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Views of -SportBy RED SMITHFORTYNINERS IN FIFTYSEVENNEW YORK — if baseball is strictly a business with profit as the be-all and the end-all, then there is only one important factor to be considered by Walter O'Malley and Horace Stoneham, proprietors of the oldest established permanent floating crap games in New York: how much more money would they make in Los Angeles and San Francisco than in Brooklyn and Manhattan?There is no doubt here that the prospector who sinks his pick in Los Angeles real estate will strike a vein of pure gold. It is a city of two and a quarter million—about a half million smaller than Brooklyn—that has clamored for big league ball for years.The citizenry is conditioned to outdoor entertainments and enthusiastic about sports; some of America’s largest crowds squint red-eyed through smog to watch Los Angeles football games and horse races. In character it is a gec-wluzz town, a pitchman's paradise that cuddles up to Townsend Plans, faith , healers. Aimce Semplc McPherson, sports cars and Gcorgcous George.Phrenologists thumbing the Angeleno skull discover a grossly enlarged '‘civic booster” bump. If and when O’Malley sets up his tripod and keisler in ^iPcrshing Square, the populace ill enlist in a holy crusade to outdo the box office frenzy of Milwaukee.•* • *CITY OF LOVELY FOGSan Francisco is something else again. More sophisticated than the neon Nincvah to' the south, the loveliest and gayest of American cities is about half Los Angeles’ size, smaller than St. Louis or Washington, roughly comparable to Milwaukee orional League meeting where permission to move was granted, O’Malley had, the papers reported, **a word of advise for the Flatbush faithful.”“The important tiling for Brooklyn fans.” he said, ‘‘is to support the Dodgers as they have been doing.”Perhaps because they are slaves to vice of public speaking baseball men achieve a state of auto-hypnosis in which they see nothing illogical or incongruous in statements like that made in circumstances like these. Operating on the same profit-and-loss principles as any other business, they pretend to he engaged in some kind of public service and they prattle un-blushingly about ‘Tan support” and ‘‘loyally,” demanding from their customers an uncritical, dog-like devotion that no railroad or delicatessen or coal mine would dare to claim.Baseball is a business run for profit, employing professionals from far places who playfor pay. Except for the B” onhis cap and the location of the
Newspaper Details
Rocky Mount Evening Telegram
Rocky Mount, North Carolina, US
Mon, Jun 03, 1957
Page 9
Full Page
Clipped by
Drinda J.
NV, USA 08 Nov 2016
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