In case you haven’t heard, Official Dodgers photographer Jon SooHoo has a blog where he shares some of his great pictures. It is at http://dodgersphotog.mlblogs.com/author/mlblogsdodgersphotog1/ and I have added the link to the sidebar. To me, his blog is what the Inside the Dodgers blog should have been. He gives us a look at the team without any sales pitch.

A link on the Dodgers Twitter feed had a picture of Matt Kemp and equipment manager Mitch Poole standing next to the Dodger truck at Camelback Ranch.  Crzblue’s Dodger Blue World showed that picture, as well as a great shot of Gary Carter standing next to Mike Sciosia.  http://crzblue.mlblogs.com/2012/02/16/the-dodger-equipment-truck-has-arrived-at-camelback-ranch/

Other items of note from the Dodgers News feed on the sidebar:

• Dodgers Web musings: Worst offensive infield in baseball? – Los Angeles Times February 16, 2012
• Dodgers’ bidders to meet MLB’s ownership committee – BusinessWeek February 16, 2012
• Dodgers Spring Training 2012 Preview: Not Too Many Spots Up For Grabs – SB Nation February 16, 2012
• Joe Torre says ‘no’ to managing while talking about his run – USA TODAY February 16, 2012

Outsite the Dodgers got a shout-out on this blog:

http://www.millermosaicllc.com/online-marketing/brian-oconnell-shares-bundle-secret-for-urls/

I was asked to write a guest post after getting a free ebook on Amazon and tweeting my appreciation to the author.

I didn’t try to organize an Outside the Dodgers team due to the small amount of regular posters, the great distances that some of us would have to travel and our demographics.  It is now too late to join one of the teams, but not to come hang out and meet some of your fellow bloggers.  

Participating Blogs

The Left Field Pavilion
Vin Scully is my homeboy
Dodger Thoughts
True Blue LA
Sons of Steve Garvey
Fansmanship.com
Mike Scioscia’s tragic illness
Opinion of Kingmans performance
Save the Dodgers
Dodger Bobble
Dodger Diaries
 

As most of you might already know, Roberto Clemente signed with the Dodgers for $10,000, but never got to play a single game in Brooklyn or Los Angeles.

A rule back then in effect required that any player signed for more than $4000 had to stay on the parent club for a full season. At that time, the Dodgers had a great team and there was nowhere to place the 18 year old Clemente. The Dodgers attempted to keep Clemente’s profile low, but the keen eye of the Pittsburgh Pirates general manager knew Clemente and he was selected by the Pirates for $4,000 on Nov. 22, 1954.

What I never heard before, was the story of how Ted Williams said that he would have liked to be a Dodger. From the Aug 20, 1940 issue of the Dubuque, Iowa Telegraph-Herald, Williams said “If I were a free agent and each major league club offered me identical contracts, I’d sign with the Dodgers… I know I’d be a hero in Brooklyn.”

Imagine the 1950′s Dodgers with Williams in left, Snider in center and Furillo in right field. Williams could have played in Los Angeles in the 1959 World Series and ended his career in LA in 1960. Then, with Clemente maturing, the 1960′s Dodgers would have been much stronger with Roberto a fixture in right field. I liked Ron Fairly, but Ron Fairly was no Roberto Clemente.

Woulda, coulda, shoulda.

The year was 1950. Walter O’Malley, the cool businessman-lawyer who had just taken over as director of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, cast an appraising eye on his club’s prospects. He decided they were not good. To be sure, in the next few years the Dodgers were to show the largest pretax and net-profit take in the business. Before a House subcommittee in 1957 O’Malley admitted that the Dodgers from 1952 to 1956 had made $1,860,744 after taxes.

But O’Malley knew the symptoms of business decline. His team was operating in a saturated TV market, in an outmoded place of business and under conditions which O’Malley—but few others—foresaw would deteriorate in the coming years. With a prescience given only to those destined for success, O’Malley moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles.

The results of his migration are now in. And they show that O’Malley has made more money in a single season than any other franchise holder in the history of baseball. The Los Angeles Dodgers can show a return on investment that even the most glamorous space-age stock might well envy. Moreover, there is no end in sight to his avenue of dividends.

O’Malley, of course, is not going to tell anybody how much money he has made out of his master move west. The economics of baseball traditionally have been a clandestine rite, interrupted only occasionally by the sudden sobbing of a burned board of directors. Often, such a performance is just a front-office version of the hidden-ball trick calculated to hoodwink the team’s leading hitters into signing a contract somewhat below their net worth. But even the banjo hitters are warming up for a crack at O’Malley’s bank roll after his 1959 season.

Let’s make a very conservative estimate of the Dodgers’ 1959 take. To begin with, a total of 2,071,045 paid their way into the Los Angeles Coliseum to watch the Dodgers in regular-season play. Their average ticket cost about $2.40, or a total of approximately $5 million. Concession profits gave the club an additional $384,016, and baseball novelties like hats, bats and pennants $15,000.

