Bring the Dodgers Home

The decision of the Dodgers to file for bankruptcy protection marks as good a moment as any to surface what is known around The New York Sun as the Marchman Plan — namely for Major League Baseball to take over the team and bring it home to Brooklyn. The team’s owner, Frank McCourt, is blaming the bankruptcy filing on the refusal by Major League Baseball to approve a television deal with Rubert Murdoch’s Fox Network, according to a dispatch of Reuters. MLB has its own reasons for nixing the television deal (there’s a dispatch on a blog called itsaboutthemoney.net arguing that Mr. McCourt has turned the Dodgers francise into a family credit card). The beauty of the Marchman Plan, which is named for the famed baseball columnist of the Sun, is that it would address the deeper problem in respect of the Dodgers, the fact that when the team went west it lost its soul — and so, for that matter, did Brooklyn.

The idea behind the Marchman Plan, its author cabled us this morning, is that Mr. McCourt was able to run the team the way he has because he had no ties to it or to Los Angeles, where the Dodgers are currently based. Mr. McCourt was, after all, a parking lot magnate from, of all places, Boston. Mr. Marchman argues that New York “would never have tolerated the importation of some random undercapitalized guy from another city.” We don’t want to try to sort out the property rights issues here, except to note that MLB has its own financial interest — that is, standing — in the McCourt proprietorship and the future of the Dodgers. In any event, what Mr. Marchman argues is that the better case is for MLB to move the Dodgers back to Brooklyn and transfer the Tampa Bay Rays, who have been one of the three best teams in the sport for years and still have miserable attendance and revenue, to Los Angeles.

“This would actually make sense, and any Angelenos inclined to whine about their beloved team being robbed from them for reasons outside their control could take it up with generations of Brooklynites,” writes Mr. Marchman. He adds that the New York City metropolitan statistics area has about 9.5 million people a team. Los Angeles and Texas have about 6.5 million a team, Philadelphia and Houston about 6 million, and no one else is remotely close. Chicago is at about 5 million a team. So, Mr. Marchman cables us, “adding a third team in New York would still leave the city with the highest population:team ratio in the majors, and of course the city is very rich to boot.” This may — or may not — be the ideal time to build a ballpark in Brooklyn, but Mr. Marchman suggests the Dodgers could play temporarily at Citi Field. “The Wilpons would doubtless welcome the rent,” Mr. Marchman muses.

The big negative in respect of Brooklyn is that any financial backer of the Dodgers’ return would have to deal with the government, in a city that makes new development notoriously difficult. It was government interference — via Robert Moses — that frustrated the vision of the Dodgers owner at the time, Walter O’Malley, who wanted to build a new field at Atlantic Yards when the Dodgers outgrew Ebbets field. It would take a veritable Homer of municipal history to do justice to the epic that has attended the effort to get a little basketball stadium erected at the yards, even in the midst of what was once called the Brooklyn Renaissance. All the greater the attraction of the Marchman Plan, which would be energized by a fondness for the Dodgers — and the days of the Dodgers — that abides even after more than half a century. A return of the Dodges to Brooklyn would be good for the Dodgers, good for Major League Baseball, and good for Brooklyn.