I was reading a piece about Robert F. Wagner, Mayor of New York City in the 50s, and his creation of a Commission to bring National League baseball back to the city after the departure of the Dodgers and Giants for ‘fresh woods and pastures new’. (The result apparently was the Mets).
My question is why would baseball teams leave such a huge city with potentially massive crowds on tap to go somewhere smaller, where they would presumably not get such large attendance numbers? What other factors could possible weigh more than profits?
Actually as this site shows, both the Giants and Dodgers were handily outdrawn by Milwaukee, which of course is a lot smaller market than either SF or LA. Giant attendance fell from over a million in 1950 to 600,000 by 1957. Dodger attendance stayed steadily around a million customers, but considering they won six pennants in their last decade in Brooklyn they should have done a lot better.
So why the attendance problems? It’s usually attributed to their old middle class fanbase moving out to the suburbs. That meant they had to come back to the old neighborhood by car, and then as now cheap parking is impossible to find in NYC. Plus as Brooklyn and Harlem started urban decline few people wanted to go back to the old neighborhood anyway. There was some attempt to move them to different parts of New York but the local politicians had little interest in helping out. So why not move to the West Coast where baseball starved fans would help bring up attendance numbers and the local government would bend over backwards to help build them a stadium?
The Dodgers were losing money in Brooklyn, and were in a bad neighborhood in a small old ballpark. Robert Moses had made it clear that they weren’t getting a new ballpark in New York. Air travel had made it possible for Major League Baseball to expand to the west coast where there were large population centers, so the other baseball owners were in favor of the move. For things to work, they needed two teams in the same league on the west coast, not just one. They convinced Horace Stoneham to move his Giants to San Francisco at the same time that Walter O’Malley moved his Dodgers to Los Angeles. There was already a rivalry between the two cities that mirrored the historical rivalry between the teams. Also, the Polo Grounds (the Giants’ stadium in New York) had been built in 1911, so I’m sure Stoneham was happy to get a new ballpark.
That’s pretty much the case. The Dodgers wanted to build a new bigger stadium in Brooklyn but Robert Moses ended up queuing the whole deal. Unfortunately, O’ Malley got the blame and became a hated figure for a generation of Brooklynites.
This may well be apocryphal, but after Horace Stoneham announced that he was moving the Giants to San Francisco, a reporter supposedly said to him, “Mr. Stoneham, there’s a little boy outside crying because you’re taking his team away. What would you say to that boy?”
Stoneham’s allegedly replied that he’d the tell the boy, “Sorry, son, but I haven’t seen your old man at the ballpark in a while.”
True, but if yo uever watch footage of Roger Maris’ 61st homer, you’ll notice something: the stadium is NOT packed to the rafters!
Even the best team in baseball, with a guy about to set a huge record, couldn’t draw big crowds to the Bronx in 1961.
That tells you a lot about the state of baseball in general, and in New York, in particular. Baseball just wasn’t as big in the Fifties and Sixties as it is today. And believe it or not, when George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees in 1973, EVERYBODY assumed he was going to move them- probably to Florida (though maybe “only” to New Jersey). It was widely assumed that you COULDN’T get people to come to the Bronx for a ballgame any more.
Paid attendance for Maris’ 61st home run was 23,154, and most of them were piled into the right field stands.
It was the last Sunday of the season, a meaningless game except for Maris’ chance to break Ruth’s record.
57,824 showed up for the last Sunday the Yankees had a home game (Sept. 10, Game 145). The Mick hit his 53rd HR of the season that game and people were probably still hoping Mick would be the one to break the record at that point.
And for many it wasn’t even that. Due to baseball comissioner Ford Frick’s infamous “asterick decision” (that since Maris didn’t hit 60 homers in the same number of games as Ruth played, Maris would only get credit for the 162-game home run record), many if not most thought the record would remain Ruth’s.
You can make all the excuses you want, the fact remains, Yankee Stadium was RARELY sold out in the Fifties and Sixties. Even the departure of the Dodgers and Giants didn’t appreciably increase attendance.
In 1964, arguably the last year of the old Yankee dynasty, the team averaged 15,922 fans a game.
Favorite lousy attendance quirk: 413 people showed up at Yankee Stadium for a September Thursday afternoon game against the White Sox in their annus horribilis of 1966.
Based on the chart that installLSC posted earlier, even the best-drawing teams in the 1950s (which were almost exclusively teams in their first few years after relocating to a new city) weren’t drawing much above 25K a game (and those were usually in stadiums with much higher capacity).
I don’t know for certain, but I suspect that the relative (if not total) lack of night games in that era may have helped contribute to this.
There is a difference between losing money, and not making as much money as you’d like to. I doubt very much if Walter O’Malley, who owned the Dodgers and moved them to LA , ever lost a dime in his life. O’Malley didnt’ like the fact that Milwaukee and its 50,000 seat county-subsidized stadium was outdrawing the Dodgers and their 35,000 privately owned Ebbets Field. Los Angeles gave O’Malley free and well-located land in Chavez Ravine for the new stadium. NYC wasn’t going to match that deal.
Recommended reading:
Forever Blue: The True Story of Walter O’Malley, Baseball’s Most Controversial Owner,and the Dodgers of Brooklyn and Los Angeles Link
Bill Veeck, Jr. complained about this in his autobigraphy, Veeck as in Wreck. Maris’ chase after the home run record was an opportunity to get the public excited about baseball, but Frick actually tried to get people to ignore it.
1947: 1.8 million
1948: 1.4 million
1949: 1.6 million
1950: 1.2 million
1951: 1.3 million
1952: 1.1 million
1953: 1.2 million
1954: 1.0 million
1955: 1.0 million
1956: 1.2 million
1957: 1.0 million
Stagnating, at best. Then they move to LA:
1958: 1.8 million
1959: 2.1 million
1960: 2.3 million
1961: 1.8 million
1962: 2.8 million
Well, it seems pretty obvious why they moved. In Brooklyn, fielding the best team in the National League, attendance was going nowhere. In Los Angeles, though the team was initially actually LESS successful - they won the 1959 World Series but did not win the pennant again until 1963 - it doubled.
IIRC, the other owners didn’t need to convince Stoneham to move the Giants, he was already planning to move them, but to Minnesota. Their “convincing” was to get him to move specifically to San Francisco so the Dodgers wouldn’t be so lonely.
Back in those days though, 1M in attendance was considered great, even though it was down from the post-war boom, even if looking at it now the attendance seems small. Baseball learned a heck of a lot about marketing in the 70s & 80s & 90s.
Another thing to consider is that the Dodgers played at the LA Coliseum (which held over 90,000 fans for baseball) during their first few years in Southern California as opposed to tiny Ebbets Field (capacity between 31,000-34,000). Even Dodger Stadium (where the team played in 1962) has about 55,000 which is still significantly more than Ebbets.
