My guess is that everyone over the age of 60 reading this knows who Buckminster Fuller is, while everyone under 30 probably doesn’t, unless they were an architecture or possibly an engineering student. Before going into why he’s famous, here’s a quote from him near the end of his life:
I m now close to 88 and I am confident that the only thing important about me is that I am an average healthy human. I am also a living case history of a thoroughly documented, half-century, search-and-research project designed to discover what, if anything, an unknown, moneyless individual, with a dependent wife and newborn child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that could not be accomplished by great nations, great religions or private enterprise, no matter how rich or powerfully armed.
If you were to sum up Fuller’s beliefs in a single sentence, it would be, “doing more with less.” Fuller is best known for popularizing geodesic domes, structures that were cheap to build and which could support their own weight. Among others, the Marines used his geodesic domes and in the 1960s they were seen all over the world.
Recently, historian and Facebook friend Steve Treder posted the picture of the image at the top of the piece. It wasn’t until blowing it up that it was obvious that this was a Fuller idea. The proportions are out of whack, especially to a 21st Century point of view, with enough foul territory to make any pitcher’s ERA go down a quarter of a run.
While it’s fascinating to think of geodesic dome principles being applied to sports stadiums, the idea that’s most relevant to this blog is that this domed stadium was floated as a new home for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Now, it may have been that there was no proposal that would have been agreeable to both the Dodgers and New York City. One of the big stumbling blocks was that the Dodgers wanted a baseball-only stadium while the trend was coming of multi-purpose facilities. Dodger Stadium was one of only two MLB parks that were baseball-only (Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City being the other) built from the late 50s thru 1990. And it’s not like there weren’t a bunch of new parks debuting in that time frame, including the Astrodome in Houston.
So, let’s play “what if” with this ballpark. What if the Dodgers stayed in Brooklyn? Would the Giants have moved to San Francisco as the only team west of the Mississippi? Would MLB have put expansion franchises in California even earlier than they did when the Angels started play in 1961? What other city would have gotten an NL expansion team in 1962?
MLB.com has a story on the move west for the Dodgers and Giants with the following line: “[O]n May 28, 1957, NL owners voted to make it official: The Dodgers and Giants could move to California, provided that they did so together.” Maybe Giants owner Horace Stoneham could have convinced them otherwise. But it seems like Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley wanted California while Stoneham just wanted out.
The Braves moved to Milwaukee for the 1953 season and early returns were strong. It’s possible that Stoneham would have moved the Giants to Minnesota before the Senators did, if O’Malley stayed in Brooklyn. So, if the Giants moved to Minnesota, what would the Senators do? Would they have moved to LA or San Francisco and been the second West Coast team to go with the expansion Angels? And would the NL have ceded California to the AL? Or would they have put an expansion team there to replace the ’62 Mets? And if the NL hadn’t moved there in one form or another, would the Braves have left Milwaukee for California, instead of Georgia, in the mid-60s?
There are a bunch of ways this might have played out in an alternate universe. Perhaps with a strong Giants team in Minnesota, the Braves stay in Milwaukee. It’s not even far-fetched to consider a scenario where so many teams moved west that the A’s weren’t allowed to move to Oakland and instead remained in Kansas City for a few more years. If that happened, it would have had ripple effects. Kansas City would have had a tenant for its new park and the expansion that came in 1969 might have come a few years later, allowing Seattle and Montreal to have better-funded and more stable ownership groups.
A dome in Brooklyn might have meant a stable Pilots franchise and no Bud Selig in MLB.
But let’s get back to the Mets. The Dodgers stay in Brooklyn and it’s unlikely MLB puts an expansion franchise in Queens. They replaced two teams with one in reality – it’s hard to see them going back to two teams. O’Malley certainly wouldn’t have wanted to “share” the market and it probably wouldn’t have been very hard to convince the other owners that there were more lucrative markets to join elsewhere.
So, all of us Mets fans would be Dodger fans, instead. Instead of M. Donald Grant and Linda deRoulet, we would have had the O’Malleys. And instead of Doug Flynn and Frank Taveras, we would have pulled for Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, Ron Cey and Bill Russell. And in 1977, instead of enduring the Midnight Massacre trades of Tom Seaver and Dave Kingman, we would have rooted for Garvey, Cey, Dusty Baker and Reggie Smith to become the first quartet to hit 30-HR in a season for the same club. There would have been World Series clubs in 1974, 1977 and 1978.
And fans in the 1960s would have seen World Series teams in 1963, 1965 and 1966, coming away with wins in the first two seasons. Fans in the 1980s would have 1981 and 1988 would be our story of triumph, rather than the WTF season it’s remembered for now. And 2020 would be viewed a lot more favorably.
Because O’Malley and New York City couldn’t come to an agreement, we got Grant, Selig and the Wilpon family. Maybe those three would have been involved somehow, regardless of how the Brooklyn stadium situation worked out. It’s just hard to imagine that it would have been worse.
And Dodgers360 would have a completely different vibe.
And we would have seen Koufax, Drysdale, Tommy and Willie Davis, Maury Wills, and Frank Howard in NYC in their primes! Sad we missed them here!
Classic. From Geodesic domes to the Dodgers360.
Buckyballs to extreme Moneyball!
This is right in my wheelhouse, I was 9 when the Dodgers left Ebbetts Field and I do have direct memory of the move. All my family on both sides were strong Dodger fans.
If the Dodgers do not move, it is extremely unlikely there will be MLB expansion in the early 60s. After the Dodger move, the move to form the third major league, the continental league, was started. It was fear of this rival that led MLB to expand and undercut the Continental League by grabbing some of the prime proposed sites, including New York and Minneapolis and Houston. Expansion then probably delayed to the 70s. Two AL teams, perhaps the Senators and A’s could have relocated to California in the 60’s.
The Dodgers had a great site in mind for the new stadium in Brooklyn right across from The LIRR main station at the site of the decaying Fort Greene meat market at Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues. They would build the stadium them selves and erect a big parking garage next to the stadium that would be used for local parking at non-game times. But mogul Robert Moses at that site, he proposed sites at Bedford Stuvesant and later Flushing Meadows, but Walter O’Malley the Dodger President did not like those sited.
As noted in the article, Horace Stoneham and the Giants could only move to Frisco if the Dodgers also moved west. There were some negotiations for the Giants to abandon the Polo Grounds to play at Yankee Stadium as a tenant. That might well have worked out well for the Giants, who were about to be a much better exciting team
I’ve often thought what would it have been like to root for a good team all these many years. Competitive, a decent chance each year to make the playoffs, and bringing home a few titles each decade. Not this life. Mets fans root for the underdog, because that’s us. Now back to thoughts of Koufax, Hodges, Drysdale, Campanella and so much more. They were just some stars on the same team. Good thing they didn’t build a domed stadium. Good thing there was expansion. I draw the line at rooting for the Yankees.