Fifty years after Walter O’Malley pulled the Dodgers out of Brooklyn, baseball honored him with election to the Hall of Fame.

Reaction to the Dec. 3 announcement is mixed, though it tends to become more positive as one moves west. After all, O’Malley built his reputation on moving the Dodgers; it is the primary accomplishment cited by the Hall in its press release on the new inductees, and the lead sentence of his Times obituary.

That record has led to O’Malley being reviled by all manner of Brooklyn fans and assorted baseball traditionalists. A famous story has a pair of New York journalists trading their lists of the three greatest villains of the twentieth century; both men included Hitler, Stalin and Walter O’Malley.

“I’m flabbergasted, is my response,” Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz said in a telephone interview following the announcement. “A couple of weeks ago, I read that they were even considering honoring Walter O’Malley. I told them if they insisted on doing this, it would break the hearts of Brooklynites all over again.” Markowitz suggested that the Hall make it up to Brooklyn with the enshrinement of former Dodger Gil Hodges.  read more »