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O'Malley agrees with the diagnosis. But rebuilding the team, he argues, was impossible so long as his base of operations was the stained and gloomy pile of masonry hard by Prospect Park. "Look at it this way," says he. "Brooklyn draws a million people. Milwaukee draws two and a quarter million. Results: 1) they can pay their players more; 2) they can absorb more farm club losses; 3) they can have more front-office talent; 4) they can buy more bonus players. The momentum is Milwaukee's. Obviously, we have deteriorated into a noncontending ball club. I decided that the thing to do was get my new stadium and get in a competitive position—get the customers who could give me the money to compete again."
Dodger Fan. The very thought of the cribbed, cabined and confined spaces of Ebbets Field has long filled O'Malley with horror. As far back as 1947, when he was still only a minority stockholder, he ordered an engineering firm to design a new stadium with a revolutionary dome that would end the losing phenomenon of the rained-out game. "It was treated facetiously by the press," recalls O'Malley ruefully. "But why should we treat baseball fans like cattle? I came to the conclusion years ago that we in baseball were losing our audience and weren't doing a damn thing about it. Why should you leave your nice, comfortable, air-conditioned home to go out and sweat in a drafty, dirty, dingy baseball park? Ballparks are almost all old. They are built in the poorer sections of the city. The toilets at most ballparks are a germ hazard that would turn a bacteriologist grey. Why, when I came to the Dodgers, I spent a quarter of a million dollars just to change the urinals, and Branch Rickey, who was the general manager, nearly had a stroke. He couldn't comprehend spending that much money on the customers when we could spend it on ballplayers."
At that point O'Malley had no thought of building his new pleasure dome anywhere but in Brooklyn. He would be satisfied, he said, with the land around the Long Island Rail Road station at the west end of Brooklyn. That ancient terminal, he figured, would soon have to be rebuilt anyway; it would do no harm to tear down the adjacent slums, and the nearby Fort Greene meat market was long overdue for relocation. All O'Malley asked was land, condemned and handed over to him cheap. So in March of 1955 Democrat O'Malley rounded up his own political pals, buttered up the proper Republicans, and helped push through a bill setting up the Brooklyn Sports Center Authority. Governor Harriman, sometime 8-goal polo player, hustled down to Brooklyn, signed the measure at Borough Hall with the gallant announcement, "I am a Dodger fan." Walter sat back to savor the glorious future. The truth was that he was starting the longest fall downstairs in the history of American comedy.
Anchor to Windward. Before the Sports Center Authority undertook the tedious business of condemnation, O'Malley got up $5,000,000 as his share of the venture. He sold Ebbets Field to a real-estate operator named Marvin Kratter for $3,000,000, and signed a lease for the Dodgers to play there for three more years. He sold his Montreal farm club's park for $1,000,000, disposed of his Fort Worth park for another $1,000,000.