@Slip18
1916. Their last year in NY was 1957.
The Giants had been planning a move to Minnesota but Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley wanted to move his team to Los Angeles. The National League would not allow the Dodgers to move alone. It would not be logistically feasible for only one team to move to the West Coast. O'Malley was able to talk Giants owner Horace Stoneham into moving his team to San Francisco. The NL then authorized the move. This also allowed the Dodgers and Giants to retain their longtime rivalry.
@Machiavelli @Slip18 Until O'Malley approached Stoneham with the proposal to move to California, Stoneham was planning to move
the Giants to Minneapolis---they had the major league territorial rights there because of their Millers farm
team. Stoneham needed a new ballpark even more than O'Malley did, but he lacked O'Malley's finances to
build a park on his own. And since Minneapolis had already built Metropolitan Stadium, in which the Millers
played, with an eye toward luring a major league team, Stoneham's ballpark problem was solvable in
a blink.
One of the great mysteries of the time, in my opinion, is this:
New York's planning and building czar (for city and state alike), Robert Moses, was hell bent for leather to
build a multipurpose stadium in Flushing, in Queens, adjacent to La Guardia Airport and the World's Fair
grounds. He was likewise hell bent on making sure
nobody in New York could build and operate a
sports facility on his own, privately, so long as he, Moses, had anything to say about it, and New York's
mouselike politicians weren't inclined to challenge him. (For
@Slip18 and anyone else who doesn't know:
the facility Moses wanted to build is what eventually became Shea Stadium.)
That said, and knowing that Walter O'Malley was equally hell bent on not playing in Queens (he once
said, famously, "If we play in Queens, we won't be the Brooklyn Dodgers anymore"), the big question
becomes
why on earth did Moses not even think
of offering the Giants the chance to play in
that ballpark? The Giants didn't have the Dodgers' borough identification; they weren't the Manhattan
Giants or the Harlem Giants. Horace Stoneham wouldn't have had reason to say, "If we play in Queens,
we're not the New York Giants anymore."
Had Moses offered the Giants the Flushing multipurpose stadium, it might have changed everything,
even if Moses concurrently did everything in his power to stop O'Malley from building his own new
ballpark in Brooklyn. If the Giants accepted any offer to play in the new Flushing park, they could
have held on and gritted it out in the Polo Grounds (as the Mets eventually did, playing their first
two seasons in the rambling wreck) until Shea Stadium was ready to open in 1964. It might have
forced Moses' hand regarding the Dodger situation---not to mention exposing him as a hypocrite,
never mind that one of New York's worst kept secret in those years
was Moses' hypocrisy.
You wonder whether Moses knew all that and played his hand accordingly. But let the record
remind you that one Giants' stockholder voted against the team leaving New York: Joan Payson,
by way of her proxy voted by her chief financial officer M. Donald Grant.
After the Giants and the Dodgers left, New York's then-mayor Robert Wagner proposed forming
a group that might entice a National League team to move to New York. A couple of years earlier,
the original Pacific Coast League, considered the equal in performance of a major league, had
its hopes of being sanctioned as an actual major league shot down.
The leader of the New York group was a corporate lawyer named William Shea. Shea's first move
was to approach the Cincinnati Reds, whose owner Powell Crosley (he who also made a small
fortune making radios and large appliances) was tempted to make the move but ultimately said no,
partly because then-National League president Ford Frick spoke loud enough about league
stability after the moves of the Braves, the Philadelphia Athletics, the St. Louis Browns, the
Dodgers, and the Giants.
Shea's next move was to bring former Cardinals/Dodgers/Pirates president Branch Rickey and
Mrs. Payson aboard as two of the prospective owners in a third major league, the Continental
League. The new league proposed to play in New York, Houston, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Denver,
Dallas, Toronto, and Buffalo. Rickey was named the president of the new league; the franchise
owners included Mrs. Payson in New York, future Big Red Machine builder Bob Howsam in
Denver, and future Los Angeles Rams owner Jack Kent Cooke in Toronto.
Shea also went to Sen. Estes Kefauver and convinced him to open hearings into baseball's
anti-trust exemption. (These were the hearings where Casey Stengel absolutely flummoxed
the senators, and Mickey Mantle followed him and answered his first question with, "My views
are just about the same as Casey's.") The prospect of losing its anti-trust exemption shook
baseball even more than the Continental League, but combined they did exactly what Shea
hoped for: they brought major league baseball back to New York when baseball agreed
to expand both leagues. The National League got franchises in New York and Houston; Mrs.
Payson, of course, was awarded the New York franchise---the Mets.
The kicker: The American League planned to expand to Los Angeles and Minneapolis, but
the Washington Senators threw a monkey wrench into the plan by moving to Minneapolis
to become the Twins. The AL had to agree to put a new franchise in Washington, which
played as the Senators until 1971 before becoming the Texas Rangers.
