A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (3 page)

Above all others was a book called
The
Summer Game
by Roger Angell (1972). Angell did not even think
of himself as a professional sportswriter. He wrote from a fan’s
perspective, choosing to mingle with fans in the stands instead of
a press box. Every year he took a baseball journey and wrote about
it in
The New Yorker
. He devoted a particularly large amount
of attention to the 1962 season; first, the nascent Mets, then the
unfolding pennant chase played in the glorious California sunshine
between the Giants and Dodgers; and finally a World Series that
combined all the old “subway series” elements of John McGraw vs.
Babe Ruth updated to Mickey Mantle vs. Willie Mays, complete with
jet air travel. Angell stirred all my old pangs, shedding new light
on the summer of ‘62.

In a high school history class they showed a
docu-drama starring William DeVane as JFK and Martin Sheen as Bobby
Kennedy called
The Missiles of October
. It was a
hard-hitting, sober look at the Cuban Missile Crisis, but what
struck me was that it all happened in 1962, the year of my great
fascination. To think, all I cared about was Pete Runnel’s batting
average and the fact that Sandy Koufax hurt his finger at
mid-season, but now I learned that much had occurred beyond the
bounds of Fenway Park or Chavez Ravine.

Through baseball, I developed a focal point
for history. If something happened in 1914, I knew that Chief
Bender had jumped to the Federal League that year. Pearl Harbor
occurred the same year Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 straight games and
Ted Williams was the last of the .400 hitters. I had remembered
Bobby Kennedy running for President in 1968, but all I recalled was
that he was always surrendered by Mexican farmworkers, which seemed
incongruous.
The Missiles of October
showed him to be a man
of power, a hawk and war architect suddenly questioning the use of
force, and therefore instructive to understand the RFK I knew from
1968. A man tempered by his experiences.

Three things occurred to me since I came to
“worship” the
1963 Official Baseball Almanac
. First, I went
beyond just reading about baseball to actually playing it . . .
pretty well. Well enough to help Redwood High School, located in
the San Francisco suburb of Marin County, win the mythical national
championship in my senior year of 1977. Well enough to earn a
full-ride scholarship to college and make all-conference as a
pitcher. Well enough to play a few years of professional ball, in
the St. Louis Cardinals and Oakland A’s organizations; to strike
out 1989 National League MVP Kevin Mitchell three times in one game
and K 14 Kingsport Mets on a hot July night in 1981. As Casey
Stengel once said, “You could look it up.”

The next thing that happened to me was that
while I never lost my passion for baseball, as a fan and a player,
I developed just as much passion for history, politics, and as a
direct result, for writing. Being a millionaire baseball star was
not my destiny. Being a writer and historian was.

Most importantly, I stopped “worshipping” the
1963 Official Baseball Almanac
, or
The Sporting News
Official Baseball Guide
, or the works of Pat Jordan and Roger
Angell. I started worshipping
The Holy Bible
instead,
directing my admiration not for Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays or Don
Drysdale, but for the Lord Jesus Christ.

So it is that I temper my writings with an
understanding of the things that are truly important. But somehow
baseball has never slipped too far away, even as I endeavor to find
Truth. My love for baseball is in fact spiritual, as is my love for
America. This is a book not merely about baseball, but about
America. We are, in my view, the new Promised Land, and as we have
struggled against evil in the form of slavery, two world wars,
terrorism and, in 1962, the threat of nuclear bombs, it is my
belief that His guiding hand has led us to safety time and time
again.

STEVEN R. TRAVERS

(415) 455-5971

[email protected]

“GET YOUR WHEELBARROW AND SHOVEL” – STOP – “I’LL
MEET YOU IN CHAVEZ RAVINE.”

- Walter O’Malley’s telegraph to L.A. Mayor Norris
Paulsen, 1957

The Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants
moved to California in 1958. Roy Campanella’s special night in 1959
was seen as the “debutante ball” of the Dodgers. Five months later
Los Angeles won the World Series. For decades, the University of
Southern California Trojans and UCLA Bruins were America’s dominant
collegiate sports powerhouses. Crowds of over 100,000 came out to
watch football games at the Coliseum; USC, UCLA and the Rams. The
1932 L.A. Olympics had been the most successful to date. Hollywood
was the world’s cultural touchstone, and politically the Golden
State was now the most important in the nation.

