: Marv Throneberry, first baseman for the New York Mets, steps into the batter’s box to face Chicago Cubs starter Glen Hobbie. It’s the bottom of the first inning, and Throneberry is in the unaccustomed position of having two runners on base and a run across the plate. More familiar, though, is the fact that the Mets are already behind 4-1. This deficit is substantially due to Throneberry; while the Cubs were batting in the top of the inning, he was called for interference with a Cubs base runner caught in a rundown. Having been given an extra out because of Throneberry’s gaffe, the Cubs took advantage, scoring four times. Now, in an effort to atone for his mistake, Throneberry drives Hobbie’s pitch into right centerfield for a triple, scoring the two runners ahead of him. The Cubs’ lead has been cut to one and the Mets are back in the game with a runner on third – or so it would seem. Before the home crowd has had a chance to celebrate, Ernie Banks, the Cubs’ star first baseman, calls for the ball. Hobbie dutifully tosses it to Banks, who steps on the bag. Tom Gorman, the first base umpire, has seen what Banks has seen – Throneberry clearly failed to touch first base on his way to third. He didn’t even come close. Gorman calls Throneberry out on the appeal. Casey Stengel, the Mets’ seventy-one-year-old manager, instantly charges out of the dugout to challenge the call, moving as fast as his knobby legs will carry him, only to be intercepted by second base umpire Dusty Boggess. Don’t bother, Casey, says Boggess. He didn’t touch second base either. Stengel, in a line preserved for the ages, replies, Well, I know damn well he touched third, because he’s standing on it!

Like the tales of Casey Jones and Davy Crockett, the story of this particular Throneberry misadventure has become legendary, and like these and other legends, the actual details have become blurred over the sixty years which have passed since the event took place. For example, some versions have Mets coaches Solly Hemus or Cookie Lavagetto or umpire Gorman delivering the setup line preceding Stengel’s immortal reply. Others have Throneberry being called out at second, rather than first, with second baseman Ken Hubbs filling the role normally attributed to Banks. But the details really don’t matter. Rather, the story exemplifies the travails of the 1962 New York Mets, the worst baseball team of the twentieth century, or, as some believe, ever.

Throughout baseball history, some players have been remembered only for a single moment of tragedy or misfortune which obscures any memory of the rest of their careers. Al Smith, the Chicago White Sox outfielder who had beer poured on his head by a fan during the 1959 World Series, is one example. When he died in 2002, Sports Illustrated even included in his obituary the famous picture of beer splashing onto the top of his cap. Another is Ralph Branca, the Dodger pitcher who threw the pitch which Bobby Thomson hit for the winning homer in the final inning of the last game of a playoff, thus sending the New York Giants to the 1951 World Series. Almost nobody remembers that Branca had been a very good pitcher prior to that moment, a three-time All-Star who had won 21 games only four years earlier.

The Original Mets, however, are different. Created as the result of substantial effort after the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers fled for the West Coast in 1957, the Mets debuted in 1962 with a collection of over-the-hill veterans and unproven youngsters. Rather than a single moment of calamity or ineptitude, the has-beens and never-weres comprising the ’62 Mets are remembered for an entire season in which the fine line between tragedy and comedy was repeatedly trampled on to the point of obliteration. With few notable exceptions, the players on the ’62 Mets are known or recalled publicly for little else.

It seems every baseball aficionado over the age of 35 – Mets fan or otherwise – has his or her favorite story about the Original Mets. Some are clearly nonsense or intentionally exaggerated hokum, while others, having been related fifth hand by a cousin’s friend whose brother knew a guy whose barber claimed to have been there and witnessed the event, have had the details substantially rewritten over time (such as the passage leading off this prologue). Beyond dispute, however, are the facts and the statistics. The 1962 Mets batted .240 as a team, with only one regular hitting over .275, and they committed 210 errors (28 by their first basemen and 32 by a single utility player). They were eliminated from playoff contention on August 7, at which point they had won 29 games and lost 82 on their way to finishing 40-120 – 60 1/2 games out of first place (and eighteen games behind the next-worst team). In setting a record for losses, they endured losing streaks of nine, eleven, thirteen and seventeen games. The pitching staff had a collective earned run average of 5.04, gave up 948 runs (147 unearned) and threw 71 wild pitches and 192 home run balls, and the ace of the staff, Roger Craig, not only led the team with ten wins but also with twenty-four defeats. He was one of four Mets pitchers who lost at least seventeen decisions (with two losing at least twenty), and Ken MacKenzie, the only hurler with a winning record, finished 5-4 with an ERA of 4.95.

In addition to the statistics, though, there are other historical curiosities which have contributed to the legend surrounding the 1962 team, as will be shown throughout this book. For example, after their first nine games, all losses, they found themselves nine-and-a-half games out of first. Also, due to a playoff resulting from the regular-season tie between the Dodgers and Giants, the Mets continued to drop in the standings even after the season had ended. The Mets were 0-15 on games played on Thursday. No other baseball team has ever traded a ballplayer for himself or hosted an Old Timers’ Game in its inaugural season. The Mets, of course, did both. No other club’s roster likely contained a pitcher who won both games of a doubleheader and then never won another major league decision. The Mets had two. Nor did any other team have two players with the same first and last name – both pitchers – and assign them to be roommates. Indeed, the legend of their futility preceded their first game, as several of the players they acquired prior to their debut season chose to retire rather than play for the Mets. Of the forty-five who did play at some point during that first year, nearly half never appeared in another major league game after 1962. Finally, the Mets were probably the only team ever to be insulted by their patron at their coming-out party.

