Inherit the Wins : Walter and Peter O’Malley Had the Same Blood and Same Job, but Their Personalities Were at Different Ends of the Spectrum

They may have been cut from the same cloth, but the dye lots were definitely different. The late Walter O’Malley was a plaid, something along the lines of a Lindsay Nelson sport coat, whereas Peter O’Malley has been a navy blue blazer.

“Walter was extremely gregarious, avuncular,” longtime Dodger announcer Vin Scully said of the rotund, cigar-chomping Walter O’Malley, Dodger president from 1950-70. “Children would just automatically climb onto his lap--he was that kind of man.

“He was very involved in clubs, playing cards, playing golf. . . . Peter was the shy son. But maybe when you’re the son of such a whirlwind--and Walter was one of the brightest comets to streak across the sky--you’d be inclined to back off. Peter was much more careful, much more quiet.”

But every bit as successful as his father, the larger-than-life risk taker who, some say, virtually ran baseball for three decades, brought the major leagues to the West Coast in 1958 and turned Brooklyn’s beloved Bums into a perennial contender, a team that won five World Series titles after moving to Los Angeles.

Still, Peter O’Malley, who announced Monday that he will sell the Dodgers after 27 years as team president, often got credit for little more than not having screwed up what his father had created.

“That’s not fair,” Scully said. “Walter was brilliant. He saw the future, and he handed his son a good organization in 1970. When you inherit something from your father, naturally everyone says, ‘Hey, the old man set him up.’ But Peter made it an even bigger success, and that’s a great tribute to him.”

Indeed, the Dodgers have been one of baseball’s most successful teams on the field as well as off, finishing first or second 19 times in the last 27 seasons and producing the last five National League rookies of the year.

The Los Angeles Dodgers were the first team to attract two-million fans and in 1978 became the first team to eclipse the three-million mark, a figure they have reached 11 times.

The common thread through it all? The O’Malley name.

Walter and Peter had similar outlooks to management. Both were considered superior businessmen who carefully selected their top employees and then gave them room to operate. Neither was the type to visit the clubhouse or meddle deeply in team affairs.

“You read of owners who are involved in every bloody facet of the organization,” Scully said. “But when the O’Malleys hired you to do a job, you could do it.”

They were a contrast in style, though.

“Walter was outspoken, Peter was not,” said Buzzie Bavasi, the Dodger general manager from 1951-68 and father of current Angel General Manager Bill Bavasi. “Walter was a leader, the Jerry Reinsdorf of his day. He pretty much took over the National League meetings. People listened to him when he talked.

“Peter never attempted to be a power broker in baseball. He let others do the talking, and he was one of the better listeners in the game. He was more interested in the welfare of the Dodgers, not the game as a whole.”

Walter occasionally produced off-season headlines by creating phony holdouts, secretly signing important players but pretending they were still angry, and far apart, on a new contract.

Under Peter O’Malley, the Dodgers turned promotion into an art form, relying heavily on giveaways, speeches, clinics and media events, and created a friendly atmosphere in Dodger Stadium, clean and family oriented.

Walter was impish, highly sociable, a man who helped write baseball history. Peter is dry, reserved, and has been content to let others judge his accomplishments.

“His father was unusual,” Marvin Miller, who led the players union for 25 years, once said. “And he’s not.”

Perhaps that’s because Peter went to great lengths to stay out of camera range, so much so that after watching Monday’s televised news conference, a long-time staffer in The Times’ sports department remarked, “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen him live.”

Bavasi said Peter was much more like his mother, Kay, who died in 1979, also the year of Walter’s death. Kay was a gentle, compassionate woman who loved baseball and was a friend to players and their families.

Although friends have acknowledged that Peter is low-key, seemingly unemotional and lacking in the frequent displays of humor that characterized his father, they add that first impressions can be misleading, that he is cordial, warm and thoughtful.

Case in point: In the late 1960s, after learning that former Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe, without a job and destitute, had pawned his 1955 World Series ring and watch for $600, O’Malley went to a downtown hockshop and bought the ring and watch.

He then returned them to Newcombe and hired him as the Dodgers’ director of community relations.

Walter, of course, also had his compassionate moments.

“He was the type of fellow who wouldn’t give you a $3-a-week raise,” Bavasi said. “But he’d spend $10,000 for an office party and invite everyone.”

Walter loved a party. The late maverick baseball owner Bill Veeck once said that whenever you smelled a good cigar and a glass of Irish in the air, Walter O’Malley couldn’t be far behind.

Peter shied away from the spotlight, and with Monday’s announcement--and barring any foray into the NFL or a stint as the next baseball commissioner--he will slip even farther away from his little ray of limelight.

The Dodgers, for the first time in 47 years, will no longer be run by an O’Malley, and for that, Scully said, baseball and Southern California will suffer.

“My gut reaction is one of great sadness, that close relationships from a major part of my life are coming to an end,” said Scully, who has been with the team since 1950. “But I’m also saddened for the people here, because I know how much [the O’Malleys] truly cared about the relationship between the team and community, and the obligations they felt they had. . . .

“There’s a very empty feeling in my house tonight and there will be for a long time to come. There’s a feeling of a definite loss, almost like a death in the family.”