Despite this, Los Angeles and California were seen
as “minor league,” far removed from long-held Eastern salons of
sports influence. It was not until April 10, 1962 that they entered
the “Major Leagues.” That was the day that the Dodgers hosted the
Cincinnati Reds in the first game ever played at Dodger
Stadium.

When the world got a look at
Dodger Stadium in all its glory, the true greatness of the Golden
State could not be denied. Here was the finest sports palace ever
conceived; Manifest Destiny for the 20
^th
Century, something greater
than the sum of merely human parts. Baseball, America and Los
Angeles, California would never be the same.

Until Dodger Stadium was built, the Dodgers and
Giants were roughly equal rivals. The Giants had won five World
Championships (1905, 1921, 1922, 1933, 1954); the Dodgers’ two
(1955, 1959), but they seemed to have achieved an edge in the final
New York years and the early California seasons.

That edge had demonstrated itself in the winning of
the 1955 World Series followed by the National League championship
in 1956. Manager Walt Alston presided over the “Dodger way,” a
victorious formula of sorts that had been the product of such
baseball minds as Lee MacPhail, Branch Rickey, Buzzie Bavasi,
Fresco Thompson and Al Campanis.

The Giants, on the other hand, had fired Leo
Durocher and gone through a succession of managers. They had opened
their new stadium, Candlestick Park, two years earlier, but it was
a dud; immediately old, dirty and uninviting. Dodger Stadium was a
shot across the bow at the Giants, but it was also a signal moment
in a long-held rivalry that existed before Californians ever
thought about Major League baseball.

San Francisco despised Los Angeles. San Franciscans
despised Los Angelenos. Los Angeles and Los Angelenos did not
particularly care. San Franciscans hated them even more for caring
so little. San Francisco was a schizophrenic town with equal parts
inferiority complex and superiority complex. They thought of
themselves as the Paris of the West, New York of the Pacific; L.A.
was a land of rubes. There was no city there, no base, no monument
to greatness . . . until now.

San Francisco started out
as
the
important California city,
but the building of the Owens River Valley aqueduct and two world
wars had changed that. The University of California and Stanford
University built impressive stadiums in the early 1920s. Stanford
lobbied for the Rose Bowl game to be moved up north. Southern
California responded by building two stadiums, the Rose Bowl in
Pasadena and the Coliseum near downtown L.A. Both dwarfed the
northern stadiums. Instead of being compared to Cal and Stanford,
they were compared to the “House That Ruth Built” (Yankee Stadium)
and the Roman Colosseum.

California’s “Wonder Teams” and Stanford under coach
Pop Warner were the two great college football dynasties of the
early 1920s, but they quickly became overshadowed by Knute Rockne
and Notre Dame. When Southern California started their great
rivalry with the Fighting Irish, it established the Trojans as the
other major grid power, further pushing Cal and Stanford into the
shadows. A sense of jealousy pervaded the northern schools,
infusing the region in ways that became socio-political. Then UCLA
came into their own. The Bruins, not the Golden Bears or Indians,
were USC’s main conference rival, winning the 1954 National
Championship in football and later establishing themselves as the
greatest basketball dynasty of all time.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, reeling from a
recruiting scandal in which Stanford “turned them in,” California
scaled back sports. A program that had produced four National
Champions in football, two in baseball, one in basketball, plus
numerous Olympians, became a joke and has never truly
recovered.

Political power shifted from the
north to the south. Earl Warren was from the Bay Area and attended
the University of California. He became Governor and was tapped by
Thomas Dewey as his Vice Presidential running mate in the losing
1948 election. Richard Nixon was from the Los Angeles area. He
represented a growing, more powerful electorate than Warren, and
rose to greater heights. Ronald Reagan would also tap into the same
Orange County conservatism that propelled Barry Goldwater to the
1964 Republican nomination, and eventually would become the
dominant political
ethos
in
America.

