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Tuesday, April 29, 2008 |
None So Blind: Gary Gillette On Brooklyn Attendance
One of the most incredible things I've read at Baseball Prospectus — and one of the silliest:
Another problem with evaluating O’Malley’s legacy is that many revisionists, consciously or unconsciously, make a big deal out of the Dodgers’ Brooklyn attendance, then and now. Disparage the Dodgers’ support in the 1950s as a way of rationalizing O’Malley’s gambit, they write phrases like “the Dodgers barely drew a million fans” in Brooklyn in the 1950s, as if that were some kind of crime. The fact is that both major leagues in the 1950s were in deep trouble, with overall attendance declining for a multitude of reasons. It is neither fair nor instructive to compare today’s attendance, when the US population is double what it was in 1950, with five decades ago unless one also puts those numbers in context. Furthermore, the Los Angeles market of the twenty-first century is more than four times the size of Brooklyn’s market in 1950.Well, who gives a tinker's damn what the league was doing? If you see an opportunity to make better coin, you take it. O'Malley père made his fortune in the 1930's, as a bankruptcy attorney; undoubtedly, he saw firsthand the results of "everybody was doing it" herd mentality. Gillette's point amounts to Olympic-grade gnat-straining; if all your friends were dead set on squandering their fortunes, would that make it a good idea for you to do it, too?The myth of weak attendance in Brooklyn undergirds the popular understanding of O’Malley’s inspiration to go west. Despite the misconceptions that have obscured the facts since the move, the Dodgers had drawn better than the NL average (excluding Brooklyn) in every season from 1938 through 1956. Only in 1957, the Dodgers’ last year in Brooklyn—and a season throughout which rumors swirled that the team was headed west—did O'Malley's team fall a few thousand fans short of the league mean in attendance.
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