39TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION • 2017
QUEENS CHRONICLE, Thursday, November 16, 2017 Page 8
C M ANN page 8 Y K
BASEBALL
How the Mets came to be Queens’ team by Lloyd Carroll “Go west, young man!” was advice that 19th-century New York newspaper Horace Greeley famously dished out to someone who was asking him about making a fortune. The United States of America was growing rapidly following the end of World War II and many people were leaving the populous Northeast for the Midwest and the Pacific Coast, especially California. Baseball teams started to follow suit. In 1953 the Boston Braves, tired of playing second fiddle to Ted Williams and the Red Sox, moved to Milwaukee. Two years later, Hall of Fame team owner and field manager Connie Mack sold the financially struggling Philadelphia Athletics to Arnold Johnson, who promptly relocated the team to Kansas City. Walter O’Malley and Horace Stoneham, majority owners of the Brooklyn Dodgers a nd New York G ia nt s , respectively, were intrigued by this trend. The moves they made led to Queens getting its own team, the New York Metropolitan Baseball Club. The crowds at the Polo Grounds had dwindled by 1957 and it didn’t help matters that the Giants were figuratively and literally playing in the shadows of one of most dominant baseball teams of all time, the New York Yankees of the Eisenhower era. The Giants’ top minor league team was the Minneapolis Millers and Stoneham started making plans to leave Upper Manhattan for the Twin Cities. A lot has been written about O’Malley and Robert Moses, the government official who was known as “The Master Builder” because of all the infrastructure developments such as
highways, bridges, tunnels and parks that developed under his aegis. It quickly became a knee-jerk reaction for New York baseball fans from the World War II generation to vilify both men, who were at odds with each other. Now that 60 years have passed since the Dodgers and Giants moved to California, it is t i me to look at th i ngs a lit tle more dispassionately. O’Malley knew that he had to leave antiquated Ebbets Field, but he also desired that the Dodgers remain in Brooklyn. He wanted Moses to approve the building of a ballpark on the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic avenues, where Barclays Center now stands, because it was where the Brooklyn terminal for the Long Island Rail Road was located. Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk counties were all growing exponentially, largely at Brooklyn’s expense. Having a new facility across the street from Atlantic Ter minal would allow the Dodgers to draw b o t h Br o ok ly n it e s a n d suburbanites. Moses despised O’Malley’s idea and tried to sell him instead on the notion of building a stadium in Flushing Meadows. Moses tried to press upon O’Malley that the new Dodgers home would be located right off both the Grand Central Parkway and Van Wyck Expressway, and it would be served by the Flushing IRT elevated train line. Moses’ thinking actually was in sync with O’Malley’s on a lot of issues. The stumbling block was that the Dodgers owner refused to consider the idea of moving to Queens because he was the owner of the “Brooklyn” Dodgers. Moses didn’t budge and Robert Wagner, the New York City mayor at the time, could not find a way to resolve their disagreement.
Master builder Robert Moses pushed for the idea of a baseball stadium in Flushing Meadows Corona Park and tried to get the Dodgers to move there, but their owner wouldn’t agree, leading to the birth of the Mets. Their first owner — and biggest fan — was Joan Whitney Payson, who FILE PHOTO, LEFT, AND PHOTO BY SLGCGC / FLICKR was honored with this plaque in 1981.
Shea Stadium was six weeks old when this shot was taken during a night game against the FILE PHOTO Giants on May 29, 1964. The Mets won 4-2, improving their record to 13-30. Los Angeles mayor Norris Poulson was following the O’Malley-Moses imbroglio from 3,000 miles away. While LA was the center of the film industry, Poulson knew that luring a baseball team, particularly one from New York City, would really put his town on the map, and would spur growth in other areas. Keep in mind that this was still five years before the Beach Boys would start making hit records that truly glamorized the Southern California lifestyle. Poulson and O’Malley met clandestinely in both New York and LA during the early summer of 1957. The Dodgers owner was impressed with the potential of the Los Angeles market. Poulson also pitched the idea that O’Malley would be able to earn extra revenue by putting his games on cable television, a very fledgling industry. While the idea of cable was unheard of at the time in established Northeast cities, it was taking hold in rural areas where TV reception was a problem. Southern California was so huge an area that the growth of cable made sense. Poulson promised O’Malley that he would give the Dodgers the right to build on property located just north of Downtown LA off the 110 Freeway. The only problem was that the locale was in the middle of the Mexican-American neighborhood of Chavez Ravine. In a controversial move, Poulson used eminent domain to forcibly remove the residents of the area. That decision would cause such resentment that many Mexican Americans refused to attend
Dodgers games for years, and it wasn’t until the arrival of phenomenal Mexican pitcher Fernando Valenzuela that the rift truly started to heal. O’Malley was sold but he knew that the other team owners would never approve a relocation to distant Los Angeles unless he could convince another ballclub to move west with him. He spoke to his crosstown rival, Giants owner Stoneham, about moving to San Francisco. That city’s mayor at the time, George Christopher, wouldn’t refuse a major league baseball team that was dropped in his lap, but he wasn’t as obsessed as his mayoral counterpart 400 miles down the California coastline was. Rather than give Stoneham prime municipal property, Christopher offered to build a stadium in the more desolate southern part of the city near the airport. Stoneham did not do his due diligence. Had he done so he would have discovered that the Candlestick area was the one part of the City by the Bay that wasn’t well-served by the San Francisco Municipal Rail system. He would also learn much to his chagrin that the area was incredibly windy and could turn into an icebox even on summer nights. The tundra conditions for baseball were a key reason why attendance was long a problem for Stoneham, so much so that the Giants were on the verge of moving to Tampa in 1992. San Francisco eventually allowed subsequent Giants owner Peter Magowan the right to build continued on next page