In sum, the ’62 Mets’ status as the worst baseball team of the modern era is beyond dispute. At the same time, though, they also were – and remain – one of the most beloved teams of any era. For better or worse, they were, in the immortal words of their equally immortal manager, amazin’. The Mets drew over 900,000 fans to the decrepit Polo Grounds in 1962, paltry attendance by today’s standards but good enough for sixth in the National League that season. More important, the Mets gave the hated Yankees stiff competition for attention and headline space in New York even as the Yanks were in the process of winning their third consecutive pennant and second World Series in a row. Met fan traditions, such as the Let’s Go Mets chant and the displaying of banners, began that season, and some of these continued for decades and even to the present day. In addition, Stengel and others achieved folk hero status, while some ballplayers parlayed their membership on the Worst Baseball Team Ever into lucrative careers later in life (most notably Throneberry, who appeared in a dozen Miller Lite beer commercials in the 1980s). Nine people associated with the club are in the Baseball Hall of Fame (albeit not for anything they did that season), and its alumni have gone on to subsequent careers as successful businessmen, coaches, managers and broadcasters, and even a U.S. Congressman and a state senator. Through it all, interest in the team has never abated. In fact, Hall of Fame centerfielder Richie Ashburn, best known for his stellar tenure with the Phillies before finishing up with the Original Mets, said in 1992 that he got more mail as the result of the 1962 season than he did for the previous fourteen years of his career.

In light of all this, it is hard to believe that there has never been a single comprehensive literary work focused on the events of the ’62 season and the personalities of those involved. Sure, there was Jimmy Breslin’s Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?, written in 1963 (and recently reissued), and Leonard Shecter’s Once Upon The Polo Grounds, which appeared in the wake of the Mets’ improbable 1969 World Series victory. These books, though thoroughly entertaining and highly recommended by the author, differ significantly from this text. Breslin and Shecter, both excellent writers, were newspapermen who covered the story with the veneer of their own personalities, even occasionally ignoring facts which did not fit the myth they wished to convey. With this book, though, it is the author’s belief that no such treatment is necessary. Any strong story, and the saga of the Original Mets is no exception, should be allowed to tell itself; failing that, it should be told through the actual words of those who participated in, or at least witnessed, the events on which the story is based. With all due respect to Messrs. Breslin and Shecter, this text goes well beyond their earlier works not only in scope and in attention to the details of the events, but also based on the simple fact that the story is largely told herein by those who played a part. In fact, pitcher Jay Hook, who recorded the team’s first win on April 23, 1962, told the author that this text will be the ultimate clearinghouse for information about the Original Mets – everything you ever wanted to know, and more.

Therefore, in addition to just telling what happened, this book will provide insights into the fascinating characters involved, and it will also explore the reasons for the team’s legendary status even today. So pour yourself a cold Rheingold Extra Dry Lager and come examine what it was like to have spent a year in Mudville with the Original Mets.

FOREWORD TO THE EXPANDED EDITION

I don’t ask how we lost 120 this year. I ask how we won 40. – Casey Stengel, manager of the New York Mets

"This is not the story of a bad team. The Mets are not bad. Listen. They’ve been bad at times in the past, let’s call it more often than not, including the all-time record for being bad the most times in a single season. But badness is not what defines the Mets as a franchise. There is a difference between being bad and being gifted at losing, and this distinction holds the key to understanding the true magic of the New York Mets." – Devin Gordon, So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets – The Best Worst Team in Sports

I thought I was done writing this book in the spring of 2010 when, upon the gentle coaxing of my then-fiancé (now my wife), I finished my final series of edits and brought out first the electronic version and then, finally, the print edition. It was the culmination of more than eight years of work, much of which I enjoyed beyond words. But it was still work, and I have to say I was glad to see the back of it. Even so, I am immensely proud to have done it.

Twelve years have passed since then. I can hear the more cynically-minded among you asking, Well, what’s changed? The Original Mets have not played any more games, the stats are the same and everything is as it was in 2010, other than a few ballplayers leaving this earth. Why another edition?

Actually, a fair bit has changed in some respects. As I said in the original Afterword, I have spent pretty much zero time in my life being a Mets fan. I didn’t embark on this odyssey out of some deep-rooted fandom for New York’s National League ballclub, nor did such a fandom take hold of me while I was writing the book. As I explained, what drove me to undertake this task was my love of the story of the Original Mets, my desire to learn more about the team and all its unique unbelievability, and my discovery that there were no comprehensive sources in existence. Because nature abhors a vacuum, I took on the challenge, even if it was entirely self-created.

Since the book was published, though, I’ve spent significant time in the company of real live Mets fans, those who bleed blue and orange and aren’t afraid to tell the world about it. One of the more amazing doors that A Year in Mudville opened for me was the chance to speak at a conference at Hofstra University in 2012. The conference was organized by a group of esteemed academics who also happened to be crazed Mets fans, and it coincided with the team’s fiftieth anniversary, and thus also the fiftieth anniversary of the Original Mets. Although the franchise had no official participation in the conference, there were plenty of luminaries in attendance, such as Original Met Ed Kranepool (see below for my definition of what constitutes an Original Met) and writers whose work loomed large in my world, like George Vecsey and Stan Isaacs. Meeting these men was a huge thrill, but no less thrilling was the chance to get to know people like Greg Prince, Jason Bornstein, Ron Kaplan and Andrew Richter, to name but a few. Greg, Ron and Jason are among the many folks who write often and interestingly about all things Met-related, while Andrew, a gifted photographer, presented a moving essay about the demise of Shea Stadium; in fact, he managed to make me homesick for a place I had never visited. Spending time with such true believers could have made me feel like a real outsider; instead, it made me feel like I was part of a community. It also compelled me to think differently about my own work and approach it with fresh eyes.

There are also practical considerations that made me want to revisit Mudville. The bulk of the writing I did took place in the first few years. This was a time when we were sort of on the cusp of transitioning from paper research to electronic methods. I realize that the internet was fully operational in, say, 2005, but a lot of sources to which I had no easy access back then have now been digitized. Moreover, items of which I had not the slightest inkling of their existence are now freely available online and can be found by anybody willing to look for them. Since I assigned myself the mission back in 2002 of presenting the most comprehensive telling of the Original Mets’ saga, I gradually came to realize that there was more out there, way more in fact, than what I originally had offered and that this should be part of my presentation as well.

