IF THE DODGERS HAD STAYED IN BROOKLYN

by D Fowler

Volume II

Brooklyn Dodgers Part 6 - Free Agent Transactions

The Pacific Coast League teams had been busy trying to grab up everybody they could. They drew a few Washington Senators and Kansas City Athletics and Philadelphia Phillies; players on teams who it was figured wouldn’t compete for years. Once a few started, more went with them. These weren’t the greatest stars; in fact, only a couple who had been All-Stars for more than one season ever went west. However, the possibility of wealth was too great, especially for the borderline players. These were quickly grabbed, and the depth on major league clubs suffered.

Days before spring training, 1958, major league baseball watched as Rocky Colavito was traded from San Diego to Seattle, in another move designed by the ambitious Emil Sick to bring baseball to Seattle. "Colavito could break Mantle’s mark someday," Sick noted, "and I don’t care if he gets an asterisk, he will still have set the record, in my mind." Rocky’s four home run performance in early May of that year did get an asterisk, though he never even hit 50 home runs in a season.

When the Hollywood Stars inked several unsigned youngsters to minor league deals, promising that they’d make the majors in 1958 they had fired one of the biggest shots of the war so far. In late May, they made good on their word; three rookies began with Hollywood, including Jim Kaat, who would go on to a long career that would end in 1983. He wasn’t very effective that year, but he was in what was being passed off as a major league.

When several members of the Yankees refused to accept a trade to the lowly Athletics, though, and opted to leave for Seattle, that was an even bigger salvo. The Seattle Rainiers were sued for interference with a contract, while they charged back that the reserve clause was illegal. They were challenging the clause with the hope that they could get even more free agents.

The Yankees decided to do something clever, then. They rescinded the trade with the Athletics, and sent a trade proposal to Seattle for the same players! They thought maybe they could get Rocky Colavito out of this, and have a Mantle-like player, anyway.

Now, the Rainiers were in a quandary. Do they accept the trade offer, or reject it, thereby stating they didn’t really want the players. If they did that, they’d be gambling on the reserve clause being deemed illegal.

Sick was ambitious, but he was also shrewd; he had to have been to build Seattle baseball during the depression. He wouldn’t gamble on such an uncertain legal matter. They decided to accept the trade. Any other deals had been under the table, but by forcing the trade and press release and everything else to call it a major league deal, in a way the PCL would gain acceptance.

This action, in the words of one author in the 1990s, "established what was important to these owners, the reputation as a major league. The challenge of the reserve clause was something no owner really wanted to try, if they could avoid it, and Seattle’s ownership realized that if they kept that up, they could win the battle but lose the war, dooming the whole PCL attempt to become a major league."

Suddenly, with that one act, the PCL was seen as a potential rival to the majors. This, of course, led to expansion, so there were 20 teams, and not 24 or more. And, a 162-game schedule was established.

Seattle made the prime choice, flight-wise, for an American League team now, with the Senators close to moving to Minnesota. Besides, if Sick fell in line, getting his club to become an A.L. club, he would bring the others. The PCL was quasi-major league, but they were still at the level of the Kansas City Athletics or Chicago Cubs. The Rainiers were coupled with Los Angeles’ Angels, while the N.L. got the San Francisco Seals and Los Angeles Stars.

With almost whole teams being invited on board the big league bandwagon - though there was a small expansion draft - the PCL became, once again, a AAA league, the highest level of the minors. But, the cities involved, and the owners, had become major league owners.

The only sad part was, Emil Sick would die only a few years later, in very late 1963, without having seen an A.L. pennant winner. But, he died with something that he cherished - the title of owner of an American League baseball team. And, some even called the man who managed to buy a struggling team, build a ballpark, and turn the club into a winner during the Great Depression the "father of Pacific Coast baseball." It was a fitting tribute.

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Brooklyn Dodgers Part 8 - Musical Franchises

The year is 1965.