LOVELY RENT-FREE SERIES

The Dodgers paid no rent to the Coliseum for the World Series, O’Malley having convinced the Coliseum that the Series is historically a benefit for the players and the Commissioner of Baseball but not for the clubs. This is true except when the crowd level reaches 90,000 a day, as it did in the Coliseum. When that happens everybody makes money. The Dodgers made $335,140.16.

On the road last year Los Angeles reaped $356,094 from 1,294,889 admissions. Radio broadcasting rights brought in another $885,000, or about what the Dodgers received in Brooklyn for both radio and TV. (Nielsen, the rating people, report that the third Series game had the largest audience—24.3 million homes—ever to view a single broadcast, so O’Malley has a good argument for higher broadcasting fees in 1960.)

Thus, conservatively, O’Malley’s income from all baseball sources last year was some $7 million. In their last pennant-winning year in Brooklyn, the Dodgers took in $3,880,824.

Expenses in 1959 for the Dodgers balance out about as follows: player payroll $465,000, second highest in the league; Coliseum rental $281,282; field maintenance and crew $395,000; front-office personnel $350,000; bonuses to new rookies (an investment in the future) $850,000; loss on minor league operations $300,000; visiting teams’ share of gate $569,537; indemnification payment to the National League office and the Pacific Coast League $250,000; air transportation $110,000.

Dodger expenses for 1959 thus wound up in the area of $3,600,000. This is nearly a million and a half more than the expenses in Brooklyn in 1956, the last World Series year, when they were $2,216,175. However, Walter O’Malley and his jolly crew still had a net income before taxes of at least $3,300,000.

But the Dodgers’ and O’Malley’s windfall has not gone unnoticed in Los Angeles nor has it been universally cheered. One of the first results of the big year was that the Coliseum commission was wearing its old face when the wily Walter came forward to seek an “equitable” deal for the use of the Coliseum in 1960. The commissioners reminded O’Malley that he had signed his two-year lease with the clear understanding that should a third year be necessary he would have to sign on at the standard pre-Dodger-era rate. The Coliseum in 1960 will get 10% of the gross and all income from the concessions.

By last year’s figures, this would come to $800,000, or an increase of $500,000. To O’Malley’s credit, he put up only token resistance and quickly capitulated—even though, at 70-plus games a year, the Dodgers brought in seven times as much business at the Coliseum as football teams did.

It appears likely that the Dodgers will have the biggest National League player payroll in 1960. Gil Hodges and Duke Snider will again head the list with approximately $39,000 each. Wally Moon rises from $20,000 to $30,000. Don Drysdale goes up from $17,000 to $27,000. Charlie Neal will get $24,000, up from $19,000. Carl Furillo $25,000, Clem Labine $23,000, Jim Gilliam $22,000, and Roger Craig, $17,000, a raise doubling last year’s $8,500. Catcher John Roseboro goes from $10,000 to $16,000. Larry Sherry gets a deserved 100% raise to $14,000, and Sandy Koufax’ strikeouts merit his jump from $14,000 to $17,000. Bonus boys Frank Howard and Ron Fairly, who have already banked nearly $200,000 between them just to sign, will get standard $8,000 contracts but with provisos for premiums.

Off the field, the line is forming at the O’Malley pay window, too. Pained at the high cost of living in the Coliseum, O’Malley is more anxious than ever to complete his new stadium in Chavez Ravine. He has had to buy up at exorbitant prices 12 parcels of real estate to complete his acreage. One home site in the ravine was owned by an embittered son of a onetime British army officer. The son blamed his father’s death from a heart attack to wrangles he had had over the land. The site was appraised at $9,000. His home was sold to the Dodgers at $150,000. Another parcel appraised at $15,510 cost the Dodgers $130,000.

When these costly bases have been safely touched, Walter O’Malley, living in baronial splendor in the pseudo-alpine fastness of Lake Arrowhead, 100 miles east and 5,000 feet up from Los Angeles, will start building his $8 million ravine stadium, the ownership of which the Dodgers will share with no one.

So just how are things with the Dodgers and O’Malley? Just fine, thank you, or rather, let O’Malley thank himself. He saw the gold in the West and, superlative businessman that he is, cornered a nice solid part of it.

One item that I saw there that was interesting was the Huffington Post article about potential new Dodgers owners.  You can’t tell the players without a scorecard and here it is:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/05/dodgers-bidders-photos_n_1184635.html?ref=sports&ir=Sports

I hope that 2012 will be the last we have to endure Frank McCourt and a new owner will be in charge.   It will be interesting to see which owners group emerges out of those in the running.

I don’t have much hope that the current roster will make it to the World Series but anything is possible.

Remember that you have posting privileges so if you are feeling creative or just in the mood to rant or whatever, go ahead and write a post.

I have not been around too much lately but noticed that it takes a while to scroll all the way down when using a tablet computer to read the comments.

I am typing this on a Kindle Fire.  It is slower. than a PC to enter text but is much more portable.

Hopefully the “book” will get the bidding process started.  I CAN’T WAIT until McCourt is gone.