The Mets’ fiftieth anniversary in 2012 had a strong influence on my thinking in this regard. This took two forms. First, there were a large number of books, articles and columns appearing in print, some of which involved interviews with people with whom I had not managed to speak in my first go round. While some of them contained excellent information which was missing from my book, others raised additional questions: did that really happen that way? Or, I never heard of that. Is it really true? While some of these books and articles were well-researched and genuinely informative, others repeated some of the myths I had sought to disprove in Mudville. Clearly, I realized, I still had some work in front of me.

The second was the fact that the anniversary brought some of the Original Mets out of the woodwork, including some genuinely surprising encounters. The most notable of these was Choo Choo Coleman, who appeared at a dinner given by the Baseball Assistance Team, an organization which helps former players in need, and he then sat for a long interview, probably the lengthiest of his life and almost certainly the first since his career ended. His emergence caused amazement in the Mets community; nothing had been heard from him in decades, which led many to conclude that he was deceased. His very appearance caught people off guard, as he apparently had shown up on his own initiative, a process which involved taking his first plane ride in 35 years. Among the items he cleared up was the origin of his nickname, a piece of information which, by itself, would have warranted a second edition of this book. I won’t make you wait, by the way…according to Choo Choo, he was so called as a child because he was fast. You’re welcome.

An additional factor was the continued refinement of sites based on baseball history and statistics, most notably Baseball Reference and the Society for American Baseball Research. The information contained in these sites allowed me to develop an even more thorough understanding of the Original Mets than I thought I already possessed. In particular, I realized that I had unintentionally given a number of players short shrift, and I wanted to fix that. The book you are now reading contains more information about literally every single Original Met player than its predecessor; in some cases, quite a bit more.

This latter factor also led me to appreciate another advantage of the internet, namely, the ability to find people more easily than a decade earlier when I was writing the original book. The most notable example was discovering the existence of one of Dawes Hamilt’s boyhood acquaintances, and even more amazing was the realization that this gentleman was already one of my Facebook friends. It is hardly a novel observation on my part that the online world is a strange and wondrous place.

Finally, to be frank, all of the new information out there also revealed to me that I had gotten one or two things wrong the first time. I found this state of affairs to be more galling than you can possibly imagine, so this too needed to be put right.

Before I turn you loose on the expanded edition, or perhaps vice versa, I have to deal with a threshold question to which I briefly alluded above: who are the Original Mets? Since the publication of my book, I’ve seen discussion, even controversy, over this matter. Like any issue of nomenclature, this involves some thought, but to me, the answer has always been a straightforward one. Not to others, though. Some insist that only the twenty-two expansion draftees qualify as Original Mets, presumably including the one who was traded a few weeks later (but still wound up on a 1962 Topps baseball card as a Met). I’ve seen lists of Original Mets that include Johnny Antonelli and Billy Loes, pitchers who were purchased after the expansion draft but who retired without even making it to spring training. Similarly, I’ve read references to Ed Kranepool, signed in June 1962 and called up to make his major league debut at season's end, not being an Original Met, an argument I find baffling.

I view this, and have always viewed this, as a simple issue: if a player was part of the major league roster at any point from Opening Day until the end of the season, he is an Original Met. Period. This includes Kranepool, who had six late-season at-bats, and Galen Cisco and Larry Foss, who pitched four and five times, respectively, after being acquired in September, as well as Joe Ginsberg and Clem Labine, who played in two and three games in April before being released, but excludes Lee Walls, the expansion draftee who was traded soon thereafter, and Ted Lepcio, the first big leaguer to sign a Met contract but who was cut at the end of spring training. Any such classification of this-one-is-but-this-one-isn’t is by its nature somewhat arbitrary, and I suppose my system is as well, but I feel my approach has logic on its side, requires the least amount of slicing and dicing and is more inclusive and less arbitrary. I never explained myself in the first book because, frankly, I never thought any explanation was needed. It literally never occurred to me there could be another definition. It has only been due to subsequent discussion that I feel I should state my position more explicitly and emphatically (Ed Kranepool not an Original Met? Or, for that matter, Marv Throneberry not an Original Met? Really?). Therefore, any reference you see going forward to the Original Mets, in the singular or plural, refers to one or all of the 45 men who appeared in games for the 1962 Mets. If you prefer a different approach, that’s up to you. My book, my rules. I’m glad we could clear this up.

There is also more information about people who are not Original Mets but who are, to coin a phrase, Original Met Adjacent. I’m speaking of folks like Joan Payson, the first owner of the Mets, the broadcast team of Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy and Ralph Kiner and their producer, Joe Gallagher, the coaches, and, of course, manager Casey Stengel, who continues to be the subject of fascinating books, articles and stories. There’s even a bit about Kathy Kersh, better known as Miss Rheingold 1962.

What follows, simply, is still more about the Original Mets than you, or even I, could have dreamed existed. They are a wonderful group of baseball trailblazers, whether they realized it or not. The 45 Original Mets ranged in age from 17 to 40. They came from 23 states, the District of Columbia, two Canadian provinces, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and the US Virgin Islands. They were farm boys, college graduates, veterans of World War II and the Korean conflict, a bevy of high school and college stars, a professional basketball player, Negro League barnstormers and even a seminary student, and they would go one to become major league managers and pitching coaches, a broadcaster, successful businessmen, stars of TV commercials, owners of clothing and sporting goods stores, restaurant managers, an orthodontist, a sheriff and a U.S. Congressman. Seven Original Mets had never appeared in a major league game before the 1962 season, while nineteen never appeared in a major league game after 1962; several fit both categories. Within five years, almost all were gone from the big leagues, but a few were still active a dozen years later. If all this were not enough, not one but two rock bands, Throneberry and Yo La Tengo, have used Original Met references in their names.

