Put in this light, it's hard to imagine what else O'Malley could have done to keep the team in Brooklyn. Was he self-interested? Sure. Was he hungry for profits? Absolutely. But Brooklyn's devotion to the Dodgers has been exaggerated with time. Time has also revealed that O'Malley wasn't alone; all business owners are profit-seekers, even baseball owners. People like Dick Young did not want to see baseball as a business, but that didn't change the fact that it was a business. Walter O'Malley was the first to publicly embrace the idea, and his image has suffered for it ever since. So Michael D'Antonio has attempted to set the record straight.
I have only two complaints with the book. The first is its strong tendency to interpret events in a light most favorable to O'Malley. It's troubling to read a biography detailing a number of disputes and disagreements where the subject is almost never at fault. I'm not arguing with the author's facts, per se, but rather his disarming tendency to take O'Malley at his word and ignore any interpretation that might suggest that he was either lying or telling the truth for selfish ends. O'Malley is depicted as an ambitious businessman with a keen ability for politics, but one with honest intentions and a devotion to do what was right by his employees. But there are many cases where that depiction of O'Malley rings quite false.
This brings me to my second problem: O'Malley's later years, after the team's move to Los Angeles, are given short shrift. Walter O'Malley is an important baseball figure for many reasons. It's not just the Dodgers' move to California that makes biography important to our understanding of baseball.
D'Antonio account of this period is troubling, mainly because it's confined to the last 20 pages of a 321-page book. Forever Blue devotes almost 95% of the book to O'Malley's life from birth to the construction of Dodger Stadium in 1962. The years 1963-1979 occupy about 6% of the text, and even then they're sharing space with the author's final thoughts and conclusions, not to mention a full-page anecdote about going on safaris.. O'Malley's role as the most powerful man in baseball during the development of the player's union and the arrival of free agency is discussed only in passing. That's a terrible shame.
And even then, D'Antonio makes O'Malley sound like a hero. D'Antonio admits to O'Malley's power over the other owners, but in an utterly harmless manner that suggests that O'Malley was king simply because he was the best and the brightest in baseball, not because of any backroom manipulation. He goes so far as to depict O'Malley as a genuine friend of the labor union and its leader, Marvin Miller. At no time does he suggest that O'Malley's attitude was paternalistic or calculated, despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary.
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