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Many people were wondering when New York Daily News columnist would come out with a piece about how bad it was that Walter O'Malley was inducted into the Hall of Fame.
I think that Hamill must have had this saved up on his computer and just hit F9 + O to send it in.
Some highlights:
Forget the dithering about Barry Bonds. Send apologies to Pete Rose. Warm up a place for Shoeless Joe Jackson. All moral arguments about who belongs in Cooperstown are over forever. Walter O'Malley has been voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
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They included my father. He was an immigrant from Northern Ireland who did not become an American by reading the Federalist Papers. He became an American by reading the sports pages of the Daily News.
His James Madison was Dick Young. His team was the Brooklyn Dodgers, and most of all, the team that played together 10 years after Jack Roosevelt Robinson, No. 42, first walked onto the sweet grass of Ebbets Field.
If Dick Young were James Madison, we would have had no constitutional right to root for Tom Seaver on the Mets.
Let's not spread the gospel - let's keep it for ourselves!
With all due respect to Jon Weisman and all other LA fans, I may dislike the Dodgers even more than I do the Red Sox. And one of the reasons is that I am so damn sick and tired of the overblown "Boys of Summer" noble-loser mystical bullshit that surrounds that Brooklyn team.
Good team. There have been lots of good teams. Old Brooklyn Dodger fans seem to feel that theirs is the ne plus ultra of nostalgia.
Another thing is their poor-me act gets really old. They act like they're the only city that ever lost a team. What about the Giants leaving? What about Montreal? What about all the Braves fans in Boston? What about the A's leaving Philly and then KC and now leaving Oakland? What about the St. Louis Browns? The Braves leaving Milwaukee? None of those teams had any fans, I guess. Then again, judging from their attendance track record, neither did the Brooklyn Dodgers.
The Dodgers in Brooklyn averaged better than 20,000 fans only three times, and never after 1950. In Los Angeles, they averaged under that only three times.
As to the other cities which lost teams, apparently the media's East Coast bias has been in effect for a long time.
That said, I do think Roger Kahn's "The Boys of Summer" was a classic baseball book.
And judging the Dodgers impact in brooklyn by attendance or the state of ebbets field isn't a complete benchmark I don't think.
Don't get me wrong, I couldn't be happier that they went to LA. And I couldn't be happier that O'Malley is in the HOF... calling him a pioneer in professional sports for west coast expansion isn't an overstatement. But discounting hatred/sentimentalism/nostalgia for the Dodgers here in NY as some over inflated figment of people's imagination is also incorrect.
Just a few thoughts for an old post that I don't think anyone is reading any longer...
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