So you now have before you an even more comprehensive edition of A Year in Mudville, about fifty percent larger than its predecessor. I am grateful that this version didn’t take me eight more years to write. If you’ve already read my first attempt, allow me to thank you once again, and I hope you will find enough here to warrant a second look.

So here we go. Again. Once more, with feeling.

CHAPTER ONE – THE VOID AND THE IDEA

There are some things in baseball 35 to 50 years ago that are better now than they were in those days . . . How could you transfer a ball club when you did not have a highway? How could you transfer a ball club when the railroads then would take you to a town, you got off and then had to wait and sit up five hours to go to another ball club? – Casey Stengel, manager of the New York Yankees, testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly on July 9, 1958

The story of the Original Mets begins with a notice on a bulletin board. The notice was posted by Arthur E. Patterson, an aide to Brooklyn Dodger owner Walter F. O’Malley in the World Series press headquarters on October 8, 1957, during the Series between the New York Yankees and the Milwaukee Braves. The note succinctly informed the world that the Dodgers were moving to Los Angeles. They were joined by the New York Giants, who had announced their own relocation to the West Coast seven weeks earlier.

The departures came as a shock to New York baseball fans, but they had been in the works for several years, and the departure of one or both clubs to the West Coast had been the subject of rumors since at least 1953. Their rivalry was then the oldest in professional sports and remains so today. Although both teams had been staggeringly successful on the field (in fact, the Series that fall was the first since 1950 in which the National League was represented by neither the Dodgers nor Giants), the neighborhoods in which their pre-First World War ballparks were situated were changing. Each had lobbied for new parks in better parts of town, and both had hinted that relocation was a possibility if their demands were not met.

The Giants clearly had a valid argument. For years, they had been third in a three-team city. Having to play their home games at the decaying Polo Grounds, the eighty-year-old ballpark located in Manhattan adjacent to Harlem, certainly did not help. The Giants had enjoyed considerable success in the early fifties, winning pennants in 1951 and 1954. However, despite these triumphs and the presence of exciting players such as Willie Mays, the team’s attendance had plummeted by mid-decade, from 1.6 million in 1954, when they swept the World Series over the Cleveland Indians, to half that number the following year, to 630,000 in 1956, to 600,000 in 1957, or fewer than 8,500 per game, when they finished sixth for the second year in a row. Of that paltry figure, more than a third came from eleven home dates with the Dodgers, without which the Giants’ attendance would have been downright embarrassing. For unlike Dodger fans, who flocked to games regardless of how the team performed, Giant fans went to the Polo Grounds only when the Giants were winning.

Thus, while suffering through hard times on the field, the Giants were being abandoned by their fan base. A low-income housing project had been erected near the Polo Grounds, which had little on-site parking, and a trip to the ballpark was increasingly seen as a dangerous proposition, especially at night.

In 1956, Giants chairman Horace Stoneham adopted the Manhattan borough president’s proposal for an ultra-modern 110,000-seat roofed stadium in Manhattan on a tract owned by the New York Central Railroad. Nothing came of this idea, and the next year, Stoneham raised the idea of an arena in Queens near the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge. For the first time, he made references to looking outside the city if he did not get his new facility.

The transformation of the Dodgers from the most beloved team to the most hated was very different. The Dodgers were the most successful National League club of the era, with six pennants in the eleven years after World War II. In the five years they didn’t win, they had three near misses, losing playoffs in 1946 and 1951 and being eliminated in extra innings on the final day of the 1950 season. Attendance at Ebbets Field was second in the league in 1956. In fact, they drew over a million fans every year between 1950 and 1957, a remarkable showing considering the ballpark’s capacity was only 33,000. Moreover, Walter O’Malley owned Ebbets Field and thus did not have to pay rent. However, O’Malley still claimed the Dodgers were at a competitive disadvantage compared with teams with larger facilities, and beginning in 1951, shortly after assuming full control of the Dodgers, he began asking the city for a new stadium. He was particularly envious of the former Boston Braves, who in 1953 had moved to Milwaukee and a modern stadium with parking for ten thousand cars. At that time, O’Malley had prophetically noted that this is about to start a chain reaction.

The Braves presented a tantalizing example of the potential of relocation. The team was a charter member of the National League dating to 1876. In 1948, when the Braves won the pennant, almost 1.5 million fans had come out, but only four seasons later, their last year in Boston, their attendance was an unbelievable 280,000. The following year, their first in Milwaukee, they drew over 1.8 million, more than a six-fold increase, as the team rose from seventh place to finish second behind the Dodgers. From 1954 through 1957, they topped two million a year, the first time a National League team had managed this. O’Malley drooled over these accomplishments, especially when the Braves defeated the Dodgers for the pennant in 1957 and then beat the hated Yankees in the Series – something the Dodgers had managed only once in seven tries since 1941.

O’Malley also feared the trends were against him. In 1955, when the Dodgers won the World Series, attendance barely broke a million, a 43 percent drop from 1947, Jackie Robinson’s first year with the team. By 1957, the last of Brooklyn’s trolleys had shut down, and Ebbets Field had 700 parking spaces for its 33,000 seats.

O’Malley also worried about the changing complexion of his fan base. For decades, the Dodgers had drawn from the white middle-class communities surrounding the ballpark. Now, many lower-income African American and Hispanic families were moving in, causing the whites to flee. Going to Ebbets Field was now viewed as a riskier venture, and the poor parking facilities didn’t help, especially with more night games. While O’Malley certainly capitalized on this sentiment for his own purposes, the problem did exist. Dick Young, the legendary New York sportswriter, claimed O’Malley told him that the borough had become full of blacks and spics and Jews.

Not everyone shared O’Malley’s assessment of Dodgers’ economics, though. Irving Rudd, the Dodgers’ promotions director, pointed out years later that the Brooklyn ballclub made more money than any other in baseball, even the Yankees. O’Malley, he claimed, was just engaging in typical posturing; if the team drew two million, he would claim this was the minimum he needed to stay afloat.