The Milwaukee Braves had announced a move to Atlanta. Suddenly, a very large and growing city - Houston - seemed to need a team, as Atlanta was without a true geographic rival; nobody in Georgia considered Washington, D.C. to be a Southern city, even if a team did move there; and they tried to lure a few teams.

Speaking of D.C., Washingtonians continued to demand a team, and Congress was always thinking about that antitrust exemption baseball had.

So it was that in 1965, Charlie Finley, who had bought the struggling L.A. Stars, began complaining that the expanded minor league park his club played in was too small. He wanted a new stadium, or he would move to Houston. Or, wait, no, maybe it would be Washington.

Then, Milwaukee got into the act. They tried to court Finley, promising a fan base that was second to none - the Braves had always drawn well, and were even drawing well in their last season there before the move to Atlanta - plus a lot more. Besides, weren’t the Cubs a lot closer a rival? Chicagoans could come up for the games, too. Atlantans would not go to Houston for games.

The summer of ‘65 featured not only those cities, but also Dallas, San Diego, and even Oakland, which promised a new Coliseum, weighing in on the desire to lure the Stars away from L.A.., or the Rainiers away from Seattle. The Kansas City Athletics also were in danger of moving, before Ewing Kauffman agreed to buy the perennial doormat, which he did in 1966.

Expansion became the key buzzword around baseball again. Bill Veeck weighed in with an unheard of suggestion - split the major leagues into two divisions, and add a playoff series. This, of course, was unheard of - the team finishing first had to win the pennant, didn’t they?

However, clubs like the Athletics bemoaned the fact they could finish 10th or 9th so much - imagine if they finished 12th! And, where would it end? The Phillies had gone 49-113 back in 1961, finishing almost 50 games back and being eliminated mathematically in early August but for all intents and purposes in early May. What if the league had had 12 teams; they never would have had a chance..

The Brooklyn Dodgers were beating the Minnesota Twins in the Series in 7 - with Sandy Koufax, the Brooklyn native, winning on two-days’ rest in the finale - when Finley got what he wanted from L.A., a new ball park there and not in a suburb like the Angels now had. L.A. was a big city, and could support two clubs; plus he’d known all along he could never get the revenue elsewhere he could there.

However, the Rainiers were different. All winter long, they dithered between Seattle and the cities with the most to offer, Milwaukee, Oakland, and Washington (with new RFK Stadium). Finally, in spring, the ownership (which in OTL went bankrupt a couple years later with the expansion club) went bankrupt, and the team moved to become the Washington Senators.

Now that things had settled down with the wandering franchises, baseball decided to wait a couple years to expand. In 1969, Montreal and Houston would go into the National League, with Milwaukee and San Diego in the American. The N.L. had wanted Milwaukee, to replace the Braves, but if the A.L. had gotten an Eastern and a Western team, they could have had to shift Detroit to the A.L. West! And, the N.L. had wanted Houston as a stop out west for Atlanta.

1969 divisions, in order of finish (*=pennant winner, **=Series winner)

AL East: Baltimore**, Detroit, Boston, New York, Washington, Cleveland

AL West: Minnesota, L.A. Angels, K.C. Athletics, Chicago, San Diego, Milwaukee

N.L. East: Atlanta*, New York, Pittsburgh, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Montreal

N.L. West: Chicago, Cincinnati, L.A. Stars, St. Louis, San Francisco, Houston

(Jenkins wins game 4 over Phil Niekro on 3 days rest to force game 5, but Tom Seaver - who didn’t start till game 2 b/c of pitching so much lately to ensure the Braves overtook the Giants - beats the Cubs in Wrigley 3-1. The Orioles go on to down the Braves in 6. But don’t worry, Cub fans, your team will be winning a pennant sometime. Maybe not when you think, either.

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Brooklyn Dodgers Part 9 - Designated Winners

Mickey Mantle faced a decision as 1970 dawned. He had 591 home runs. He was well short of Ruth, and Mays and Aaron would surely be well ahead of him by the time their careers were over. One of those two might even pass the Babe.

