Frank McCourt agrees to sell Dodgers

Frank McCourt agreed Tuesday to sell the Dodgers, abruptly surrendering the team after fighting to retain it over two years and in two courts.

McCourt and Major League Baseball have agreed to seek approval from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for an auction of the Dodgers. The sale is expected to include the team, Dodger Stadium and the surrounding parking lots, a package bought by McCourt for $421 million in 2004 and likely to sell for two to three times as much now.

The new owner would be the third since Peter O'Malley sold the team to News Corp. in 1998. The Dodgers had remained in the O'Malley family since its patriarch, Walter, moved the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958.

The sale agreement caps what might be the most tumultuous season in club history, which started with a fan nearly beaten to death in the Dodger Stadium parking lot and ended with the league charging McCourt with "looting" $189 million in team revenue for personal use. The Dodgers called that allegation "inflammatory" and unsupportable.

A million fans a year would be very low attendance today, but was considered the standard in the 1950s and 1960s. So yes, it was good attendance. Especially considering the ballpark.

Moses was quite willing to use eminent domain to give the Dodgers land in Flushing Meadow, but he worked extra hard to keep O’Malley from being able to acquire the land at Atlantic and Flatbush. It didn’t fit Moses’s plan.

Chavez is named after a 19th century LA councilman, not Cesar Chavez.

Yes, I knew that the name "Chavez Ravine" went quite a way back, and therefore it was obviously named for a Chavez earlier than Cesar Chavez.

The reasons for Mexican nationalist ramifications of the name "Chavez Ravine" do not relate to Cesar Chavez of the agricultural workers union. They relate to accusations of several Mexican-Americans living in the area who were allegedly evicted from their homes by city officials using eminent domain to acquire the land necessary to build Dodger Stadium, during the late 50s or early 60s. That's still a sore spot with some Mexican nationalist radicals and their leftist sympathizers in the media who use the former name "Chavez Ravine" to evoke the history of Mexican-Americans in the area and this still controversial episode, and to emphasize their position that the property was unjustly taken from the Mexican-Americans by the "Anglo" community at large. (There was a TV documentary about this a few years ago.)

I'm challenging you to show me any maps of Los Angeles since shortly after Dodger Stadium was opened in 1962 on which "Chavez Ravine" was used. In the early years of Dodger Stadium, the Dodgers made a conscious PR effort to avoid the use of "Chavez Ravine" (a "ravine" was just a huge hole in the ground and did not reflect favorably on the state-of-the-art new stadium they had built), while their American League tenants from 1962 to 1964, the newly created Los Angeles Angels, would use the name "Chavez Ravine" to irk the Dodgers. So the name of the place was a divisive issue between the two clubs and the two leagues in that time frame. Since then, "Chavez Ravine" has pretty much faded into the dustbin of history and, as I said, off local maps. It should only be used now in historical references.

“I’m challenging you to show me any maps of Los Angeles since shortly after Dodger Stadium was opened in 1962 on which “Chavez Ravine” was used.”

I made no claim about maps. What difference does it make?

The world is just the way that it is. Lost Angeles is just the way it is, also.

I don’t live there, and would not do so of my own free will.

Do you remember Fernando-mania? He was a good player, and brought happiness to fans.

Remember when the people in East Los Angeles cornered the Midnight Stalker, a hispanic psycho from Tejas?

For several decades Los Angeles was just about the most exciting city in the US, faults and all.

Fifty years from now, when I’m long gone, cities will live on, and the USA will still have plenty of problems.

I’m a product and resident of fairly pristine suburbia, more comfortable in smaller places, but I’ve walked the streets of New York, London, Rome, and a few others.

I much prefer California coastal suburbs, faults and all too.

Right now my biggest problem is surviving the effed up economy, not the name of Dodger Stadium.

I remember Chavez Ravine being used colloquially in writings about the Dodgers for many years, in addition to the Angels' early references before they moved into the original Anaheim Stadium. I haven't seen it used too often, if at all, in the years since. The complete story of how the land was chosen, the stadium was built, and the true actuality of the Chicanos who squatted there, is told in two splendid books, Mr. Neil Sullivan's The Dodgers Move West, and Mr. Michael Shaprio's The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together.

[Walter] O’Malley wanted to build a ballpark near Atlantic and Flatbush in the heart of Brooklyn, but the city’s chief planner, Robert Moses, wouldn’t allow it. (He offered land in the Flushing Meadow in Queens (about where Citi Field is now.)

The Dodgers may not have been doing poorly before leaving Brooklyn, but Ebbets Field was rendered obsolete before her time---nobody anticipated Brooklyn's postwar growth hemming the park in, and a pre-Rickey/pre-O'Malley regime had let the park go to seed enough that even Larry MacPhail's improvements to the park in the early 1940s were only going to hold it so far.

What Moses had in mind was what ultimately became Shea Stadium---he wanted to build a new multipurpose facility in Queens and jam it down O'Malley's throat. Moses had actually vowed that never again would a privately-built, privately-owned sports facility rise in New York so long as he ran the planning and building show in the city and the state. And New York's mouselike politicians weren't exactly going to stand up to the man, either.

What should be an intriguing historical question---if O'Malley was that adamant about not moving to Queens (If we play in Queens, we won't be the Brooklyn Dodgers anymore), why didn't Moses think about the Giants, who also needed a new ballpark in about the worst way possible (the Polo Grounds was a rambling wreck by the same time), who couldn't afford to build a new ballpark on their own, and who didn't have the strict borough identification the Dodgers had? Moses could have gotten what he wanted for his new ballpark (the Giants could have hung on awhile knowing they'd have a new home), and O'Malley might---might---then have been allowed, still, to build what he planned to build in Flatbush. So long as the Giants weren't even part of Moses' thinking, Moses had O'Malley over a barrel, even with O'Malley's political connections.

“I remember Chavez Ravine being used colloquially in writings about the Dodgers for many years,”

Me too. Back then it didn’t seem to have the potentially deep political meaning and symbolism, as some here seem to feel it must.

I guess long before I became a true conservative, I came to accept things as they were, here in the southwest.

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