Walter in Wonderland

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The man with the ample jowls swiveled happily in his seat. Cigar ash dribbled over his shirt front, and his several chins bobbled as his tight little mouth widened into a smile. Everywhere he looked he saw money. There in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum were 78,672 paying customers for the first home game of the Los Angeles Dodgers; no larger crowd had ever watched a single regular-season baseball game anywhere. So far as the Dodgers' President Walter Francis O'Malley was concerned, his team had already conquered Southern California.

In a city where wide-eyed crowds can be conned into celebrating the dedication of a drugstore, it was no surprise that big-league baseball had packed the house. It hardly mattered that the Dodgers had already dropped two of their first three games with the San Francisco Giants, the hand-picked playmates who had gone to the Coast from New York City. It was almost irrelevant that the Dodgers were now in the process of winning 6-5 to spice up their first game at home. The marvel was that it was Walter O'Malley who had brought the show to town.

Even in that warm wonderland of swamis, fly-by-night faith healers and hard-eyed Hollywood flesh peddlers, O'Malley was obviously something special. Half Irish and all gall, he is a sucker for other people's promises and a happily shameless manipulator of his own. His gravel-voiced oratory beats at the unwary with the brass of a top sergeant and the blarney of a sideshow barker. To doubt his most outrageous argument is to deal him a mortal affront. But doubters there are. For Walter is a complicated soul. When there are two ways to do a thing, he chooses the oblique. Part leprechaun and part literal-minded lawyer, he disconcerts friends with a Groucho Marxist air of insincerity. Yet he walks among foes with the grave and wary eyes of an honest man lost among a legion of pickpockets.

Neither background nor training suggests the single-minded operator who led the money-hungry major leagues westward to the California gold fields. Nothing betrays the brash architect of baseball's biggest revolution since a Brooklyn pitcher named "Candy" Cummings fired the first curve and separated the men from the bushers. A Bronx-born Giant fan who seldom bothered to go to a ballpark, Walter O'Malley went to work for the Dodgers as an attorney. "Why, I don't think he even knows what Duke Snider makes," snorts the Dodgers' Vice President and General Manager Emil ("Buzzy") Bavasi. "He leaves all that to me." But tomorrow he may well be the boss of the league. What will come of that eminence no man can say.

All Walter has done so far is reorganize the national pastime. He has separated two of the most colorful clubs in the majors from two of the gaudiest congregations of fans anywhere in the land. As a result, wherever people recognize the name, no one is neutral about O'Malley. But last week, as O'Malley counted the house, he could conclude that he was ahead of the game: complaints about his actions might still be pouring in, but so was the California cash.