Baseball Goes West: The Dodgers, the Giants, and the Shaping of the Major Leagues by Lincoln A. Mitchell (review)

Readers can be forgiven if they begin to think that the baseball tale most often told is no longer the Doubleday myth, the Called Shot, or the demolition of the color line but rather the story. The story, sometimes anguished and sometimes celebratory, of how the Dodgers and Giants left Brooklyn and Manhattan for Los Angeles and San Francisco. One can argue that the historiography on this subject, both popular and academic, is now large enough to begin to assuage the angst of the fans left behind, still vibrant more than sixty years after the fact. It begins to reward those on the West Coast who saw major league baseball not leaving but coming to them.

Start with the enormous selection of literature, some texts no more than nostalgia, asserting a special relationship between Brooklyn the team and Brooklyn the one-time city. Leaven with solid work like Andrew Goldblatt’s The Giants and the Dodgers (2003). Add the conventional wisdom that Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley still stands as one of the twentieth century’s most evil men. Temper with Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker (1974), Neil J. Sullivan’s The Dodgers Move West (1987), Paul Hirsch’s 2011 essay, “Walter O’Malley Was Right,” and Andy McCue’s biography of O’Malley, Mover and Shaker (2014). Season with newer work like Michael Fallon’s Dodgerland (2016), Robert Garrett’s Home Team (2017) and Gerald Podair’s City of Dreams (2017). What more need or might be said?

Lincoln Mitchell, a San Franciscan working in New York (irony?), thinks he has the answer. Stating it clearly, he writes “The most immediate impact of the move west was that it greatly expanded the sense of what was possible for big league baseball” (36). This is indeed a new wrinkle. It posits that major league baseball was so conservative in the early 1950s that anything short of the “courageous and smart” decisions made by O’Malley and Giants owner Horace Stoneham would have condemned the business of baseball to continued decline (18). Mitchell asserts that “the decision by O’Malley and Stoneham to move west was absolutely central to the making of modern Major League Baseball (MLB), and that those moves helped baseball continue to grow domestically, maintain a singularly important niche and role in American culture, and become the increasingly global institution that it is today” (4).

This is an intriguing idea, well worth exploring in detail, even if it implies that O’Malley and Stoneham participated in a venture which had implications they themselves might not have fully grasped. The argument’s components include minimizing the impact of earlier franchise shifts, like the Braves to Milwaukee, the Browns/Orioles to Baltimore, and the Athletics to Kansas City. Another is establishing the notion that fans of the Pacific Coast League (PCL), who held their brand of baseball to be “major league,” would not have welcomed anything less than two excellent, competitive teams. Mitchell also considers the counterfactual. The PCL could have been made more robust and elevated to a third major league. Two lesser clubs could have relocated. Major league Baseball could have expanded from its two eight-team leagues and put two new clubs on the West Coast. But none of these things happened. Had the Dodgers and Giants not moved, and had the American League still decided to expand by two teams in 1961, those teams might have gone to Los Angeles (as the Angels did) and San Francisco. But, as Mitchell writes, “there is no concrete reason to think expansion teams would have succeeded in these new cities, which were steeped in self-confidence and a long history of PCL baseball” (226). In short, a golden opportunity would have been squandered.

Mitchell presents his argument in his longish introduction and returns to it in his...