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.
Baseball Taking Control of Dodgers’ Operations [NYT]
Related: Hit the Road, Frank [Slate]
The Dodgers: Los Angeles’s Answer to General Motors [The Atlantic Wire]
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.