The
Beginning of "Modern Baseball"
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With the kinks in the World Series worked out, including changing the format to a best-of-seven series, baseball hit a comfortable stride. That was until March 1953. That year, the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee. The Braves franchise had been in New England for seventy-seven years but stayed in Milwaukee for only thirteen years before moving to Atlanta, where the team has remained. And, after the 1953 season, the St. Louis Browns moved to the Atlantic seaboard to become the Baltimore Orioles. (Chris Von der Ahe’s St. Louis franchise, which was named the “Browns” before the Robison brothers took over, stayed along the banks of the Mississippi River, where the team, the Cardinals, remains.) In 1955, the Philadelphia Athletics stopped in Kansas City for twelve years before finally landing in Oakland. The West Coast settlements were pioneered in 1958 by the relocated New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, who moved to San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively.
Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers’ owner, was particularly skewered for moving his team. Fans and newspaper reporters branded the exodus a greedy and sneaky act. They argued that it was a betrayal to take the team away from its fans. And history has been less kind. But O’Malley, for his part, was frustrated looking for a suitable Brooklyn site to build a spiffy, larger Dodger stadium. The team had played in Ebbets Field since 1913, and the facility was cramped and decrepit. It was a swath of land perfect for a new stadium that lured O’Malley to Los Angeles. When he got there, what he found was a giant headache.
O’Malley arrived in Los Angeles in January of 1958 and found the stadium building process mired in legal entanglements. The site of the proposed stadium was a political battleground known as Chavez Ravine, a large Mexican community that had thrived for generations. City officials ordered much of the three-hundred-acre site bulldozed in 1950 to make way for a controversial public housing project called Elysian Park Heights. The bickering eventually landed the housing plans in the shredder, and O’Malley purchased the land as a site for his ballpark. Citizen opposition to having the public land used for a private business was virulent, but it wasn’t insurmountable. Los Angeles politicians ushered the stadium plan through the system and cleared out the stragglers still living in Chavez Ravine. During the three-year period of debate and stadium construction, O’Malley’s team played in the thirty-five-year-old Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. On April 10, 1962, the Dodgers played their first game in the new stadium in front of 52,564 fans and lost to Cincinnati, 6-3. . .
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