Walter O’Malley, the Brooklyn Dodgers president who moved the team to Los Angeles in 1957, lives in infamy. Even novelist Wilfrid Sheed dedicated his 1993 memoir “My Life as a Fan” not to but against him.

The Dodgers were named for their fans, known as trolley dodgers for their skillful evasion of fast streetcars en route to the ballpark. Club President Charles Ebbets moved the team to Ebbets Field, between Flatbush and Crown Heights, in 1912. His oddball successor, Wilbert Robinson, wouldn’t put men whose names he couldn’t spell into the starting lineup. Some players might not touch a bat all season. And the Dodgers could be as inept as the 1962 Mets: Babe Herman hit “the most remarkable triple in the history of the game” in 1926, putting three men on base – the same base – when the runners on second and first and Herman all slid into third, one after the other.

Dodgers fans were sui generis. Hilda Chester, a hefty woman who favored flowery print dresses, rang cowbells, one in each hand, to support the Dodger cause. The Dodger Sym-Phony, five Williamsburgers on brass and percussion, disagreed with umpires by playing “Three Blind Mice” and celebrated strikeouts with funeral marches as luckless batters slunk to their dugout, the bass drummer timing his stroke to coincide with a player’s seat hitting the bench. Under the right-center field scoreboard, Pitkin Avenue haberdasher Abe Stark’s 4-by-40-foot billboard promised: HIT SIGN, WIN SUIT. It got him elected Brooklyn borough president.

In August 1955, O’Malley announced the team would “have to have a new stadium” after the 1957 season. No one listened. 3:43 p.m., Tuesday, October 4, 1955: bottom of the ninth, Game 7 of the Series, Dodgers ahead 2-0, Yankees at bat with two outs. Elston Howard grounded to Pee Wee Reese at short. Reese snagged and threw the ball to first, where Gil Hodges, foot nailed to the bag, caught it. From 3:44 to 4:01, New York’s telephones had no dial tone as the Bell system collapsed under its heaviest usage since V-J Day. Brooklynites clogged Flatbush Avenue, Kings Highway, Atlantic Avenue, and Ocean Parkway, cheering and weeping tears of joy, and the night resounded with firecrackers, auto horns, and banging pots and pans.

Though the team was profitable as never before, attendance was declining. Some blamed television. O’Malley blamed Ebbets, one of the smallest major league stadiums, with only 700 parking spaces. He proposed that the Dodgers build a domed stadium with 12,000 parking spaces above the Long Island Rail Road terminal at Atlantic Avenue, easily accessible by mass transit, with the city assembling the site under eminent domain and selling it at a reasonable price to the Dodgers.

The 1949 Federal Housing Act permitted municipalities to purchase property with federal money for resale to developers whose projects conformed to larger public purposes. Whether the stadium conformed would be determined by Robert Moses, the city’s slum-clearance committee chairman. His agenda was speeding automobiles to and from suburbia. Money spent on a stadium couldn’t be spent on highways and bridges, the sources of Moses’s power through control of jobs and multimillion-dollar contracts. He gave it the thumbs-down.

In early 1957, O’Malley met with Los Angeles Mayor Norris Paulson. Los Angeles had assembled 300 acres for an unbuilt housing project. Paulson determined the site could be transferred to the Dodgers under the public-purpose clause and won support for the project from local officials and businessmen. In May 1957, the National League authorized the move. O’Malley then bought Los Angeles’s Wrigley Field for $1 million, obtaining a place to play ball until the new stadium’s completion.

Dodgers fans picketed by the thousands with signs reading “Brooklyn Is the Dodgers. The Dodgers Are Brooklyn” and “Keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn.” On September 14, 1957, the city’s lawyers said the Atlantic Avenue site could be condemned for the Dodgers. But by then, Los Angeles and O’Malley had a deal. Los Angeles gave the Dodgers the land, spent $5 million on infrastructure, and got Wrigley Field; the Dodgers built a $10 million stadium with 50,000 seats and 24,000 parking spaces. On September 17, the city offered O’Malley a new deal for Atlantic Avenue. O’Malley murmured that the offer had merits. But when the city demanded more money from the Dodgers, the deal fell through.

Two weeks after the Dodgers had beat the Pirates in Ebbets’s last game on September 24, O’Malley announced they were leaving. His effigy was burned at Borough Hall. He had fatally admitted the game was a business. This offended the fans’ romantic attachment to the team, against which talk of profit and loss, demographic shifts, and market forces struggled in vain. Few admit the Bums went west because Poulson could structure a deal and New York’s politicians couldn’t.