Warriors to Keep Golden State Name Despite 2019 Move to San Francisco

[The_Admiral]

4 hours ago, Gothamite said:

 

I was with you right up until that part. 

 

IT'S A HIDEOUS BUILDING

[Gothamite]

Nah, not really.  I like the green roof.

 

It also happens to be a great place to watch a basketball game.  If only the team itself was worthy of it.

[Digby]

Climbing the upper deck aisles at Barclays feels like hiking a mountain in the middle of the night.

[SFGiants58]

On 4/19/2018 at 12:34 PM, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

Excellent idea about an alternate history involving the Dodgers.  There's good reason to believe that they would have done very well in a modern stadium at Atlantic and Fourth Avenues.  The generation of Brooklynites who had moved to Long Island would have flocked to that stadium on the LIRR.  Imagine Koufax having his great years in that ballpark, and the draw from Long Island that that would have been.  This opens up some good storytelling possibilities, such as a knock-on effect of helping to arrest the decline in the quality of public transit in New York that continued into the 1970s.

However, I don't think I have ever heard of any attempt on the part of the Giants to build anywhere else in New York City.  Stoneham didn't think the problem was the ballpark; he was convinced that there was no more audience for his team in New York, and he wanted to get out.  If not for O'Malley's intervention that pursuaded him of the value of moving together to California, the Giants were off to Minneapolis for sure.

 

Yeah, the latter part is me falling victim to the other problem of alternate histories. Said problem is going into the counterfactual wanting a certain outcome, no matter how unrealistic.

 

The only way the Giants would have stayed in New York would have been through Stoneham selling the team, which is doubtful (he only let go of the team in the 1970s after financial duress, as the team and the Polo Grounds were his only assets). Still, if a William Shea-like figure did buy the team and go along with the Robert Moses/city fathers' Shea Stadium plan, a West Side stadium, or a move to the Meadowlands, it would have been an interesting twist to the rivalry's history. 

 

The Minneapolis outcome, while it would have made sense at the time (the Giants big minor-league club, the Millers, played there), would have been disastrous for baseball. One of the sport's best rivalries would have died, and I doubt a Giants/Milwaukee Braves or Dodgers/Phillies rivalry would have been an adequate replacement. Having the Dodgers and Giants move to California was arguably one of the best relocations in all of Big Four sports, because of how much it increased baseball's geographic reach and preserved such a storied rivalry. The Minneapolis/Minnesota Giants are still a fun thought to consider, especially because it opens up opportunities for the Washington Sen(ationals)ors to move elsewhere. No counterfactual history can convince me that Calvin Griffith wouldn't white flight his way out of DC. 

[kroywen]

On 4/19/2018 at 1:34 PM, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

Excellent idea about an alternate history involving the Dodgers.  There's good reason to believe that they would have done very well in a modern stadium at Atlantic and Fourth Avenues.  The generation of Brooklynites who had moved to Long Island would have flocked to that stadium on the LIRR.  Imagine Koufax having his great years in that ballpark, and the draw from Long Island that that would have been.  This opens up some good storytelling possibilities, such as a knock-on effect of helping to arrest the decline in the quality of public transit in New York that continued into the 1970s.

However, I don't think I have ever heard of any attempt on the part of the Giants to build anywhere else in New York City.  Stoneham didn't think the problem was the ballpark; he was convinced that there was no more audience for his team in New York, and he wanted to get out.  If not for O'Malley's intervention that pursuaded him of the value of moving together to California, the Giants were off to Minneapolis for sure.

 

The Brooklyn dome proposal always seemed fairly dead-in-the-water with the City (and especially with Robert Moses), but I've always wondered what would've happened if the Dodgers took up the city's offer of the Flushing Meadows site for a ballpark (the eventual site of Shea Stadium). I'd imagine the Dodgers would've renamed themselves "New York Dodgers," and the Dodgers-Yankees rivalry would've continued strong into the mid-1960s. The Koufax-led dynasty taking place in NYC would mean the continuance of New York's "Golden Era" of baseball into the mid-60s, which would've been incredible to watch for fans in this corner of the nation. I have little doubt that an NYC-based Dodger team post-1958 would've experienced considerably more success than the Mets have in their history. The Tri-State market would probably be more equally divided between Yankee fans and Dodger fans today.

