The late owner Walter O’Malley was added to Dodger Stadium’s Ring of Honor before Saturday evening’s game against the Pittsburgh Pirates on the second night of the team’s Alumni Weekend.
O’Malley’s son Peter represented the O’Malley family at the event and accepted the honor on behalf of his father. The ceremony included the playing of an approximately four-minute tribute video narrated by the late Dodger broadcaster Vin Scully.
O’Malley is the 15th member of the Ring of Honor, alongside the retired numbers of players Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Jim Gilliam, Don Sutton, Sandy Koufax, Fernando Valenzuela, Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson and Don Drysdale, managers Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda, Scully and fellow broadcaster Jaime JarrÃn.
O’Malley’s association with the Dodgers began in 1932, when he was assigned to the team’s Board of Directors by the Brooklyn Trust Co., at a time when the team was in arrears paying its mortgage loans on its stadium, Ebbets Field.
O’Malley became the Dodgers’ vice president and general counsel in 1943, succeeding Wendell L. Willkie, the 1940 Republican presidential nominee.
O’Malley began buying shares of the team’s stock in 1944 and became its majority owner in 1950.
Upon taking control of the team, O’Malley made finding a replacement for Ebbets Field, which opened in 1913, a priority. However, he was unable to reach agreement with New York City officials on a new stadium site and announced in 1957 that the team would move, breaking the hearts of its loyal fans.
“The thing that annoyed the people in Brooklyn was that the Dodgers were still drawing,” the late New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist Dave Anderson said in a 2008 interview with City News Service in connection with O’Malley’s induction to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The Dodgers drew in excess of 1 million fans for each of their final 13 seasons in Brooklyn.
By comparison, the Giants, who joined the Dodgers in moving west following the 1957 season, drew 824,112, 629,179 and 653,923 fans in their final three seasons in New York.
“There was very little emotional reaction to the Giants leaving” for San Francisco, Anderson said.
Anderson, who covered the Dodgers for the Brooklyn Eagle, said he made a distinction between “Walter O’Malley the devil and Walter O’Malley the saint.”
“I, like everybody, resented the fact that he took the Dodgers away from Brooklyn,” Anderson said. “He did a terrible thing for Brooklyn. He did a great thing for baseball by bringing baseball to California.”
The Dodgers quickly captivated Los Angeles upon their arrival, setting several attendance records, including being the first team to draw 3 million fans in a season.
O’Malley’s legacy includes:
— bringing Major League Baseball to the West Coast;
— construction of Dodger Stadium as Major League Baseball’s first privately financed stadium since Yankee Stadium in 1923;
— keeping ticket prices the same from 1958, the Dodgers’ first season in Los Angeles, through 1975, with a top price of $3.50;
— enhancing and modernizing the Dodgertown complex in Vero Beach, Florida, which served as the Dodgers’ spring training site from 1948 through 2008; and
— presiding over an organization known for success on the field, stability in key positions and being a model franchise from a business standpoint.
In O’Malley’s 38 1/2 seasons as majority owner, the Dodgers won 11 National League pennants and four World Series championships, while employing just three managers (Chuck Dressen, Alston and Lasorda) and three general managers (Buzzie Bavasi, Fresco Thompson and Al Campanis).
O’Malley was ranked as the eighth most influential “off the field” person in 20th century sports by a panel assembled by ESPN in 1999 in connection with its “Sports Century” series. He was also named that year as the 11th most powerful person in sports in the 20th century by The Sporting News.
O’Malley died Aug. 9, 1979, at the age of 75.