In a way, the announcement that Barclays Bank will be awarded naming rights for Bruce Ratner’s proposed Brooklyn arena, ends a 50-year sports business saga in the borough that began with Walter O’ Malley’s stadium bid. The arena will be built not far from the hole in the ground that O’ Malley, the president and owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, wanted for his proposed stadium. In early 1957, when it became clear he wouldn’t secure the kind of deal he wanted from Mayor Wagner and his envoy, Robert Moses, the astute businessman began eyeing the West Coast. This year, Ratner moved a step closer to bringing a major professional sports club, the Nets, to Brooklyn — with a great assist from Mayor Bloomberg.

The moves to California of the Dodgers and Giants have been chronicled for five decades and, in many ways, are treated as a turning point in sports history — the moment when sports ceased to be “sports” and became a business. The truth is that O’Malley’s move to Los Angeles and Horace Stoneham’s relocation of his Giants to San Francisco weren’t the most important sports business events in the history of the industry. It doesn’t even rank second, although to a couple of generations of New York-area Dodgers fans, O’ Malley committed the ultimate act of treason. (Oddly enough, Stoneham escaped the wrath of many local baseball fans.)

The Dodgers and Giants moves ended a Golden Era of New York baseball, which began in 1949, ended in 1957, and featured the Yankees, Dodgers, or Giants in every World Series during that nine-year period. But if you consider that the relocations affected only three cities: New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, the historical significance of the Dodgers and Giants franchise shifts is considerably overrated.

O’Malley ended up with land on which he built a privately funded stadium, while Stoneham got a municipally funded facility and what amounted to about a $1 million television deal from entertainment executive Matty Fox for TV service that never materialized. Neither O’Malley nor Stoneham broke their leases and for both the moves were strictly business deals. In fact, Stoneham thought about moving to Minneapolis and O’Malley’s Dodgers played some games in Jersey City in 1957.

O’Malley wasn’t the first team owner to mull over the possibility of going to Los Angeles: The St. Louis Browns ownership wanted to move to California in the early 1940s, but the onset of World War II and travel restrictions aborted the plan; the National Football League’s Cleveland Rams moved to Los Angeles in 1946, and the NFL “merged” with the All-America Football Conference after the 1949 season and claimed the San Francisco territory.

O’Malley’s wanderlust started with the move in 1953 of the Boston Braves to Milwaukee, where three years earlier Milwaukee city officials had resolved to build a stadium with the hope of landing a major league baseball team.

That decision by Milwaukee elected officials is far more significant than the Dodgers and Giants moves. The local government changed the rules for stadium and arena funding and signaled the start of competition between cities for sports franchises. Cities were now willing to put up money for venues — something unheard of until that time.

In 1952, St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck again began to explore the possibility of moving the Browns. By the time American League meetings were held on March 16, 1953, Veeck had reached a deal to move the Browns to Baltimore, but American League owners blocked the move with five of the seven owners saying no. Veeck, who had suffered $396,000 in losses in 1952 and watched as the behemoth Anheuser-Busch companies purchased the competing Cardinals that year, badly wanted out of St. Louis.

Meanwhile, just two days after the American League meetings that March, Lou Perini, who owned the Boston Braves and their farm team, the Brewers, asked National League owners for permission to move his cashstrapped Braves to Milwaukee. Perini claimed he had lost $500,000 operating the Braves in 1952. Perini’s decision was a shrewd one: The Braves were a smash at the box office in 1953, setting a National League record with 1,826,397 fans attending Milwaukee home games. The Braves owner negotiated one of the first “sweetheart” leases, paying just $1,000 a year to rent County Stadium before “voluntarily” amending the contract to pay $25,000 annually for the 1953 and 1954 seasons. (He also got concession rights at the park.) Perini’s success would mark the beginning of the end for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

After the 1953 season, Veeck sold his Browns to Baltimore businessmen. Arnold Johnson bought the Philadelphia A’s and moved the team to Kansas City in 1955. And O’Malley and Stoneham became fourth and fifth in line, respectively, to move — not even no. 2 on the list of most noteworthy franchise moves.

Even the migration of the Boston-based New England Whalers of the World Hockey Association (a league that challenged the National Hockey Association in the 1970s) to Hartford, Conn., would have a far greater impact, although back in 1974 the only ones who noticed were a few Whalers fans in Boston and a number of Hartford residents. But the Whalers move was significant for two reasons: The city had erected an arena as part of a mall using public funding; and if Whalers owner Howard Baldwin had stayed in Boston, there would be no ESPN as it exists today.

If you are looking for a starting point in the growing concept of stadium- and ballpark-villages that are springing up in Brooklyn, East Rutherford, N.J., St. Louis, Fremont, Calif., and Arlington, Tex., look no further than Hartford. The Connecticut arena was designed with the intention of luring business into a downtown mall and, conversely, shoppers were supposed to be drawn to events at the Hartford Civic Center. It was a simple idea and one that sports owners have continued to expand upon, lobbying for land to build privately funded facilities complete with commercial and residential space. Included in the new deals would be a clause for municipalities to pick up the cost of infrastructure. And as part of the transaction, sports owners would get tax breaks for financing the project.

Once in Connecticut, Baldwin looked to expand the Whalers’ television presence. A former employee of Baldwin’s, Bill Rasmussen, agreed to shop around for satellite time that could be purchased for the Whalers. A package including Whalers games and University of Connecticut sports events was offered to Connecticut-area cable television operators. Rasmussen learned it was cheaper to buy satellite time on a weekly basis and that he could hit 48 states instead of just Connecticut. The plan for a Connecticut regional sports TV service never got off the ground but instead it resulted in the creation of ESPN by 1979.

So Baldwin’s move from Boston to Hartford is easily the second most important franchise shift in the evolution of sports business.

Ratner’s Barclay Bank deal, together with Mets owner Fred Wilpon’s agreement with Citibank for a new stadium, and Jeffrey Vanderbeek’s Devils-Prudential accord, were not even options on the table for O’Malley in 1957. In 1972, Erie County, Penn., officials signed a naming rights agreement with Rich Products (a food product company) for a new municipally funded football stadium that would house the Buffalo Bills. Ironically, in the first years of the agreement, the Bills refused to use the name, maintaining the deal was between the county and the business. Today, Rich Stadium is Ralph Wilson Stadium, one of the few NFL facilities whose naming rights remain unsold.

The Erie County–Rich Products pact is also important because it transformed the sports marketing business. Stoneham’s Giants franchise is now owned by Peter McGowan, who reaped an enormous amount of money in stadium naming rights from Pacific Bell when the Giants’ new ballpark was opened in 2000.

Ratner’s move from New Jersey to Brooklyn will be neither historic nor ground-breaking. It’s just another franchise move in a deal that’s really about the real estate business, not sports. But professional sports have always been about business — the business is just bigger than it was when Walter O’Malley waved good-bye to Brooklyn 50 years ago.