 

The interesting downstream effects would've been on the west coast - what happens with the Los Angeles and San Francisco/Oakland markets. There's little doubt in my mind that MLB would've expanded or moved to LA and SF by 1961 anyway - either in the form of expansion teams and/or the Senators leaving DC in favor of LA or SF (keeping in mind that the Giants likely would've landed in Minnesota; no way New York was keeping a second NL team into the 1960s). The AL probably would've been first to land on the West Coast, given the Senators' desire to move out of DC.

 

If an AL team landed in San Francisco rather than the Giants, the A's would never move to Oakland. Suddenly you're looking at a very different baseball landscape in the late 1960s - does the AL ever approve an A's move from Kansas City? If not, does the 1969 AL expansion even occur? What happens with the Seattle and San Diego markets? And so on...

 

I think I did a counterfactual alternate history on this exact issue (the Dodgers staying in NYC) in the "Alternate History" thread years ago... I'll see if I can dig it up.

[kroywen]

On 4/19/2018 at 6:13 PM, Digby said:

Climbing the upper deck aisles at Barclays feels like hiking a mountain in the middle of the night.

 

This. I LOATHE the upper deck at Barclays. As steep as Matterhorn, and gives zero legroom.

 

I have no qualms with placing an arena at Atlantic Yards (actually think it was a great idea), but completely mis-designed. Seating is way too tight and uncomfortable, the building looks like a rusted-out spaceship, and it was built too small for a hockey rink despite a team right on Long Island clearly looking for a new arena even at the time Barclays was designed. And given how poorly the arena utilized available space on the east-west axis, I have no doubt that they could've built it large enough to fit a hockey rink.

[SFGiants58]

4 minutes ago, kroywen said:

 

 

The interesting downstream effects would've been on the west coast - what happens with the Los Angeles and San Francisco/Oakland markets. There's little doubt in my mind that MLB would've expanded or moved to LA and SF by 1961 anyway - either in the form of expansion teams and/or the Senators leaving DC in favor of LA or SF (keeping in mind that the Giants likely would've landed in Minnesota; no way New York was keeping a second NL team into the 1960s). The AL probably would've been first to land on the West Coast, given the Senators' desire to move out of DC.

 

If an AL team landed in San Francisco rather than the Giants, the A's would never move to Oakland. Suddenly you're looking at a very different baseball landscape in the late 1960s - does the AL ever approve an A's move from Kansas City? If not, does the 1969 AL expansion even occur? What happens with the Seattle and San Diego markets? And so on...

 

I think I did a counterfactual alternate history on this exact issue (the Dodgers staying in NYC) in the "Alternate History" thread years ago... I'll see if I can dig it up.

 

Our good friend @Silent Wind of Doom did that already:

 

As to the LA and Bay Area markets, I've hypothesized that the 1961 AL expansion would have gone down like this:

 

1. Senators move to SF, adopt "Seals" name.

2. Add expansion Los Angeles Angels.

3. Add expansion Washington Senators, who may or may not move to Arlington in about a decade.

 

Given that there'd be an AL team in San Francisco, the A's could have made several moves. These include:

 

1. Stay in Kansas City, wait on construction of Truman Sports Complex. This complicates the 1969 and 1977 expansion rounds, as there's no Kansas City expansion team and the Pilots don't get rushed into a poor financial position.

2. Move to Milwaukee, preventing the Pilots from moving there in 1970.

3. Wait a few years and move to Arlington, Seattle, or even Toronto (given the Giants' interest in moving there during the mid-1970s).

 

Also, the National League would have wanted in on the West Coast markets during this period. This has several possible implications, such as the Braves moving to Oakland, LA, or Seattle, with 1962 or 1969 expansion adding more teams in the region. Baseball's franchise map would look markedly different with these few changes.

[The_Admiral]

21 minutes ago, kroywen said:

the building looks like a rusted-out spaceship

 

Really one of the ugliest buildings in New York and ugliest buildings in sports. Rust is not an architectural flourish. Just an awful building to look at.

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

11 hours ago, kroywen said:

 

The Brooklyn dome proposal always seemed fairly dead-in-the-water with the City (and especially with Robert Moses), but I've always wondered what would've happened if the Dodgers took up the city's offer of the Flushing Meadows site for a ballpark (the eventual site of Shea Stadium). I'd imagine the Dodgers would've renamed themselves "New York Dodgers," and the Dodgers-Yankees rivalry would've continued strong into the mid-1960s. The Koufax-led dynasty taking place in NYC would mean the continuance of New York's "Golden Era" of baseball into the mid-60s, which would've been incredible to watch for fans in this corner of the nation. I have little doubt that an NYC-based Dodger team post-1958 would've experienced considerably more success than the Mets have in their history. The Tri-State market would probably be more equally divided between Yankee fans and Dodger fans today.

