What's the over/under on New York sportswriters saying that the LA Dodgers will have no right to celebrate this championship?

I'm guessing it will be 3 separate published stories.

I dig your optimism, Bobby T (sorry, I'm in a soulful mood) but I'm taking the over and then some. I mean, do published stories include columns, snarky comments from television prognosticators, etc? If so, the over is mine.

Jon, you've recommended this site I don't know how many times and I just now checked it out.

Three words: I'm in awe.

Wasn't the "Boys of Summer" a Don Henley song? He must have coined the phrase.

I think the "Boys of Summer" book came way before the Don Henley song.

You were too dry, Bob.

I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac.

Goin' down the road, feeling bad.

Don't wannabe treated thissaway.

Showing my age, I bought Henley's "The Boys of Summer" on a 45 RPM vinyl.

1)Roger Kahn and Pete Hamill are good for three stories EACH on why the LA carpetbaggers should leave 1955 alone;

2)Too bad Peter O'Malley didn't try to prosecute the 2 NY sportswriters (Jack Mann and Stan Isaacs)who stole the 55 WC banner, then hid it for 45 years (Rob at 6-4-2 has the story);

3)The only thing worse than saying the Dodgers can't celebrate 55 is Arte Moreno claiming that the Angels are celebrating 100 years of baseball, based on the separate, non related history of the defunct PCL Angels.

"Little voice inside my head said don't look back,
you can never look back"
Don Henley (pre 3 Eagle reunion tours)

To quote Three Times One Minus One...

...damn.

Especially that ring. For some reason, seeing all the WS rings in a row was the coolest thing in Cooperstown for me.

The only thing better would be another ring to commemorate the 50 years. And isn't 50 the diamond anniversary?

Objectively speaking, the three biggest scandals in baseball history were: (1) the color line, (2) the Black Sox scandal, and (3) the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. (I myself am not objective.) Finding out the history of the Dodgers moving is like finding out your grandfather stole the Mona Lisa. The first reaction is a kind of awe: "You mean that's it? The real one? In the living room?" And while you know in some part of you that the right thing to do would be to give it back, it goes so well with the couch . . .

What few people realize is that the Dodgers were not going to play in Brooklyn in any circumstance. When Robert Moses finally got around to decreeing where the ballpark would be, it was in Flushing Meadow, where Shea Stadium is, under the flight path. Unlike the other Moses, Robert did not consult with anyone, not even God, and certainly not with a mere businessman. Really, if you want to see how New York City lost the Dodgers (and they were theirs to lose), look at L.A.'s dealings with the NFL. It was the same deal: Politicians diddling around and diddling around and ultimately trying to force a location on the team owners that the owners found unacceptable. In the end O'Malley must have been thinking not only about the future of Brooklyn vs. the future of Los Angeles, but whether he could entrust his own future to the people he was dealing with.

In retrospect, the best thing to have done would have been to allow O'Malley to take his organization and players to Los Angeles, but leave the Brooklyn Dodgers name behind for an expansion franchise. Los Angeles would have been just as enthusiastic about their new Angels as it was about the Dodgers, and we would now be discussing the controversial renaming of the Hollywood Stars of Anaheim. Unfortunately for Brooklyn, the only person in baseball with that kind of vision would have been O'Malley, and he liked to keep what was his.

I politely beg to differ that the people of L.A. would have been just as excited over an expansion team as the Dodgers.

The Dodgers came out west and won a WS in their second season with a team that was nothing special. The Angels were almost instantly accorded second class status when they started in L.A. and drew paltry crowds until the move to Anaheim.

Would an expansion team have had the political wherewithal to pull off the Chavez Ravine deal?

I didn't mean an expansion franchise, I meant that O'Malley would have taken everything except the name "Dodgers" to Los Angeles, and Brooklyn would have the expansion franchise. Under those circumstances I would think Los Angeles would have been excited enough to get the team not to miss the name.

Oh, the "Baltimore Ravens/Cleveland Browns" solution.

So you would have had the Los Angeles Angels playing in Dodger Stadium now and the Brooklyn or New York Dodgers flailing away in 1962 under Casey Stengel?

Forgotten all this is the Giants move out West too. Where all the weeping Giants fans from New York? The Giants were even more successful than the Dodgers in New York, although the bulk of their success was in the McGraw era.

Were the Giants ever that popular in NY? Maybe being the New York NL also-ran for a long time had something to do with it. You def. never hear about old Giants fans lamenting the move. The shock was probably muffled by the Dodger move - if the Dodgers could move from Brooklyn, anything was possible. The only prominent ones I can think of are Woody Allen (this may complete him as the ultimate traitor to Brooklyn) and Don DeLillo, whose book "Underworld" makes it seem like the entire history of the 20th Century hinges on the Shot Heard Round the World. Now that's a fan. It probably also underlines how lousy the Giants were that this outcome was so shocking.

How strange to think that in the eyes of NY city planners the Dodgers weren't worth losing a little bit of Brooklyn real estate, and now they're desperately trying to attract the New Jersey Nets. I think the proposed Brooklyn Nets stadium is on or very close to the exact spot where O'Malley wanted to put his new stadium.

The way I look at it is, the team belonged to Walter O'Malley and he had the right to make what appears to be a justified business decision. However, people in Brooklyn (and elsewhere) had a deep emotional commitment to the Dodgers and were going to suffer from the team leaving. People in Los Angeles had no such emotional commitment and would have been happy with the same team under a different name. Under the Cleveland Browns solution the people in Brooklyn would not have been fully satisfied but they would have had some kind of compensation. O'Malley would have lost the goodwill associated with the name Dodgers, which is something of great value, and he probably wouldn't have done it unless he was forced to.

Given a time machine and absolute power, this isn't the first thing I'd do.

Fewer and fewer of the Brooklyn Dodgers fans lived in Brooklyn. The demographics of the borough was changing. Dodgers fans lived out further on Long Island in Nassau County. They wanted to get out of Brooklyn.

The NY Giants were THE team in baseball from 1904 until the Yankee juggernaut took over for good in 1923.

The Giants won the World Series in 1905, 1921, 1922, 1933, and 1954 and lost in 1911, 1912, 1917, 1923, 1936, 1937, and 1951. I think that's all of them.

The ascendancy of the Dodgers and Cardinals in the 1930s and 1940s, combined with McGraw's retirement knocked the Giants down a peg. Also, the Giants had the Stoneham family owning the team and they were nice guys, but the Dodgers under guys like McPhail, Rickey, and O'Malley knew both players and business and what it took to be successful.

The Giants also won a pennant in 1924, but lost to Walter Johnson's only championship Senators team.

For an excellent academic discussion of the move, read Neil Sullivan's book "The Dodgers Move West." The story of the Giants' departure, three years removed from a World Championshp and featuring Willie Mays in a 50,000 seat stadium, remains to be told.

Also, the idea of "leaving the name behind" wasn't really considered at the time because only unsuccessful franchises had moved, and probably happened with respect to the expansion Senators only because of the Dodgers' move west.