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O’Malley, of course, is the man who moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. In that, he is the butt of a couple of the greatest jokes in baseball history. The first concerns New York newspaper writers — and Brooklyn loyalists — Jack Newfield and Pete Hamill sitting down in a bar and making a list of the three worst human beings of the 20th century. What they both arrived at: Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley. The other joke no doubt grew out of that legendary incident and is included in the HBO documentary Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush: You’re in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley, and you have a gun with two bullets. Whom do you shoot? The answer: Walter O’Malley, twice, to make sure he’s dead.
But Kuhn? He defined the commissioner’s position as a place for mediocrity. He basically argued the owners’ interests for decades — and got his ass handed to him every time in collective bargaining player-owner negotiations by Miller, who genuinely changed the game by placing the players in charge of it. That’s made baseball a better game than football, in my opinion, but Kuhn gets elected to the Hall of Fame first. It’s like electing Tito Landrum ahead of Cal Ripken Jr., or Craig Show ahead of Tony Gwynn. So here’s my variation on an old joke: You’re in a room with Walter O’Malley and Bowie Kuhn and you have a gun with one bullet. Whom do you shoot?
