We wrote about Peter Golenbock's Bums back in November 2022. That book is an oral history of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and one of its central characters is Walter O'Malley, the owner who moved the team to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. In Golenbock's telling, O'Malley is the villain of the story - the guy who ripped the heart out of Brooklyn for money.
Michael D'Antonio's Forever Blue: The True Story of Walter O'Malley argues that story is incomplete, and in important ways just wrong. We read it in May 2025 and it changed our mind about several things. Full notes on our wiki: Forever Blue.
The Golenbock Version
The short version of the Bums narrative on O'Malley:
- O'Malley was a lawyer, not a baseball man - he came into the organization representing the Brooklyn Trust Company, which held the mortgage on Ebbets Field
- He maneuvered Branch Rickey out of the ownership structure in the early 1950s
- He decided he wanted a new stadium, didn't get exactly the deal he wanted from New York, and packed up and left for Los Angeles
- The move destroyed a piece of Brooklyn that has never come back
This is the version most Brooklynites believe. It is also the version that appears in almost every English-language baseball history book we have read. The move is treated as a betrayal, and O'Malley as the man who made it.
The D'Antonio Version
D'Antonio had access to O'Malley's personal papers, which is unusual - most O'Malley biographies rely on public records and the accounts of people who hated him. What he found argues for a different framing.
Ebbets Field was genuinely broken. By the mid-1950s, the ballpark was over 40 years old, seated only about 32,000 people, had almost no parking, and sat in a neighborhood where the demographics of the Dodgers' fanbase were rapidly leaving. The postwar suburban migration meant that fans who had walked to Ebbets Field in the 1930s were now driving in from Long Island, and there was nowhere to put the cars. Television revenue was starting to matter, and Ebbets Field was hard to broadcast from. The problem O'Malley was trying to solve was real.
He tried very hard to stay in Brooklyn. For years - the majority of the 1950s - O'Malley was pushing for a new, privately financed stadium in Brooklyn. His preferred site was the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, which is where the Barclays Center sits today. He wanted a domed stadium, which would have been the first domed stadium in the world if he had gotten to build it. He was not asking the city for money. He was asking the city to help him assemble the land, which required using the Title I condemnation mechanism that Robert Moses controlled.
Robert Moses said no. Repeatedly. Moses was the parks commissioner and the most powerful unelected official in New York. He controlled Title I. He would not use it for O'Malley's Atlantic and Flatbush site. What Moses offered instead was Flushing Meadows in Queens - the future site of Shea Stadium, home of the Mets. O'Malley did not want to be in Queens. He wanted to be in Brooklyn.
The negotiations dragged on. The Los Angeles Coliseum group started courting O'Malley, hard. The math for LA was overwhelming: enormous market, no existing team, willing to help with land, huge television territory. And still O'Malley tried to get the Brooklyn deal.
Eventually he ran out of patience and moved.
Robert Moses
The person who comes out worst in D'Antonio's telling is Robert Moses. If you have read Robert Caro's The Power Broker, this will not be surprising - Moses shaped and reshaped the physical form of New York City for decades, and a lot of his decisions were driven by personal aesthetics and personal vendettas rather than any coherent civic vision.
Moses had specific ideas about where major sports facilities belonged (in Flushing Meadows, near his beloved World's Fair site) and no interest in letting O'Malley build somewhere else. He had the power to block the Brooklyn deal, and he used it.
If Moses had said yes to Atlantic and Flatbush in 1955, the Brooklyn Dodgers might still be in Brooklyn. That is not a speculative claim - it is straightforwardly what the sequence of events shows.
What Changed Our Mind
Reading Bums in 2022, we came away with the standard Brooklyn grievance. O'Malley did it. He is the villain.
Reading Forever Blue in 2025, we came away with something messier. O'Malley made the final decision, yes, and he benefited enormously from moving to LA. But the choice was between "move to LA" and "keep losing money in a decaying ballpark I cannot replace because the city won't let me." Given those two options, the LA move looks less like villainy and more like the outcome of a specific political failure - a failure that Robert Moses owns as much as O'Malley does.
The historical villains of Brooklyn baseball, in something like descending order, are probably:
- Robert Moses, for using his power to block the deal that would have kept the team
- The New York political establishment, for letting Moses hold that much unaccountable power in the first place
- Walter O'Malley, for taking the LA offer once Brooklyn was effectively closed
- Horace Stoneham (owner of the New York Giants), whose move to San Francisco was more purely opportunistic and gets less attention because the Giants' fanbase never had the emotional grip on Manhattan that the Dodgers had on Brooklyn
D'Antonio is not making O'Malley a hero. He is making him a businessman in an impossible situation, which is a much more interesting portrait than either "villain" or "hero."
Two Books, One Story
The reason to read both books is that they are answering different questions. Golenbock is asking: what did it feel like to lose the Dodgers? D'Antonio is asking: how did that actually happen? Both questions have real answers, and neither answer is complete without the other.
If you can only read one, read Golenbock - the oral history format does something no biography can, which is put you in the room with the fans who lived it. But if you cared enough about that book to still be thinking about it three years later, Forever Blue is what you read next. It's the book that turns the tragedy into a particular kind of history: a decision that could have gone the other way, and didn't, because one specific person with too much power made it not go the other way.
References
- Our wiki notes: Forever Blue
- D'Antonio, Michael. Forever Blue: The True Story of Walter O'Malley, Baseball's Most Controversial Owner, and the Dodgers of Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Riverhead Books, 2009.
- Our earlier take: Reading Bums
- Robert Moses background: Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker. Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.