However, though the Reds' outfield was an excellent young one, they wanted to keep Mantle on as a part time player. The Yankees would have even welcomed him back. Then, Charlie Finley had an idea.

"I don't know that he could play first base too well, with his knees as bad as they are," Finley said, "and we've got a great young star in Reggie Jackson to patrol right, so he won't go there even if his shoulder does get better. But, you know, all baseball could use a position built for an aged slugger like him." And so it was that Finley started to push for the designated hitter idea.

Offense had gone up some in baseball, though the A.L.'s was still down in 1969 compared to the N.L.. However, the main thing, as he said, was to utilize a spot for a team to let an aged slugger continue for a couple more useful years. It would be a great boost to baseball, he proclaimed.

Owners weren't quite sold on it. While Finley hadn't earned as much animosity by actually moving his team, (or threatening it quite as often as OTL) the N.L. was filled with perhaps more purists than the A.L.. The Wrigleys, O'Malley, Stoneham, and various others all wanted to keep pitchers batting. After all, the great hitting pitchers, in the last decade, had all been in their league - Drystdale, Gibson, now Carlton. And, Musial, Ott, and many others had not needed a DH rule.

Finley's idea was scrubbed, just as it had been when suggested once before, decades ago, in the N.L.. "It's a nice idea for youth leagues, maybe, to get everyone a turn, but even then, it's dubious," most said.

Mantle wound up signing with the Stars for 1970, anyway. He ended up hitting one home run in very limited duty, before retiring for good in June. Finley wouldn't give up trying to get the DH into the league. However, while Willie Mays wasn't able to be a DH, and was a shadow of his former self in center, he still performed well enough, improving his home run total to 675 before retiring in 1973, and going out a world champion after Finley’s Los Angeles club won a tough 7 game Series over the Orioles. Nolan Ryan won two, after going 23-13 in the regular season.

That year, Finley had gotten the leagues to finally agree to add the DH to the All-Star Game as a compromise; who wanted to see a pitcher bad in an exhibition? Still, despite all the controversy, the coaching battles, the messy firing of Dick Williams after his Stars finished 2nd to the Reds in 1972, and complaints about the ballpark, even after a new one was built, the Stars could be confident of one thing. After world titles in 1973 and 1974, they could be called designated winners.

The lack of a Met team going with a 5-man rotation, though, and with the most successful clubs being those that still used four-man rotations for the most part, meant that the move to five-man starting rotations wasn't nearly as fast, and this would have interesting repercussions, as pitchers were not throwing as much as decades ago - and would continue to throw less with video games and other things taking their time. And yet, once in the minors, and sometimes college, they could be exposed to going on three days' rest more often. Relief aces would become important, but for different reasons - pitchers averaging 36-38 starts a season would need some rest. But, it made sense to use your best four starters in the rotation, and not five. After all, that's how Earl Weaver and the other great managers were doing it.

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Brooklyn Dodgers Part 10 - Welcome Back, Kotter & the baseball/TV marriage

The Astrodome was a concept begun in early 1968 as promised back when Houston tried to attract a team. The Braves and Stars had played a series of exhibitions between spring training and the regular season in Houston in 1966-1968, and discovered that the region was too hot even in early April, and too filled with insects.

However, grass just wasn’t growing there in 1969 after the first few weeks, when the glare from the glass roof made it too hard to see fly balls. The covering looked good, but they needed something besides dirt on which to play.

Thus, there were talks about creating an artificial surface on which to play. However, that would take a while, and they didn’t have that much time. Stadiums had to be built in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The NFL’s relatively new Bengals certainly didn’t want to share the same ball field in Cincinnati, and so had had their own stadium constructed. Now, the same thing would probably happen in those two cold-weather cities. That way, the baseball clubs, in the heat of pennant races, would not have games decided by the messing up of the field from football games.

