May 4, 1958
By Keith Thursby
Times Staff Writer
The Dodgers’ contract with the city of Los Angeles heated up as a political issue in the spring of 1958. Proposition B was on the June 3 ballot and stories started appearing with some regularity in The Times about various groups or politicians weighing in on either side of the issue.
Television would not be left out of the discussion.
Dinah Shore (at right in a 1942 photo by Bruno of Hollywood) was one of the top names in TV in 1958. She had graduated from a 15-minute show to an hour program on Sunday nights. Cecil Smith, The Times’ entertainment editor, profiled her as busy and happy — but worried about the Dodgers.
Shore recounted seeing the Dodgers lose, 15-2, at the Coliseum and an exchange with team owner Walter O’Malley:
“I kept telling Mr. O’Malley how sorry I was. But some man called up to him, ‘Don’t worry, Walter, we’ll get ’em next time,’ and Mr. O’Malley said: ‘Such wonderful people; in Brooklyn, they’d have thrown a pop bottle at me.’ ”
Then came the politics:
“But if he loses Chavez Ravine, what’ll he do? That’s what worries me, what’ll he do?”
ladailymirror.com 
A check of the ’58 Dodger game log from retrosheet.org shows that the game in question was a 15-2 loss to Chicago at the Coliseum on April 24, dropping the locals to 3-6. Only 10,194 — less than half the previous smallest crowd, which had been the night before — were on hand on that Thursday afternon to see Don Drysdale fall to 0-3. (That would extend to 0-5 until he finally won a game…as a reliever, in a 14-inning, 7-6 home win over Philadelphia on May 6.) .
Incidentally, the NL schedule was weird that year; the Dodgers played 21 of their first 26 games at home, and didn’t play a game outside California until May 14 against the Cubs. (Not that it helped — by then, they were 9-17.)
LikeLike