Roz and Da Bums

It is incredibly hard to believe there was anyone alive yesterday who had a hand to getting the Brooklyn Dodgers, and by extension the New York Giants baseball teams to leave rowdy New York for the land of wine, produce and sunshine that is California. But there was.

Those New Yorkers who remember those teams playing in their respective dumps are long in the tooth now. Two of the octogenarians who comprise The Assembled at the racetrack remember going to Dodger games at Ebbets Field, that wooden bandbox in Brooklyn that would burn to the ground if someone so much as lit lighter fluid on a seat. They were brought up in Queens, parts of which are so adjacent that they may as well be in Brooklyn.

The principals that had a hand in the decision to move the teams are long dead. Walter O'Malley, the owner of the Dodgers passed away from a heart attack decades ago, which the scorned fans consider an anatomical impossibility, since he had no heart.

Robert Moses, The arrogant NYC Power Broker who refused to get behind O'Malley's plan to build a domed stadium at the confluence of Fourth, Flatbush and DeKalb Avenues in downtown Brooklyn, took a helicopter ride in his 90s to look at all the infrastructure he was instrumental in building, then went quietly into the night, much to the delight of many.

NYC's Mayor Wagner couldn't get a compromise between Moses (who could, he wasn't Jesus) and O'Malley, so O'Malley started to cast his eyes westward, which was really prescient since that's where the post-war population was headed, and has continued for decades. My father used to tell me that any of the neighbors who moved to California never moved back. No one did.

But being New Yorkers, no one here ever considered who at the West Coast end might have been pulling the strings. Until you read the obituary of Roz Wyman, a young woman in her 20s! who loved baseball, who was a freshly elected LA City Councilwoman (the youngest, and only the second woman), who pulled the levers at the Los Angeles end that secured the deal to get O'Malley to sign on the dotted line, do we now learn of all the characters involved in the Great Migration, or The Great Steal. And she was alive yesterday.

Roz Wyman, Key Player in Moving Dodgers to Los Angeles, Dies at 92

Yes, the fresh-faced young woman pictured above was, as Peter O'Malley, Walter's son and successor owner would tell anyone who would listen, his father trusted Roz, and while other people claimed to have sealed the deal, it was she who "deserves all the credit"

Horace Stoneham, the owner of the New York Giants was sweet-talked into moving west by O'Malley so the clubs could play each other without a lot of travel. Walter got sunny California and a sweetheart deal from the city to build Dodger Stadium that rivaled the purchase of Manhattan from the Native Americans for $24 of trinkets not yet made in China.

Walter famously got Chavez Ravine as the site to build Dodger Stadium. Chavez Ravine was long the site of housing for Latinos, but it 1952 was ordered cleared for a housing development. Then, as now, people were pushed around in the name of progress and urban renewal. The housing project never got built, so the vacant land was just waiting for an O'Malley to be welcomed in with blueprints. 

Perhaps ironically, when Ebbets field was demolished, a housing project was built there. As was when the Polo Grounds finally bit the dust.

It took a lot longer for the Polo Grounds to be rendered for scrap metal. It hung on as the home of the New York Titans, New York's AFL entry, and the first home of the Mets in the early 60s as they awaited the construction of what would be Shea Stadium in Flushing Meadow. 

Shea Stadium was a product of William T. Shea, a partner in a well-connected law firm of Shea, Gould, Climenko, and Joan Payson, the owner of the Mets (The Metropolitans) who had been lobbing for years to get a National League back in NYC.

Mrs. Payson owned champion thoroughbreds as well as a baseball team. She adorned Willie Mays and was heart broken like millions of others when the team was uprooted from upper Manhattan and whisked 3,000 miles away, so far away that the box scores from their night games didn't make the early edition of New York papers. Life was rough.

Joan, ever the Great Compromiser, adopted orange and blue colors for her Mets to signify their ties to their National League predecessors. Blue for the Dodgers; Orange for the Giants. Mike Repole, a relatively young billionaire from the proceeds from Vitamin Water who grew up in Queens, is such a Mets fan that his Repole Stable colors are a distinctive combination of orange and blue. Mike's horses do a good deal better than his Mets, winning multiple races at the highest levels.

Mrs. Payson finally got Willie Mays back in NYC as a member of the Mets in the early 70s. Mays of course was at the end of his "Say Hey" career, but he was still adorned by all those missed him.

Richard Sandomir's NYT obituary for Roz Wyman tells us baseball and politics were welded in Roz's life starting in her college years at USC when she drove the senate candidate Helen Gahagan Douglas around town as she campaigned and lost to Richard Nixon in 1950.

Roz became the youngest person ever elected to the LA City Council in 1953, serving 12 years, years of course she worked with Mayor Norris Poulson as she played O'Malley like a fiddle, simultaneously dangling a deal to the Giants as O'Malley waffled.

In the end, she got the LA City Council to approve the terms of a deal to O'Malley (who many correctly believed was getting too much in the deal) before O'Malley himself made a firm commitment to LA. But once the vote was in, O'Malley packed the teams' bats, balls and uniforms, and convinced Horace Stoneham to play in damp, foggy Candlestick Park in San Francisco as he basked in the sun of Southern California. And thus, the first Major League teams west of St. Louis came to be anchored in California, eventually followed by three more MLB teams, supported by the nation's largest statehood population. If location is everything, then timing is as well.

Roz remained active in California Democratic politics for the rest of her life, admitting that her hobby was the Democratic Party. 

Baseball stadiums across the country have made bronze likenesses of favorite players to adorn their entrance plazas. Tommy Lasorda, longtime manager of the Dodgers, had his own candidate: "What this lady did lady did for baseball in this city...they should erect a monument to her." He's right.

Because if the jilted, adult gang back in New York, who are now basically either cremated or pushing up grass in Green-Wood Cemetery knew what she had dome, they would have burned her in effigy. Maybe worse.

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