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Be careful. Be very careful what you wish for. And whatever you do, never underestimate the power of negative thinking. This advice comes after a communal curse, hurled half a century ago, finally took effect on its target, albeit two generations later. Many Brooklyn Dodgers fans wished nothing but the worst for the O’Malley family, which whisked the team to Los Angeles Dodgers for the 1958 season.
The spurned fans sent out maledictions like some early version of a drone aircraft, to circle the globe until they found the perpetrators who took our team. The jinx seems to be working — except that the O’Malleys have morphed into the Good Old Days, real baseball people who, in retrospect,(Sandy Koufax Cream) nurtured a successful team, even if it was 3,000 miles away from its rightful place on the planet. Is this transcontinental shift the original sin of the Dodgers franchise? The team was eventually sold to an Australian-speaking empire, the Murdochites, but even that wasn’t rock bottom. Now the Dodgers are caught up in the divorce charges by the Battling McCourts from Boston, and the team has been put under the control of Major League Baseball.
This absurd fate has been in the works since the mid-1950s, when Walter O’Malley, angling for a better stadium than funky Ebbets Field in Flatbush, cut himself a deal in Chavez Ravine. (Check out the Ry Cooder CD of the same name for the romantic/political version of the fate of the Latino community that lived in the ravine — one of the best American CDs of the past generation.)