O'Malley's Revolutionary Greed

But I'm a libertarian economist, so I think this is a good thing.

O'Malley moved the Dodgers West because he wanted a new stadium. What was wrong with Ebbetts, you might ask. Well, you can't fit anyone in it - it had about the seating capacity of Fenway Park, around 35,000 or so. The extra 21,000 seats in Dodger Stadium meant a lot, particularly for a team with a growing fan base that wanted its fans to actually get to see a game.
Ok, so greed probably isn't the right word with this example, but you can't say O'Malley wasn't the penny-pinching type. The story was the Dodgers didn't have names on the back of the uniforms until the mid 1970s so O'Malley could sell more programs, and he also didn't pay players for goodwill tours to Japan, and a dispute over that got Maury Wills traded. But the point is you can actually get tickets to a Dodger game, unlike a Red Sox game. And O'Malley even financed the park himself. But he moved west because the New York zoning nazi wanted the Dodgers to move to Queens. O'Malley said, hey, we're not the Brooklyn Dodgers anymore anyway, so why not be the Los Angeles Dodgers? Let's expand the league nationwide while we're at it.

But I'm happy he's in the hall of fame. Anyone in New York crying about this now is just plain weird. Especially with the internet - you can follow the team from the East Coast. You know, like I do.