All of these factors: the Rose Bowl and Coliseum
being better-recognized than Cal’s and Stanford’s stadiums; the
Trojans and Bruins dominating the Golden Bears and Indians;
political power shifting to the Southland, leaving Northern
California marginalized towards the Left; combined to frustrate
denizens of the San Francisco Bay Area. On top of that, they saw
that the center of business in the Pacific Rim was no longer San
Francisco, but Los Angeles. Then there was Hollywood. The
imprimatur of glamour, of beautiful women, hot nightlife, golden
beaches and Tinseltown fame overshadowed foggy San Francisco, which
seemed to fall short in every way a city can be measured against
another one. San Franciscans looked at their beautiful scenery,
their identifiable, skyscraper city center, their supposedly more
literate, cultured population, and tried to look down their noses
at the church-going Midwestern transplants who made up the L.A.
Basin. They seemed to be desperately attempting to convince
themselves of their elitism. The harder they tried, the more they
failed.

When Dodger Stadium was built, it was the final
insult. San Francisco had gotten a stadium done faster, in 1960,
but there was little hiding the reality of Candlestick Park: a
dismal failure in every way. Now Los Angeles had created pure
excellence. It was self-evident truth. It needed no commentary. Los
Angeles was superior to San Francisco.

During the 1956 World Series between the Brooklyn
Dodgers and New York Yankees, Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley
observed something that more than piqued his interest. He saw
Kenneth Hahn, a rising and influential Los Angeles City Councilman,
in the company of Washington Senators owner Calvin Griffith.
Everybody knew what they were speaking about: Hahn was trying to
talk Griffith into moving the moribund Senators franchise to Los
Angeles.

Los Angeles had been discussed as
a potential destination for Major League baseball since 1941. The
weather was perfect and the population grew and grew and grew.
Capacity crowds filled the Rose Bowl and the Coliseum. Fans were
rabid for athletics in California. On top of that, an enormous
number of superstar athletes in all sports were
from
the Golden State. The success of the 1932 Los
Angeles Olympics seemed to demonstrate that Los Angeles had the
ability to
choose not to participate
in the Great Depression. Out west, there was a different
mindset, a new way of thinking, an enlightened approach to race, to
culture, to society, that was more forward-looking. It was the
future.

On December 7, 1941, the St. Louis Browns were
expected to announce at the winter meetings that they were moving
to Los Angeles. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the
West Coast was threatened in the early days of World War II, those
plans went by the wayside.

When the war was finally won in 1945, the country
began to turn its attention to other endeavors. In 1946, Branch
Rickey signed the first black player, a young infielder from UCLA
named Jackie Robinson. In 1947, in the skies over the high
California desert, Chuck Yeager broke the “sound barrier.” This
made jet travel feasible, and more importantly, commercial.

In the early and mid-1950s, a flurry of franchise
shifts took place, with varying degrees of success. The Browns did
move, but not to Los Angeles. Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley
owned the L.A. market. His team trained at Catalina Island, off the
Southern California coast, during Spring Training. The Los Angeles
Angels’ franchise played in the West Coast version of Wrigley
Field, a quaint little ballpark located on a street called Avalon,
in south L.A. The Pacific Coast League was competitive, successful
and had loyal fan support. Numerous well-known big leaguers
competed in the PCL. Many of the league’s greatest stars were local
products, who moved from nearby high schools to the Angels,
Hollywood Stars, San Diego Padres, San Francisco Seals, Mission
Reds, Oakland Oaks, Sacramento Solons, Seattle Rainiers and
Portland Beavers. But it was still the minor leagues.

With L.A. apparently controlled by Wrigley, who
would never consider moving the Cubs out to the coast, the Browns –
long in the shadow of the Cardinals - moved to Baltimore. The
Boston Braves, who despite having played in the World Series as
recently as 1948 were a distant second in popularity to the Red
Sox, moved to Milwaukee. The Philadelphia A’s, a one-time American
League powerhouse, had lost a war of attrition to the Phillies.
They packed up their bags and made their way to Kansas City.