Can't Anybody Here Play This Game? Read Online Free PDF Page B

days, when they had Duke Snider, they weren’t anywhere near us in the ratings. Please. Don’t mention Rheingold around here.”
    Now the story of how New York lost two teams and left things open for the Mets—and situations such as these—to replace them is a bit of recent baseball history that must be recounted here.
    Everything started, as far as we are concerned, on a dark afternoon in February of 1957 when Walter O’Malley sat behind his desk in the office of the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers, 215 Montague Street, Brooklyn. O’Malley had a cigar in one hand and a copy of an ancient Spalding Guide in another. And all of a sudden, as he talked, you found yourself shocked. What had been, for months, only vague rumors were being confirmed. This guy with the glasses and the smile and the good-fellow way of talking was going to move baseball’s most popular franchise so he could make money for himself.
    â€œIt’s funny,” O’Malley said. “Here everybody seems concerned because we have scheduled a few games in Jersey City this year.” (Everybody was upset. Not about nearby Jersey City. They were upset because the move was an outright O’Malley threat: give me a free ballpark or I’ll move my team.) O’Malley held up the guide. “But right here in this book I read that in 1899 the Brooklyn baseball team had a fire in its ballpark and as a result some of the home games were shifted to a site in Ridgewood, right over in Brooklyn. Now why are people excited over moving a few games to Jersey City?”
    â€œBut what about moving to Los Angeles?” he was asked.
    â€œWell,” he said with a smile, “let’s not say anything about that. We—ah—we wouldn’t like to hurt anybody’s feelings out in Los Angeles. They are nice people and—ah—it really wouldn’t be nice to have something in print on the situation appear.” He waved his hand. “You understand what I mean by that, of course.”
    We understood very well. He had found an old guide which gave him another precedent that he could mull over. Not that it was that important. But he is a lawyer, and these guys want everything they can get their hands on, including hot stoves, to help a case. And the main thing here was that he was taking the Dodgers to Los Angeles.
    In June you found out about the Giants. On a Friday night at the Polo Grounds, Horace Stoneham stood at the windows in the center-field clubhouse and watched the game with the late Bill Corum, the sports columnist. They must have discussed more than the ballgame in progress, for Corum’s paper on Sunday morning reported the fact that the Giants were leaving New York for Minneapolis.
    Stoneham had to call a press conference before the games on Sunday. “I don’t want to be put in the position of calling Corum a liar,” he said. “I just said something to him the other night, and it had ifs to it, and Bill jumped at it and that was that.”
    For some reason everybody went away satisfied, and the seven Monday sports sections in New York came out a memorial to the general incompetency of the modern working sports writer. Barely a mention was carried of Stoneham’s remarks. What he actually had done was stand up and admit he was going to move his team. It turned out to be San Francisco, as things went. And the move has been as successful as you could want. Almost as successful as the one made by O’Malley.
    These moves accomplished two fine things. For one, it gave two big cities major-league baseball, something they should have had several years before somebody decided to bring it in. And, more important, it exposed most of the people on the business side of baseball for exactly what they are—arrogant, money-hungry people with a sense of loyalty only to a bank account.
    You see, the moves of the Giants and Dodgers were part of a broad plan set up by baseball