In fact, attendance was the main factor distinguishing the Dodgers from the three teams which had moved earlier in the decade (the first teams to change addresses in five decades) – the Boston Braves, the St. Louis Browns and the Philadelphia Athletics. The Dodgers brought in over a million fans in 1957 – almost 100,000 more than the combined total the Braves, Browns and Athletics had drawn in their final seasons before moving.

The city moved fitfully in response to the Dodgers’ request and took no action at all for the Giants. Mayor Robert Wagner proposed a new stadium on the 1939 World’s Fair site in Flushing, but O’Malley wanted a ballpark in Brooklyn. However, the location he chose – the end of the Long Island Railroad Line at Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues – met with the city’s disapproval. O’Malley’s son Peter later recalled that his father was in love with that site, there’s no doubt about that. It was because of rapid transportation. All the subways in New York went through Atlantic and Flatbush.

Rumors continued afterward that O’Malley, having made up his mind to move, insisted on this site, knowing the city would not go along. In any event, his demands grew increasingly strident, and his threats to move grew louder and more ominous. The gulf between O’Malley and Mayor Wagner and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses grew wider.

O’Malley later summarized his efforts as follows: We conducted an eight-year campaign to build our own stadium in Brooklyn at the Atlantic-Flatbush site. The stadium contemplated would have been built over the Long Island Railroad terminal, which was also the one spot in the city where all subway systems intersected. This would have given us a central location serving all of the city and Long Island. The Pennsylvania Railroad owned the Long Island Railroad and its property and was most agreeable to the idea. At one point, we were successful in getting legislation passed in Albany creating a Brooklyn Sports Center Authority, which would have condemned the land needed for a new stadium, with the approval of the produce market renters, who were all in favor of being relocated to a better area. Gov. Averell Harriman came to Borough Hall, Brooklyn, to sign the bill and that encouraged us enough to have architectural and engineering plans prepared. But the project was successfully sabotaged.

When it became clear to O’Malley and Stoneham that their demands would not be met, they prepared to move. O’Malley got things rolling in August 1955 by demanding that the city seize the Flatbush site by eminent domain. When Moses refused, as expected, O’Malley announced that the Dodgers would play fourteen home games in Jersey City over the next two seasons, one game per year against each National League team. In doing so, he agreed to assume the expense of rehabbing dilapidated Roosevelt Stadium, an even smaller facility than Ebbets Field.

Red Smith, the venerable Herald Tribune columnist, saw the flaws in O’Malley’s reasoning, which he demonstrated with amazing foresight in a piece he wrote in 1956, a year before the cataclysm. Smith pointed out first that O’Malley owned Ebbets Field free and clear, and yet, he was willing to embark on what Smith called the New Jersey caper. Did O’Malley have his eye on some distant city? Smith postulated, identifying Minneapolis and Los Angeles as likely candidates. Clearly, said Smith, the New Jersey caper was merely part of a larger campaign on the part of the Dodger owner to convince the other National League owners to authorize a move.

Smith, though, was a voice in the wilderness at that stage. O’Malley’s maneuvers then caused puzzlement and amusement, rather than anger. In their annual show that fall, the New York Baseball Writers referred to Walter’s Oldest Established Permanent Floating Franchise in New York. Few saw the irony at the time.

The New Jersey caper, though, should have been worthy of more attention. Although the ballpark was smaller than Ebbets Field, the Dodgers drew an average of 21,000 fans to their seven Jersey games in 1956, compared with 15,000 for their seventy in Brooklyn. Moreover, Roosevelt Stadium had parking spaces for ten thousand cars, far exceeding Ebbets’ capacity of 700.

Then, in a move clearly intended to force the city’s hand, O’Malley sold Ebbets Field to housing developer Marvin Kratter for $3 million and took only a three-year lease in return. Wagner and Moses now had only a few months to get a stadium package approved so that it could be built in time for the 1960 season, after which the Ebbets Field lease would expire and Kratter was expected to tear down the ballpark. O’Malley rammed this point home early in 1957, proclaiming that unless something is done within six months, I will have to make other arrangements.

O’Malley’s sale of Ebbets Field was not the only ominous sign early in 1957. He also sold the Dodgers’ minor league park in Montreal for a million dollars, and he bought a forty-four seat Corvair plane, even though the other seven National League teams were then clustered in the Northeast and Midwest, close enough for train travel.

In the meantime, a secret courtship was taking place with the city of Los Angeles, which had been trying to attract a major league team since 1940. Kenneth Hahn, Los Angeles County Supervisor, was in Brooklyn for the 1956 World Series with instructions to find a team – any team – willing to move to the west coast. While at the Series, he met with Calvin Griffith, owner of the Washington Senators, who was anxious to pull up stakes. As Hahn sat watching the game after meeting with Griffith, he was handed a note from O’Malley, which contained three words: Don’t sign anything.

Thereafter, O’Malley engaged in cloak-and-dagger maneuvers with Hahn while Griffith dallied. He hammered out a deal which gave him everything he could possibly have wanted. The concessions began with a modern new stadium with plenty of parking, to be built on 300 acres at Chavez Ravine and then handed over to him. The Dodgers’ moneymaking capability was about to go into hyperdrive.

At the moment, though, the territorial rights to Los Angeles were controlled by Chicago Cubs owner Phillip Wrigley. O’Malley knew that Wrigley was disgruntled as the result of a disagreement with the city over his Pacific Coast League franchise. During the Baseball Writers Association’s meeting in February 1957, O’Malley passed a note to Wrigley, offering the Dodgers’ farm team in Fort Worth in return for the Cubs’ Los Angeles Angels. Wrigley agreed, and thus O’Malley acquired the exclusive right to put a baseball team into the city. It was quite a coup, considering that the Dodgers had paid $75,000 for the Fort Worth club ten years earlier and had put $500,000 into a new stadium. One commentator noted that it was slicker than a Reese-to-Robinson-to-Hodges double play…along the lines of the Dutch buying Manhattan for twenty-four dollars. To further clear his path for an eventual Dodger move, he moved the Angels to Spokane, where they became the Indians.

