When the Dodgers and Giants Left New York: The 1957 Decision and Its Aftermath

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 10 min read

Why the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants moved to Los Angeles and San Francisco after 1957, who pushed and who refused, what the attendance data shows, and what came next for both clubs and for New York.

At the end of the 1957 season the National League lost two of its most famous franchises within a few weeks of each other. The Brooklyn Dodgers had won six pennants in the previous ten years, and the New York Giants had won the World Series as recently as 1954. By the 1958 opening day, the Dodgers were playing in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the Giants in San Francisco's Seals Stadium. New York, the largest city in the country, had no National League team at all.

The story is usually told as a drama of three men: a parks commissioner and master builder named Robert Moses, a Dodgers owner named Walter O'Malley, and a Giants owner named Horace Stoneham. The attendance and standings data in the historical record add something the story tends to skip. The two clubs were not in the same position, and the reasons for leaving were different for each. This article takes the pieces in order, from the situation in Brooklyn and Manhattan to the new homes, and then asks what the move meant for the clubs and for baseball.

Two clubs, two situations

The Dodgers and Giants shared a city and a rivalry that dated to the nineteenth century, but their circumstances in the mid-1950s were very different. The table below uses the historical team records for the eight seasons before the move.

Read the Dodgers' columns first. The club won or finished second every year until 1957, and it drew more than a million fans in each of the eight seasons, 1957 included. By the standards of the day that was a healthy attendance for a team playing in a small, old ballpark. Ebbets Field, home of the club from 1913 through 1957 in the historical record, had a best season crowd of 1,807,526, set in 1947, and the park dated from an earlier era of ballpark design. The Dodgers had a successful club and a problem with the building.

The Giants' columns tell a different story. The club won the 1954 World Series, but its attendance in 1956 and 1957 was 629,179 and 653,923, the two lowest figures in the table, and its finish in 1957 was sixth. The Giants' park, the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan, had been the club's home in one form or another since 1883. The Giants were losing games and fans, and owner Horace Stoneham began to look elsewhere.

O'Malley, Moses and the problem of the site

Walter O'Malley had taken control of the Dodgers in the early 1950s and had one goal that ran through the rest of the story: he wanted a new ballpark that he could own, on land that he could control, in Brooklyn. He looked at a site near the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues, close to a major rail terminal, and he even consulted the architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller about a domed stadium. For the design context, see Domed stadiums and the Astrodome, which traces how the idea of a roofed ballpark eventually reached the major leagues.

The difficulty was that building anything on that scale in New York City required the cooperation of Robert Moses, who held several public offices and had more influence over land and construction in the city than anyone else. Moses did not support O'Malley's idea of a stadium in central Brooklyn on land the city would acquire for him. His preference was a stadium in Flushing Meadows in Queens, which would be a city-owned ballpark. O'Malley refused to leave Brooklyn for Queens, and the two men could not reach a compromise. Flushing Meadows is where Shea Stadium would later open, in 1964, as the home of the Mets.

It is easy to turn this into a story of one stubborn man against another. The record suggests a more specific disagreement: O'Malley did not want to be a tenant. He wanted to own the site, and the city would not give him what he asked for. Whether he was right or greedy is an argument that still divides fans. The fair statement is that a profitable team with a million-plus fans a year had a legitimate reason to want a better ballpark, and that the most influential builder in the city had a competing plan.

Stoneham, Minneapolis and the West Coast

Stoneham's Giants were already thinking about leaving. The club had a Triple-A affiliate in Minneapolis, and Stoneham considered moving there. O'Malley, who by then was looking at Los Angeles, argued for San Francisco. The reason was practical. A single team on the West Coast would face a travel problem and have no natural rival, but two National League clubs there could play each other often and keep the old Dodgers-Giants series alive. San Francisco's mayor, George Christopher, pursued the Giants, and the city offered a site and a temporary park.

The league had to approve both moves. The National League's owners agreed to let the clubs relocate on the understanding that the two would go together. The Giants' directors voted in August 1957 to move, and the Dodgers followed in the fall after the season. This made the shift a joint decision by two owners and a league, not a unilateral departure, and it explains why the schedule in 1958 had the old rivals playing in California.

Los Angeles: land, a referendum and the Coliseum

Los Angeles had no major-league team and a large population, and it had a plot of land, the Chavez Ravine, that the city had acquired years earlier for a public housing project that was never built. O'Malley also acquired the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League and its territorial rights in 1957, which gave him an established baseball presence in the city. The arrangement the city council approved was controversial. Voters approved it narrowly in a referendum in June 1958, partway through the club's first season in Los Angeles.

In the meantime the Dodgers played in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a football stadium reshaped for baseball, with a very short left-field fence and a seating capacity far above that of any baseball park. The historical record shows the club in the Coliseum from 1958 through 1961. The crowds were enormous by Brooklyn standards: 1,845,556 in 1958, up from 1,028,258 in Brooklyn the year before, an increase of about 80 percent. In 1960 attendance at the Coliseum reached 2,253,887, which is the best figure for the park in the historical record. Dodger Stadium opened in 1962, and its first-year attendance was 2,755,184. In 2025 the club drew 4,012,470 there, the highest total for the park in the database.

