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I'm reminded of Roger Kahn, in The Boys of Summer, recording that he was actually foolish enough to ask Walter O'Malley himself what he was worth. O'Malley didn't take it personally, then said, "All right, you need a figure. You can say $24 million." (This was 1970-71.) Subsequently, Kahn also interviewed longtime Dodger general manager Buzzie Bavasi. "How much," Bavasi asked, "did the son of a bitch tell you he was worth?" Kahn told him. "That's true," Bavasi replied. "That's very true. All he left out was 400 acres of downtown Los Angeles." The O'Malley real estate holdings didn't solidify, people like to forget, until after the Chavez Ravine sale agreement was first finalised.

O'Malley, it should be recalled, a) began his quest to build a new Brooklyn ballpark as early as 1952-53; and, b) he had no interest or knowledge of any California prospect until he learned Los Angeles city fathers were at the 1955 World Series and were, in fact, thinking first to woo the Washington Senators. By that point, he was thick enough into his grappling with Robert Moses and the New York pols that he was in search of a solid enough contingency spot. The Dodgers' somewhat infamous schedule of playing six to eight games a season in Jersey City was intended as a pressure point applied to Moses and company, O'Malley's thinking being that they wouldn't exactly want to be the men responsible for losing a much-loved baseball team because they insisted that private enterprise had no business building ballparks.

In more ways than people realise, the California move was a huge gamble for the Dodgers, once they realised there was no way they'd get a Brooklyn ballpark built so long as Robert Moses was alive, even for a man with O'Malley's reputation as a business sharpie. There was, really, no guarantee that the team would succeed in California; it was untried territory for the majors (though the St. Louis Browns half-entertained the idea of moving to Los Angeles in the early 1940s, an idea that died almost as fast as it was born). Moreover, the Dodgers weren't even guaranteed a place to build themselves a new ballpark, since the Chavez Ravine purchase was thrown to a referendum (it passed narrowly) and there were court challenges to the purchase. In more ways than one, the 1959 Dodgers pulled rabbits out of their hats when a very underendowed team (the leftover Boys of Summer were aging; the utility men weren't quite that sharp; Sandy Koufax wasn't yet the real Sandy Koufax, though he pitched magnificently in his only World Series appearance) won the World Series agains the "Go-Go White Sox" - I'm convinced the Dodgers' unexpected Series win helped solidify a new fan base for them in southern California.

Bottom line: One city's political class became allergic to letting a baseball team buy fresh and viable land to build itself a new ballpark, out of its own pocket; a second city's political class was only too willing to let the same team buy some land and build the park at their own expense. Think about it, folks: Walter O'Malley has been painted as Beelzebub incarnate for wanting to spend his own money to build his own ballpark. Without elevating him to a retroactive saint (he was - as not even his staunchest sycophants would deny - anything but), there is something very wrong with that picture. I say again: Brooklyn's heart was smashed to pieces by the Dodgers leaving, but it is long past time to assign the blame where it belongs - and it doesn't belong to Walter O'Malley.