Meanwhile, Stoneham had originally intended to move the Giants to Minneapolis, where he controlled the territorial rights and had a new publicly funded ballpark. O’Malley, though, having worked out his coup in Los Angeles, knew it would be advantageous to have another National League ballclub in California, since the other teams could play them in succession, thus easing the expense of travel. Therefore, O’Malley convinced Stoneham that San Francisco would be a better option. As O’Malley later recalled, Horace had just about made up his mind to move the Giants to Minneapolis. I talked to Horace and said that if he left New York, we also would probably move because the one practical site in Brooklyn was no longer available. I asked Horace if he was legally committed to Minneapolis or if he would consider San Francisco. He had an open mind and I then arranged a meeting for Horace to meet the mayor of San Francisco in New York. At that meeting, proposed terms for the rental of a stadium to be built in San Francisco were considered, and I then proceeded to contact Mayor Norris Paulson of Los Angeles.

Publicly, both men denied that there was any significance to these events other than their desire to explore all options. On June 4, Mayor Wagner met with O’Malley and Stoneham and urged either owner to consider the Flushing Meadows site. Both refused, and the die was cast.

In the face of official ineffectiveness, some citizens were prepared to take action to either prevent the Dodgers and Giants from leaving, or, if they left, to replace them. George V. McLaughlin, the man responsible for bringing O’Malley, then a young lawyer, into the Dodger organization in the 1930s, first tried to buy the Giants from Stoneham for $2.75 million. After being turned down, he then discussed forming an organization to lure an existing National League team to New York, or, failing that, to convince the League’s owners to expand. The League, and its president, Warren Giles, rejected this latter idea on the grounds that the Giants and Dodgers were still in New York – for the time being, anyway.

On August 19, 1957, the Giants’ board of directors, with one dissenting vote, approved the move to San Francisco. Stoneham made the announcement at a press conference. When asked if he felt any guilt about taking National League ball away from New York children, Stoneham replied, I feel bad about the kids, but I haven’t seen many of their fathers lately.

The lone dissenter on the nine-man board (which included Stoneham’s son, nephew and brother-in-law) was M. Donald Grant, a long-time Giants fan who sat on the board as a proxy to Joan Whitney Payson, also a long-time fan and a minority shareholder. Mrs. Payson had been attending games at the Polo Grounds since 1910 (the same year a player named Charles Dillon Dutch Stengel signed with the Kansas City Blues of the American Association) and throughout the fifties, she had acquired a ten-percent ownership interest. Only Stoneham had a larger individual share. As a means of forestalling the move to the West Coast, Mrs. Payson even offered to buy the franchise, on a name-your-price offer, from Stoneham, who turned her down as he had George McLaughlin. The Giants were going, and that was all there was to it.

On September 29, 1957, the Giants played their last game at the Polo Grounds in front of fewer than 12,000 fans. Attendance had been terrible all year – 600,000 came to witness the long goodbye. As soon as the game – a 9-1 pounding by the Pittsburgh Pirates – was over, the players fled to the safety of the clubhouse, while the fans swarmed the field, taking the bases, bits of turf, anything that wasn’t nailed down, along with some things which were, and smashing some of what was left. Many called for Stoneham’s neck, but he wasn’t there. I couldn’t go to the game, he said later. I just didn’t want to see it come to an end. Someone on the Giants’ staff removed a two-foot square section of the center field sod, which the team took to San Francisco. One of the last to leave the ballpark was the widow of John J. McGraw, the tough-as-nails manager who led the Giants to ten pennants between 1902 and 1932. The loss was the 85th of the season against only 69 wins, which ensured a sixth-place finish, only three years removed from their World Series sweep of the Indians.

Walter Pullis, a future Met fan, attended the final game. Ten years old at the time, he went with his mother; his father was too angry to go. They were approached by fans who had brought saws so they could remove the seats and take them home as souvenirs. Pullis’ mother declined the offer to have their seats sawed, to their subsequent regret.

Five days earlier, the Dodgers had played their Ebbets Field finale, a 2-0 victory, in front of less than 7,000 fans. Unlike the Giants, the team had still made no announcement, but everyone knew. House organist Gladys Gooding, acting on her own and allegedly with the help of a few cocktails, acknowledged the occasion by playing Am I Blue, How Can You Say We’re Through, After You’ve Gone, Don’t Ask Me Why I’m Leaving, Que Sera Sera and Thanks for The Memories during the game. After the final out, she let loose with May the Good Lord Bless and Keep You and Auld Lang Syne," while some fans helped themselves to souvenirs and others stood and wept. Only the groundskeepers seemed not to have heard. After the last out, they raked the infield and covered it with a tarp, readying the park for the next game which would never occur.

Five days later, with still no announcement, what were then still the Brooklyn Dodgers played their last game as such, losing 2-1 in Philadelphia. Starting and taking the loss for the Brooklynites was Roger Craig, a tall righthander then in his third major league season.

O’Malley continued to play all the angles before finally posting his notice on the World Series press board on October 8. Of course, this was after the October 1 deadline imposed by the other owners. As the deadline approached, though, O’Malley suddenly faced a revolt among some Los Angeles officials who knew the value of what was being given away. For a heart-stopping moment, it looked as though the deal might fall through. On the eve of the deadline, though, Los Angeles mayor Norris Poulson, a staunch supporter of the pact, notified league president Warren Giles, untruthfully, that the deal was all but done, thus convincing the owners to grant a brief extension to take care of a few remaining details. O’Malley, Kenneth Hahn and Poulson used the time to mount a major PR blitz which carried the day. Therefore, Arthur Patterson was able to post O’Malley’s notice, which read as follows:

In view of the action of the Los Angeles City Council yesterday and in accordance with the resolution of the National League made Oct. 1, the stockholders and directors of the Brooklyn Baseball Club have today met and unanimously agreed that necessary steps be taken to draft the Los Angeles territory.