 

The interesting downstream effects would've been on the west coast - what happens with the Los Angeles and San Francisco/Oakland markets. There's little doubt in my mind that MLB would've expanded or moved to LA and SF by 1961 anyway - either in the form of expansion teams and/or the Senators leaving DC in favor of LA or SF (keeping in mind that the Giants likely would've landed in Minnesota; no way New York was keeping a second NL team into the 1960s). The AL probably would've been first to land on the West Coast, given the Senators' desire to move out of DC.

 

If an AL team landed in San Francisco rather than the Giants, the A's would never move to Oakland. Suddenly you're looking at a very different baseball landscape in the late 1960s - does the AL ever approve an A's move from Kansas City? If not, does the 1969 AL expansion even occur? What happens with the Seattle and San Diego markets? And so on...

 

I think I did a counterfactual alternate history on this exact issue (the Dodgers staying in NYC) in the "Alternate History" thread years ago... I'll see if I can dig it up.

 

11 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

Our good friend @Silent Wind of Doom did that already:

 

I would strongly disagree with the speculation, advanced by both stories, that the Dodgers would drop the "Brooklyn" name.  Being outside of Brooklyn would not stop them from using the name any more than being outside of the named locality has stopped teams such as the Dallas Cowboys or Detroit Pistons -- or the New York Giants and New York Jets.  If the team dropped the name "Brooklyn", there'd be no point in their remaining in New York City and moving to Queens, because they'd lose all their fans anyway.

But let's take a few steps back and remember that the Flushing Meadow offer was a last-ditch effort which the City made in desperation, only after agreements had been reached between the Dodgers and the Los Angeles authorities following Moses's rebuff, and only after O'Malley's original idea of buying up the various plots that made up the footprint of his proposed Flatbush Avenue stadium (the matter on which O'Malley had sought Moses's help) had become impossible because of publicity.  Flushing Meadow Park was a place where the City knew that it could build quickly.  If we start not with the question "What if O'Malley had never been born?" but with the question "What if Robert Moses's bungling of the Dodger question had been caught in time?", then we'd have to go through very many steps before we ever get to something like Flushing Meadows.

The Dodgers couldn't make money at Ebbets Field; so staying there was out of the question. And, as long as Moses had an obscene amount of power and no oversight by any elected official, it is hard to imagine a scenario in which any Dodger owner could have made headway about a new ballpark.  Furthermore, if we assume that the Braves' move to Milwaukee would have taken place in our fictional universe (a move which saw the team's attendance quadruple and go from last in the N.L. to first in all of baseball), then the possibility of moving could not have been ignored by any Dodger owner.  

But, if the question of a new Dodger ballpark had come to parties in the New York City government other than Moses, things could have gone very differently.  One obvious possibility would have been the successful building of a stadium at the Flatbush Avenue location that O'Malley wanted; any observer would have deemed that location ideal, as the Nets later did. But, if that somehow fell through after honest efforts, then we can start imagining a few other Brooklyn locations.  In the real universe, the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Brooklyn Army Terminal weren't decommissioned until the mid-1960s, and Floyd Bennett Field not until the early 1970s. Perhaps, with the impetus of placing a stadium at one of these locations, some kind of deal with the Federal government could have been worked out sooner for one of these swathes of land to return to City control.

The pessimist in me makes me think that, if the first choice of building a ballpark at the LIRR terminal were not possible, then the priorities would have swung entirely the other way, toward accommodating the greatest number of automobiles, in keeping with the car-mania of the day that wound up harming so many cities. (The images of the Braves' new park in Milwaukee showed it surrounded by a sea of parking lots.)  This makes me think that Floyd Bennett Field would have been the favoured location, because only at that spot would there be enough room for massive amounts of parking, and because that location is right off the Belt Parkway, a highway that links to the rest of Brooklyn, as well as to Queens and Long Island.

Whereas a Dodger Stadium at the LIRR terminal in Downtown Brooklyn might have contributed positively to the City by helping to boost the overall interests of mass transit, a Dodger Stadium at Floyd Bennett Field would have had the opposite effect. A likely consequence of a stadium on Brooklyn's southern coast would have been the extension of the Prospect Expressway down the entire length of Ocean Parkway to an interchange with the Belt Parkway, such that New York would have lost that iconic street and would have had in its place another highway scarring its urban fabric.

