This Day in Walter O’Malley History:
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At the Brooklyn National League Baseball Club, Inc. Board of Directors Meeting, Branch Rickey is reelected as President, while Walter O’Malley is named Vice President and Secretary and John L. Smith, Vice President and Treasurer. O’Malley had been secretary (general counsel) and Smith had been a Vice President, but James A. Mulvey and George A. Barnewall, who had served respectively as Vice President and Treasurer, were not returned to office. In addition to Rickey, O’Malley and Smith, members of the Board are Judge Henry L. Ughetta and Hector Racine, president of the Montreal Royals, the top farm club of the Dodgers, in the International League.
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Walter O’Malley addresses the audience at the third annual Nassau Review-Star Abraham-Straus All-Scholastic Awards Dinner at the Garden City Hotel. According to the paper, “In one of the most comprehensive appraisals of major league baseball outside a formal press conference, O’Malley devoted almost an hour to a discussion of the effect of television on baseball, the bonus issue, possible successors to (Baseball Commissioner) Happy Chandler and other problems concerning the Dodgers and major league clubs.” The audience includes players, coaches, high school athletic directors and school supervisors. O’Malley enumerates four points he desires in a new Commissioner, including 1) executive ability, 2) judicial demeanor, 3) consciousness of the overall public relations job that baseball needs and 4) a man able to cope with the political and legislative attacks that are constantly filed at baseball. “I want a man who’ll come in, take over, and say I’m the boss and I’ll run the show from now on for the good of the game,” concluded O’Malley. Nassau Review-Star, June 13, 1951