Without fanfare or farewell, there was now no National League team in New York for the first time in 75 years. It was as unthinkable as it was unbelievable. For the overwhelming majority of Dodger and Giant backers, many of whom were second- or third-generation fans, there was no question of transferring their loyalty to the Yankees. Some became followers of other National League teams, while many others simply gave up on baseball. In fact, Yankee home attendance fell the year after the departures.

Jim Fertitta grew up in Brooklyn and was a typical Dodger booster. He was born in 1931 and became a fan following the team’s heartbreaking loss to the Yankees in the 1941 World Series. By 1957, he was married and living in Brooklyn with his wife and two children. Like many others, he heard the rumors but did not believe them. He felt the Dodgers were too much of an entrenched tradition to ever leave. After all, weren’t the Bums even mentioned frequently in Hollywood movies? What bothered him most when the team did leave was what he saw as O’Malley’s abandonment of that history.

Presidential biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin grew up in Rockville Centre, Long Island, and she became a rabid Dodger fan at a tender age. She was 14 when the team left, and 40 years later, she recalled the effect on her neighborhood in her touching personal memoir, Wait till Next Year. It was, she stated, truly the end of an era, the end of rivalries, the end of arguments in the street over which team had the best centerfielder, the end of tradition.

Bob Mandt, later to become a Mets vice president, grew up a fervent Dodger fan, but like many, he abandoned the game when his team left. I really didn’t pay any attention to baseball from 1957 to 1961, he recalled later. I was so angry with my team. I remember my brother said to me a couple of times, ‘Let’s go down to Philadelphia and take in the Dodgers, they’re gonna play this Phillies this Friday night.’ I wouldn’t cross the street to see them, I was so mad. I didn’t like the Yankees. I couldn’t possibly root for the Yankees after hating them for so many years.

Although the city had dragged its heels in responding to the Dodgers’ and Giants’ threats to leave, it is also possible that the move westward was going to happen regardless of what the city did. There were certainly many people who felt that way. While former Dodger presidents Larry MacPhail and Branch Rickey pushed hard for increased attendance, O’Malley never did, and many observers theorized that he refrained from doing so in order to use the perceived turnstile decline as justification for his later actions. Maverick owner Bill Veeck was only one of many who posited that O’Malley would have kept raising his demands until they couldn’t be met.

It is worth noting that, as recently as February 1957, O’Malley had told Dick Young that my roots are in Brooklyn…three generations of my family are buried there. I belong there. The team belongs there. I don’t need any more money. I have enough to eat, and I don’t think it’s the best thing in the world to leave my children a whole bundle of dough. I want something else. Eight months later, it was left to Young to sum up the mood for many in Brooklyn: Preliminary diagnosis indicates that the cause of death was an acute case of greed, followed by severe political implications. And now Walter O’Malley leaves Brooklyn a rich man and a despised man.

However, in his well-researched 1987 book, The Dodgers Move West, Neil J. Sullivan attempts to portray O’Malley in a positive light, with, it must be said, some success. Among other things, Sullivan posits that the owner was at all times prepared to bear the cost of building the new stadium and only wanted the city to assist in the process of obtaining the land. In the last thirty years, numerous other authors, and the O’Malley family, have sought to counter the prevailing sentiment of the previous thirty, that the Dodgers’ departure was inevitable due to O’Malley’s greed. Peter O’Malley, in particular, claimed his father’s goal was to design, pay for, maintain and landscape, where appropriate, a stadium. He didn’t want a taxpayer facility. He needed help assembling the land. Whatever the truth of these arguments, though, they do not alter the traumatic effect of the defection on Brooklyn fans.

The moves were, in a way, the result of a giant game of chicken played between O’Malley and Moses. O’Malley had, in effect, dared the city to decline his demands at the cost of losing the Dodgers, and Moses, believing O’Malley to be bluffing, had called the bluff. Stoneham, meanwhile, had been swept along in O’Malley’s wake, as it is unlikely he would have done anything unilaterally.

Once the teams had actually moved, though, the city woke up. As Leonard Koppett noted, A vacuum had been created. And if nature abhors a vacuum, a politician who may be blamed for its creation abhors it even more. Mayor Wagner immediately began to feel the heat from hotel owners and others who feared losses from an expected decline in tourism. The mayor, who was up for re-election the following month, knew he had to do something.

Within days of O’Malley’s announcement, Wagner, with George McLaughlin’s help, appointed a Mayor’s Baseball Committee consisting of former Postmaster General James A. Farley; department store magnate Bernard Gimbel (father-in-law of Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg); Clint Blume, a prominent real estate developer and former Giants pitcher in the days of John McGraw; and, at McLaughlin’s urging, William A. Shea, a politically-connected attorney who had once owned a Long Island semipro football team.

Shea was born in Washington Heights, Manhattan, in 1907. A passionate baseball fan as a youth, he played high school ball in the shadow of the Polo Grounds. He attended New York University on a basketball scholarship before transferring to Georgetown, playing three seasons on the Georgetown varsity basketball team. He graduated from Georgetown in 1931 with his law degree, and as a young lawyer, he became closely associated with McLaughlin, clerking at the Brooklyn Trust Company under both McLaughlin and Walter O’Malley. He began private practice in 1941 and quickly became recognized as a mover and shaker who could bring people together. In subsequent years, Shea would also be instrumental in bringing the New York Titans pro football franchise (later the Jets) to town, as well as the New York (then New Jersey and now Brooklyn) Nets basketball club and the New York Islanders hockey team. Although Shea was the least-publicly known member of Mayor Wagner’s baseball committee, he brought with him some important relationships as well as a reputation for getting things done, and he emerged as the chair of the committee. Also, he and Wagner lived near each other and were close friends.