[The_Admiral]

Would there be any interest in a Power Broker reading group this summer? I'm overdue for a re-read.

[B-Rich]

6 minutes ago, the admiral said:

Would there be any interest in a Power Broker reading group this summer? I'm overdue for a re-read.

 

I'd be up for it.

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

17 minutes ago, the admiral said:

Would there be any interest in a Power Broker reading group this summer? I'm overdue for a re-read.

 

I read that book twice, twenty years apart.  Actually, I read it the first time, and then I listened to the audio book the second time, which was only a couple of years ago. Reading or listening to the book takes a lot of effort, as it is well in excess of 1000 pages long.  But doing so is worthwhile. You learn so much not only about Robert Moses but also about so many other characters in New York history, such as Al Smith, Fiorello LaGuardia, and John Lindsay, to name just a few. And there are plenty of stories of people whose names are not famous, but who have important connections to the various decisions relating to parks and highways.
 

[The_Admiral]

Alls I need to know about decisions relating to parks is that the Hillary lady made friends with the bacon man. 

[leopard88]

39 minutes ago, the admiral said:

Would there be any interest in a Power Broker reading group this summer? I'm overdue for a re-read.

 

I really liked my urban history class in college . . . but not that much.  It helps when you're lucky enough to have this guy as your professor.

 

https://sites.lafayette.edu/millerd/about-the-author/

 

http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/donald-l-miller/1929995

 

Maybe some Lewis Mumford instead.

[LMU]

Catching up here so a couple points:

 

*With the talk of Disney employees that was brought up with the Angels/Ducks, I just checked with my dad, who's an accounting manager with Disney corporate, and he confirmed that he himself is considered a "cast member."

 

*The whole Rams/Raiders talk with the rap community, I think another aspect is that the Raiders played in the Coliseum, which is located in the rap hot bed of South Central, as opposed to the Rams being out in suburban, affluent Orange County.

*Back to the Warriors, the one thing that makes this whole naming decision so baffling is that they actually included THIS as part of their current identity.

 

Tampa Bay is used as a location that encompasses Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, etc.  I don't see San Francisco Bay Warriors being that much more egregious.

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

1 hour ago, LMU said:

*Back to the Warriors, the one thing that makes this whole naming decision so baffling is that they actually included THIS as part of their current identity.

 

Yes, indeed.  I thought that the existence of that logo (which I have seen on a hat offered for sale at the NBA Store) guaranteed the reversion to the "San Francisco Warriors" name.

(Though I am profoundly irked by that "Est. 1962" business. The Warriors go back to the beginning of the league, having been a charter member of the BAA in 1946-47.)

[SFGiants58]

55 minutes ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

 

Yes, indeed.  I thought that the existence of that logo (which I have seen on a hat offered for sale at the NBA Store) guaranteed the reversion to the "San Francisco Warriors" name.

(Though I am profoundly irked by that "Est. 1962" business. The Warriors go back to the beginning of the league, having been a charter member of the BAA in 1946-47.)

 

With relocated teams, I'm a little more lenient with "Est." logos. It could just mean year of relocation, in this case the Warriors' move to the Bay Area. Apparel companies do this all the time, even when the only thing that changes is a team nickname. It seems to go off of a "whatever year the specific city name + team name combination first appeared" basis:

 

 

 

Of course, some relocated teams incorporate their old cities in a more official fashion (superseding apparel):

 

  

 

Usually it only comes up in anniversary patches, but it's good to show a greater sense of lineage in logo form.

[ltjets21]

Did the Giants ever even have the option to stay in New York? It is crazy to think that Fenway park is still around and it is a year older than Ebbets Field. I wonder how bad the conditions really were at these places and why they couldn't just renovate them.

[DeFrank]

Did anybody else think...

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/us/golden-state-killer-serial.html

[LMU]

13 hours ago, ltjets21 said:

Did the Giants ever even have the option to stay in New York? It is crazy to think that Fenway park is still around and it is a year older than Ebbets Field. I wonder how bad the conditions really were at these places and why they couldn't just renovate them.

There's different factors that probably attributed to that.  For one, the Dodgers and Giants were going to forever be competing for #2 behind the Yankees whereas after the Braves moved to Milwaukee the Red Sox were the only team in town.  You also have stadium location issues where you had Ebbets Field which was constrained by the neighborhood while also not having any parking for all the fans that moved east into Long Island in the postwar suburban boom and the Polo Grounds where the neighborhood went to hell and the stadium deteriorated largely due to the Giants not actually owning the land that the park sat on.