Navigate to News section

A Modest Proposal Regarding the Dodgers

How Commissioner Bud Selig can remake his legacy and cement his Jewishness

by
Marc Tracy
April 28, 2011
Ebbets Field, former home of the former Brooklyn Dodgers.(Wikipedia)
Ebbets Field, former home of the former Brooklyn Dodgers.(Wikipedia)

Dear Bud Selig,
You’re retiring at the end of next season. Your last big move as commissioner of Major League Baseball—a stint that saw the 1994 strike; four expansion franchises; the switch of the team you used to own, the Milwaukee Brewers, from the American to the National League; and most memorably of all the steroids scandal—will likely be your recent takeover of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Mr. Selig, you are also a Jew, and therefore probably have an intuitive grasp of the connection the American Jewish community feels to this franchise.

Mr. Selig, sunshine and palm trees are great, and Dodger Stadium is wonderful: It makes you feel like you have stepped into the California scenes of Mad Men. L.A. has a very solid baseball fanbase, too. No disrespect here.

But, Mr. Selig, if you want to be remembered as a hero, you have one obvious move left: Move the team back to Brooklyn.

The borough is about to get a basketball team. It has experienced a resurgence that its newly team-less denizens of a half-century ago could never have imagined. It is therefore time. It is past time. The front entrance can even be named after Vin Scully.

L.A.? L.A. can have the Mets.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.