The mandate was clear: get a National League baseball team into New York as quickly as possible, by any means necessary. However clear the mandate, though, the means by which to accomplish it were not. Shea immediately contacted the other National League clubs to try to convince one to relocate to New York. This was a daunting concept, due in no small part to the lack of a place to play. The Yankees were not going to share Yankee Stadium, and Ebbets Field was scheduled for demolition by its new owner. This left the ancient Polo Grounds as the only option, at least until a new stadium could be built.

Nonetheless, Shea forged ahead and was soon stymied. As he recalled, I thought it was a very easy job to be accomplished, that all I had to do was get some people with money together and go out on a white charger and pick up a franchise somewhere in the hinterlands. Well, I soon found out that it wasn’t going to be done. Indeed, it is hard to see how he might have convinced another team to move to New York. The Phillies and Cardinals had just become the only teams in former two-club towns; moreover, Cardinals owner August Busch was not likely to abandon the Anheuser Busch brewery, the source of his fortune. The Braves had led the league in attendance for four years running in Milwaukee. The Cubs were staying in Chicago, and the Giants and Dodgers were not coming back. The Pirates had already turned down George McLaughlin’s proposed sale of the team to a New York owner and responded no more enthusiastically to Shea. While Reds owner Powel Crosley showed initial interest, it soon became apparent he was just using Shea to extract a new ballpark and other concessions from the city of Cincinnati, and once he got these, the conversation was over. Nor was an American League team an option. Under Rule 1(c) of the rules of major league baseball, the Yankees had a territorial monopoly which would prevent another American League team from relocating into the city without the unanimous consent of all the clubs in both leagues, which was not going to happen. Yankee co-owner Dan Topping pre-emptively made it clear that he would personally veto any such move.

Expansion appeared to be another dead end. The number of major league teams had remained at 16 since 1903 (in ten cities before 1953, none to the west of St. Louis; this despite the fact that the population had doubled and expanded significantly westward in those 50 years), and although the league owners had been talking about expanding for ten years, there had been no action to further these discussions. As Veeck pointed out, if the major leagues ran Congress, Kansas and Nebraska would still be trying to get into the union.

Shea soon realized that despite the desire of cities such as Atlanta, Denver, Houston and Minneapolis to host a baseball team, the major leagues were disinclined to expand, and certainly not into New York. In fact, the trend was for clubs to move away from cities in which there was already a team in the opposite league. Each of the five franchise shifts between 1953 and 1957 (counting the Dodgers and Giants) saw teams moving from a situation in which they had local competition to one where they were the only game in town. The Braves got the ball rolling, thus becoming the first major league team to relocate since 1903, when the Baltimore Orioles became the New York Highlanders (and, ten years later, the Yankees). Their departure from Boston got them out of the wake of the Red Sox. The Athletics then left Philadelphia to the Phillies and fled to Kansas City, where in their first year they finished second to the Yankees in attendance, and the St. Louis Browns emerged from under the shadow of the Cardinals (having drawn under 300,000 in four of their last five seasons) and re-appeared in Baltimore as the new Orioles. The Braves, Athletics and Orioles each posted attendance figures exceeding one million their first season after relocating, and the baseball owners believed that these franchise moves represented quite enough expansion.

Now Shea was trying to convince baseball to put a franchise back into New York, where it would compete against the Yankees, the most dominant team ever. Moreover, he was doing so in a climate of heightened tensions resulting from his perceived efforts to kidnap a team. In the bad blood which followed, National League President Warren Giles was quoted as asking, Who needs New York? Of course, Giles’ salary was paid by the league’s owners, and he was known as Walter O’Malley’s dancing bear.

Therefore, the only foreseeable solution besides giving up was to create a third major league with a franchise in New York, and the committee soon embarked on this path. On November 12, 1958, at Toots Shor’s restaurant, Bill Shea announced to a crowd of newsmen that since it has now become apparent that the National League wants to do nothing about this, we have decided to go on a new tack. And thus the Continental League was born.

Shea, nobody’s fool, realized that he needed an experienced baseball hand to guide him. At George McLaughlin’s suggestion, Shea formed a partnership with Branch Rickey, the most esteemed baseball executive of his time. In the 1930s, Rickey had created the minor league farm system, which he used to build the downtrodden Cardinals into consistent contenders well into the 1940s. In 1942, he became part owner of the Dodgers and turned the former Bums, the laughingstock of the league, into the powerhouse which dominated the circuit in the decade after World War II. Along the way he broke baseball’s long-entrenched color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson. At the end of the decade, after being forced out by O’Malley, he joined another loser, the Pirates. In Pittsburgh, he demonstrated he had not lost his touch. Although he had been fired in 1955, he had assembled the nucleus of the team which would defeat the Yankees in the 1960 World Series.

Now, Shea reached out to Rickey, still nominally employed as a consultant with the Pirates at a salary of $50,000 per year. Unbeknownst to either Shea or Pirates general manager Tom Johnson, Rickey had already been considering the idea of a third league as a counterweight to baseball’s monopolistic behavior. Although Rickey was almost eighty, he still had energy and ingenuity. He agreed to serve as commissioner of the new league, thus giving Shea’s enterprise instant credibility. When Johnson heard the news, he flew into a rage and terminated Rickey’s consulting contract, at which point attorney Shea stepped in and negotiated a settlement for the remaining years of the agreement.

The two joined forces with a number of wealthy would-be owners and consulted with influential figures inside and outside of baseball. These included some soon-to-be major players, like Jack Kent Cooke and Lamar Hunt, who would later own, respectively, the NFL’s Washington Redskins and Kansas City Chiefs. On July 25, 1959, in front of hordes of reporters at the Biltmore Hotel, Shea announced the formation of the Continental League. Five initial franchises were announced: Denver, Houston, Minneapolis, Toronto, and, of course, New York. Later to follow were Atlanta, Buffalo and Dallas, with play to begin in 1961.