In Philly and Pittsburgh, as had been done in Cincinnati a decade before, stadiums along the lines of Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium (or OTL’s Shea Stadium) were built, in which the football teams could play if they wanted. But, these parks were built with sightlines and dimensions more suited to baseball; and, they had their differences; you could tell where you were.

However, football teams wanted their own fields, and baseball clubs wanted them on their own fields. The football teams were much more likely to use artificial surfaces, though some major league baseball teams experimented with it for a while. By 1977, only the Royals, Cardinals, Astros and Expos used artifical turf; and the Royals really only used it so the field would dry quicker after the sudden rainstorms that could come up on the Plains. The White Sox and Seals had tried it and found it wasn’t helpful to them.

However, this meant a slight lowering in offense from what might have been had balls not been able to zoom through the infield on Astroturf. This didn’t keep Rod Carew from batting .381 in 1977 for the Twins, nor George Brett from hitting .390 in 1980 for Kansas City. (With no unbalanced schedule, he gets to face poor pitching teams like the Twins and Padres more, so with poorer teams than in Carew’s AL West of ‘77 the lack of expansion is evened out, whereas it’s not quite for Carew.) But, baseball wasn’t drawing the fans they had hoped.

Bill Veeck would make another push in the A.L. in the 1976 season for the DH, after buying the White Sox in early 1975. Before that, though, baseball saw a unique opportunity.

A TV show based on comedian Gabe Kaplan’s high school years, "Welcome Back, Kotter," was starting in the fall of ‘75. One of the Sweathogs, a group of ruffians from the streets of Brooklyn in Kaplan’s character’s class, was already going to love sports. But, there was some considerable question whether he’d be more plausible liking basketball or baseball better.

Then, the Dodgers chimed in. Instead of having Freddie Washington always bouncing a basketball, why not have him in a Brooklyn jacket and playing baseball? One of his things could be bouncing a baseball off the chalkboard and trying to field it, pretending he was taking infield practice. And, of course, he’d dream of playing for his home town team, which was still the heart of the community.

Producers decided to give it a try - he could always ditch it for basketball later. But, the audience loved it. Fred Travelena’s character was an instant hit, and the Dodgers made sure to secure seats right next to the dugout on the first base side at O’Malley Stadium for him.

When the Dodgers signed Reggie Jackson before the 1977 season (OTL they called a couple weeks after the Yankees had signed him, and he remarked in a book that he might have been wearing Dodger blue if they get to him first), Reggie made a surprise appearance on "Welcome Back, Kotter." It became natural for Brooklyn players to be mentioned throughout the series, and even for some to appear at times. When Kaplan left the show in 1978, Tommy Lasorda even taught his history class once during the winter of 1978-’79; what was even neater was that, though they didn’t plan it that way, he’d led the Dodgers to their first world title since 1963 a couple months before the appearance. He made a couple other appearances that year.

A good team in the New York area, whether the Dodgers or Giants, through the ‘60s and early ‘70s had really helped baseball, but this drew even more interest. And, of course, the series finale in the spring of 1980, right before baseball season began, was an hour that wouldn’t soon be forgotten. Simpleton Horshack having his first child with his bride, the Sweathogs’ graduation, and of course Washington getting signed to a contract, though a mistake by Epstein almost breaks the Sweathogs apart for good before they reconcile at the end; Epstein had unwittingly gotten a Giants’ scout wanting to sign Washington. And, of course, there was no way Washington would ever sign with the hated Giants!

And, oh, those Giants. They weren’t left out of the picture during Steinbrenner’s antics or the Dodgers’ close loss to the Phillies in ‘77 (since they sign Jackson, they don’t sign Reggie Smith) or their pennant and Series win over the Athletics in ‘78. No, now that the Dodgers had made themselves a new household name, and a number of other, smaller market ball clubs were using TV shows to market themselves, the New York Giants would have their own interesting times when, after three years in probate, the team was finally sold by Stoneham in very early 1979, to a rich and rising real estate tycoon.

A man by the name of Donald Trump.