Walter O'Malley - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

O'Malley was diagnosed with cancer, and he sought treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He died of congestive heart failure on August 9, 1979 at the Methodist Hospital in Rochester, and was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. His wife Kay had died a few weeks earlier.

At one time, Brooklyn Dodgers fans hated O'Malley so much for moving their beloved team that he was routinely mentioned along with Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin as the most villainous 20th-century men; one version of a joke went, "If a Brooklyn man finds himself in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and O'Malley, but has only two bullets, what does he do? Shoot O'Malley twice." Some still consider him among the worst three men of the 20th century. Much of the animosity was not just for moving the team, but robbing Brooklyn of the sense of a cohesive cultural and social identity that a major sports franchise provides. Despite the long-standing animosity of Brooklyn fans and their supporters in baseball, O'Malley was posthumously inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2008 after having been elected by the Veterans Committee with the minimal number of "yea" votes necessary for acceptance.

His legacy is that of changing the mindset of a league whose southernmost and westernmost team was the St. Louis Cardinals. Tommy Lasorda said upon hearing of his election to the Hall, "He's a pioneer. He made a tremendous change in the game, opening up the West Coast to Major League Baseball." When asked how he wanted to be remembered, O'Malley said, "for planting a tree." The tree provided the branches to open up the West Coast to baseball, but O'Malley's son remembers his father's 28 years on Major League Baseball's executive council as service that "was instrumental in the early stages of the game's international growth." His contributions to baseball were widely recognized even before his Hall of Fame election: he was ranked 8th and 11th respectively by ABC Sports and The Sporting News in their lists of the most influential sports figures of the 20th century.

On July 7, 2009, Walter O'Malley was inducted into the Irish American Baseball Hall of Fame along with two other Dodger icons: slugger Steve Garvey and announcer Vin Scully. "Over the years, we have learned more of his decade-long quest to build a new stadium in Brooklyn and about how those efforts were thwarted by city officials. Perhaps this induction will inspire fans who themselves started new lives outside the borough to reconsider their thoughts about Walter O’Malley," said John Mooney, curator of the Irish American Baseball Hall of Fame. "He privately built one of baseball’s more beautiful ballparks, Dodger Stadium, and set attendance records annually. While New York is the home of the Irish American Baseball Hall of Fame, it seeks to honor inductees whose impact was and is national."

O'Malley's detractors say that he was not a visionary for taking baseball west. They say the game was naturally heading toward geographical expansion and O'Malley just an opportunist. Rather than truly being a leader these detractors say his leadership was a manifestation of making the most money.