San Francisco: Seals Stadium and Candlestick Park

The Giants played their first two California seasons in Seals Stadium, a minor-league park, where they drew 1,272,625 in 1958, almost double the 653,923 of their last year in New York. The 1959 total was 1,422,130. Candlestick Park opened in 1960, a windy park on the bay that the historical record shows as the Giants' home from 1960 through 1999, listed as Candlestick Park through 1996 and as 3Com Park afterward. Attendance there was 1,795,356 in the first year, and the club's best total in the Candlestick years was 2,606,354.

The Giants did well on the field in their new city. In 1958 they finished 80-74, third in the National League, with Orlando Cepeda winning Rookie of the Year; Willie McCovey won the same award in 1959. The 1962 pennant race ended in a tie with the Dodgers, and the clubs played a three-game playoff. The records in the historical record for that year, 103-62 for the Giants and 102-63 for the Dodgers, include those games, which the Giants won two to one. For more on how ties have been settled, see how MLB tiebreakers work. The Giants lost the 1962 World Series to the Yankees in seven games. They did not win another title until 2010.

The Dodgers in Los Angeles

The first season in Los Angeles was poor, 71-83 and seventh. The second was a championship: the 1959 Dodgers went 88-68, won the pennant and beat the White Sox four games to two in the World Series. Walter Alston, who had managed the club since 1954 and who stayed through 1976, kept the continuity. The pitching of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale carried the club to further titles in 1963 and 1965. The Dodgers have won nine World Series titles in the database: one in Brooklyn, in 1955, and eight since the move west, in 1959, 1963, 1965, 1981, 1988, 2020, 2024 and 2025.

That last count deserves attention, because the Brooklyn Dodgers won exactly one championship, in 1955, when they beat the Yankees in seven games after losing five previous World Series to the same city's American League team. The record shows World Series losses to the Yankees in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953, and again in 1956. The move west was a departure from the club that had finally won, and many Brooklyn fans have never forgiven it.

The players who made the trip, and the ones who did not

The move cut the careers of the 1950s stars in different ways. Duke Snider, who hit 389 home runs for the franchise from 1947 through 1962, and Gil Hodges, with 361, both played for the Dodgers in Los Angeles. Pee Wee Reese, the club's leader in runs and walks, also made the trip and played his last season in 1958. Roy Campanella, a three-time Most Valuable Player who hit 242 home runs for the club, never played a game in California: an automobile accident in January 1958 ended his career. Jackie Robinson, the 1949 Most Valuable Player, had played his last season in 1956 and never wore a Los Angeles uniform.

On the Giants' side, Willie Mays, the 1951 Rookie of the Year and the 1954 Most Valuable Player, was the franchise's central figure and finished with 646 home runs for the club, the most in its history. He was a New York star who became a San Francisco star. The shift in cities did not diminish his numbers, but it did change who saw them: the historical record shows 21 seasons with the franchise, and 15 of them, 1958 through 1972, were in California.

What New York did next

New York did not stay without a National League team for long. Baseball expanded in 1962, adding the Mets in New York and the Houston Colt .45s, and the Mets began play at the Polo Grounds, the Giants' old home, before moving to Shea Stadium in 1964. The Mets' blue and orange colors were chosen as a nod to the Dodgers' blue and the Giants' orange. That is documented history rather than folklore, and it tells you how the club saw itself: as the heir to the two clubs that left.

The expansion that brought the Mets and Colt .45s into the league is part of a larger timeline covered in baseball's expansion timeline from 1961 to 1998. The moves of the 1950s were not isolated either. The Boston Braves had moved to Milwaukee in 1953, the St. Louis Browns became the Baltimore Orioles in 1954, and the Philadelphia Athletics moved to Kansas City in 1955. The pattern, along with later franchise moves, is covered in Teams that moved, and a later relocation, the Expos' move to Washington, is the subject of the Montreal Expos article.

Why the owners could do it

One question runs under the whole story: how could a club that had been in a city for seven decades leave with so little legal obstacle? Part of the answer is baseball's antitrust exemption, which the Supreme Court first recognized in 1922 and reaffirmed in 1953. Under it, the league's owners controlled the movement of franchises, and a city had no legal claim on its team. Congress held hearings on baseball in the early 1950s and passed no law that changed this. The owners had to agree among themselves, and in 1957 they did.

A second part of the answer is air travel. Long-distance flying had become routine, so a schedule linking New York and California was practical in a way it would not have been a decade earlier. That was a precondition for moving two clubs to the West Coast at once.

Common questions

Did the Dodgers fail to draw in Brooklyn? No. The historical record shows them drawing more than a million fans in every season from 1950 through 1957, and they were a pennant contender through 1956. The database has no financial figures, so it cannot settle the money question; the dispute was about the stadium and the site.

Why did the Giants leave? Their attendance had fallen, to 629,179 in 1956 and 653,923 in 1957, and the club was losing games. Owner Horace Stoneham had considered Minneapolis before the plan for San Francisco took shape.

Who was Robert Moses? A New York official who had great influence over construction and parks. He supported a stadium in Queens, not the Brooklyn site O'Malley wanted.

Where did the Dodgers play before Dodger Stadium? In the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum from 1958 to 1961. Dodger Stadium opened in 1962.

When did the Giants win a title in San Francisco? In 2010, then again in 2012 and 2014. Their last title in New York was 1954.

Where to go next

Both clubs have long histories that predate and follow the move, and the data in this article only scratch the surface of either. On the site, the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants team pages carry the current standings and schedule, and the history and Hall of Fame topic page collects more reading.