Customer Reviews

Taking On the Yankees: Winning and Losing in the Business of Baseball

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

To me, this book performs a valuable service to baseball scholarship for one reason alone, and that's Fetter's two chapter assessment of the Brooklyn Dodgers departure from New York. In recent years, starting with Neal Sullivan's "The Dodgers Move West" and continuing with Michael Shapiro's "The Last Good Season" there has been an increased level of revisionism that attempts to exonerate Walter O'Malley of the blame for the Dodgers leaving New York, and instead cast New York Park Commissioner Robert Moses as the real villain of the piece.

In his chapters "The Case Against Brooklyn" and "Stadium Games", Fetter effectively rebutts this assertion, and puts the blame where it belongs on O'Malley, and he does this not by appealing to the old emotionalist arguments of old Brooklynites, but instead by noting how O'Malley's singleminded vision of a stadium at Atlantic Avenue was totally unreasonable from the standpoint of city officials. O'Malley was only prepared to compensate the city $1 million for land that would be turned over to him through condemnation proceedings, when the true value of the land was nearly ten times that much. The city also had no legal standing to condemn the land when a new stadium would not at the same time lead to new housing construction for those being displaced. But perhaps the most effective point Fetter makes is to carefully rip to shreds the idea that an Atlantic Avenue site would somehow have alleviated what O'Malley claims was his biggest problem, i.e. lack of adequate parking. By contrast, there was a site in Flushing Meadow the Dodgers could have moved to and retained their fan base which had already spread out from Brooklyn proper at this point, but O'Malley rejected it in total ignorance of the emotional attachment the fans felt for their team, as well as a desire to get a stadium under *his* terms only, which Los Angeles was prepared to sign over to him in full.

These chapters are so good that for me it tended to make the rest of the book's focus on baeball's business history something of an afterthought. If anything, it would have been nice if Fetter had confined his study to the O'Malley affair, because I think the book might have made a bigger impact overall had he done that. It was only by accident while leafing through this that I discovered that a welcome piece of scholarly post-revisionism had been done on this subject, and for that, Fetter is owed a debt of thanks for rescuing the story of the Dodgers move from some dubious scholarship.

If you are into the business of sports this is a must read.

The book is mostly about the economics of the New York major league teams teams.We learn why the Dodgers and Giants had to leave town.Mostly because the city could'nt provide a new stadium.Attitudes changed and the Shea Stadium was built an Yankees stadium renovated.

A picture is given of Yankee ownership starting with the days of Coronel Ruppert up to the era of Steinbrenner.

The era of free agency, and the advantages it brought to big spending teams, is well researched.
An appendix provides a lot of statistics , not the usual batting averages and runs , but about park attendance and incomes of various teams.
At the end, one wonders how can MLB be exempt from antitrust laws.