The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers' Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse Read Free Page B

have fun. So after replacing the scoreboard and constructing bigger batting cages, weight rooms, and a centrally air-conditioned home clubhouse that was twice the size of the old one, they built themselves their own private bunker under thestadium and fortified it with liquor and flat-screen televisions. They planned to celebrate many championships there.
    The town’s beloved Lakers had won five titles in the past twelve seasons under the twinkling eye of the benevolent Dr. Jerry Buss, a man whose penchant for trotting out championship team after championship team led many to argue he was the best professional sports team owner ever.
    Just winning, however, wasn’t enough for Guggenheim. The Lakers had captured the attention of a city where actual movie stars roamed free in their natural habitat by showcasing the game’s biggest superstars year in and year out. The “Showtime” era of the eighties and early nineties featuring Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson gave way to the Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal “Lake Show.” Supermodels, pop stars, and Oscar winners became courtside fixtures because nothing validates famous people more than being around other famous people.
    Since the Lakers were already a global brand synonymous with the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, the new Dodger owners had the blueprint already laid out for them. To win over the citizens of the entertainment capital of the universe and surpass the Yankees as Major League Baseball’s premier franchise they would first have to field a team with enough star power to impress folks in Hollywood. In doing so, they hoped to captivate a nation obsessed with celebrity and attract millions of new fans with their winning ways. And if becoming the loathsome Big Bad Wolf to millions more was the tax they paid on the path to glory, then so be it. They wanted to become the Lakers on grass. Only three miles separated Dodger Stadium from Staples Center, the Lakers’ home court. Under McCourt, that gap would have taken light-years to cross. The Guggenheim group set out to bridge it immediately. But before the Dodgers had any prayer of competing with the Lakers, they had to dig themselves out of an even bigger hole.
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    When Walter O’Malley moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles before the 1958 season, he was called a traitor in New York and a crazy person everywhere else. At the time O’Malley won the approval to relocate his team to L.A., the Dodgers’ closest opponent would have been the St. Louis Cardinals, some sixteen hundred miles away. O’Malley convinced the Dodgers’ archrival, the New York Giants, to move from upper Manhattan to California, too, and the two clubs launched Major League Baseball on the West Coast. Relocating the Dodgers three thousand miles away was a huge gamble, but O’Malley had long seen opportunity where others were tripped up by uncertainty. After all, he had been part of the group in 1945 that risked the franchise by signing Jackie Robinson. In addition to breaking the color barrier for generations of black baseball players to come, the iconic Robinson also went on to become a six-time all-star and National League MVP, and helped lead the Dodgers to their first-ever World Series title in 1955.
    O’Malley’s Los Angeles gamble paid off as well.Some seventy-eight thousand fans attended the Dodgers’ first game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, shattering all-time Major League Baseball attendance records.For his efforts, O’Malley was put on the cover of Time magazine and christened the unofficial commissioner of baseball. His enormous success further perpetuated the fairy tale that the West was full of endless promise and possibility. The Dodgers’ move to Los Angeles mirrored the flight of millions of displaced Americans who set out for California in search of better lives—or at least better weather.In 1950 the state’s population was just over ten million. By 1990 that number tripled to