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| Re: Tuscarora Almanac - October 8, 1974 - The Book of First Runs (1369442) | |||
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Re: Tuscarora Almanac - October 8, 1974 - The Book of First Runs |
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Posted by MATHA531 on Sat Oct 10 17:58:15 2015, in response to Re: Tuscarora Almanac - October 8, 1974 - The Book of First Runs, posted by Spider-Pig on Sat Oct 10 08:19:00 2015. It wasn't just Moses. Almost the entire adminisgtration of the city of New York was Manhattan centric and were opposed to having the ball park at Atlantic Flatbush. Moses, who was not an elected official, was willing to take the fall but...the reality was it was all irrelevant. Despite the fact Bruce Ratner included a housing component to the bjilding of Barclay Center which he never intended to build and despite the fact that despite his Manhattan centric view of the world, Bloomberg was a sports fan and helped bring Barclay Center to reality, it still took five years of litigation before construction began on Barclay Center due to the very same eminent domain laws. Would O'Malley have waited 5 years with the totally unethical offer he got from the politicians in LA? Besides, although Moses indeed was a putrid excuse for a human being, let's look at it from a practical view point. The Dodgers fan base was moving to LI and being replaced by a population that was far poorer. Would a 60,000 seat ball park at Atlantic/Flatbush have made sense? How sould the Dodgers fan base drive there with the nearest highway, the over used always crowded BQE more than a mile away and having to drive down Atlaantic Avenue to get to the ballpark.While I was a 10 year old boy at the time (and yes the trolleys had already stopped running in October 1956)and the last thing I wanted was to have to ride the subway to Atlantic Avenue, the thought of the team moving to Queens was sickening. However, the reality is that Brooklyn and Queens and Nassau County and Suffolk County are all part of one contiguous land mass (except in the extreme west where Newtown Creek separates Kings County from Queens County and these county lines simply reflect the way some Dutch and English towns were laid out in the 17th century. In the same way listening to the whinig of some of the Islander fans how terrible it is to come to Broolyn for Islander games (of course the only other alternative for the Islanders would have been Quebec Ity or Kansas City or Seattle), there would have been a period of adjustment but in my alternate history of the Brooklyn Dodgers, opening up the 1964 season at Flushing Meadows with the World's Fair next door would have been great and by now, it would have been no big deal. As much as I despise Robert Moses as a bad excuse for a human being, on this he was probably correct. A 1000 page book was written on the life and times of Robert Moses in the early 1970's; a very damning book including his decision to make sure the overpasses on the Northern and Southern State Parkways were deliberately constructed low to prevent buses from bringing poor people from the city slums to Moses' parks in Nassau county. But in any event there is only one small mention of Moses and the Dodgers in that book. There are lots of villains in the theft of the Brooklyn franchise from this area. But the biggest one will always be the greed of O'Malley and what I resent as somebody who was alive and able to remember that time and what the Dodgers meant to us in Brooklyn is when people claim the Dodgers were losing money in Brooklyn and attendance was poor, those are outright lies. The Dodgers were the biggest moneymakers in baseball at the time thanks to their telvision contract where every home game was on free television, black and white to be true, but on television as well as 2/3 of the road games while the Yankees and Giants had to share channel 11 so we only saw Giants and Yankees home games so Dodger television rights were bu far the biggest in baseball. Their attendance was leading the National League until the Braves moved to Milwaukee when they dropped to second and we now know the Milwaukee thing was an illusion. No, the Dodgers could have lasted a few more years at Ebbets Field but greed got the best of him and nobody in mlb stood up for the fans of Brooklyn; people like Ford Frick and Warren Giles who wantedd to go down in history as people who brought major league baseball to the Left Coast and damn the Brooklyn fans. All of them, but especially O'Malley are rotting in hell where they belong. |
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