Walter O’Malley always has been a divisive figure, and the two main camps were these:

Those who didn’t like him very much.

Those who loathed him.

Now we have a 324-page apology, largely, for the man who moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and built Dodger Stadium. Entitled “Forever Blue” and subtitled, “The True Story of Walter O’Malley, Baseball’s Most Controversial Owner, and the Dodgers of Brooklyn and Los Angeles,” by Michael D’Antonio.

What makes this book important? The author had access to “tens of thousands of items” from the O’Malley family archive. And, naturally, that O’Malley-centric material tends to paint Walter O’Malley in a kinder light.

If only Walter O’Malley hadn’t always made me think of Lionel Barrymore playing the black-hearted banker “Old Man Potter” in the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

You remember Mr. Potter. The man who owned everything in Bedford Falls except the virtuous and populist George Bailey. Old Man Potter was the man who was determined to make everyone crawl and beg.

Walter O’Malley looked like the Lionel Barrymore character, and acted like him, as well — from what we could see. Seemingly imperious, rarely seen in public settings, apparently disconnected from fans or other “little people,” throwing nickels around like manhole covers, more than a little bloated by the time he left Brooklyn and got to Los Angeles (for the 1958 season), and one of those behind-the-scenes power brokers who always seem so inimical in the American imagination.

“Forever Blue” does a good job of restructuring this image. So that the man one New York-area writer decided was one of the three most evil men in the world (along with Hitler and Stalin) looks at least occasionally sympathetic — as a clear-eyed businessman who actually did prefer living in New York, came to love baseball — but also intended to make a profit out of it.

The salient points:

–O’Malley spent enormous amounts of time and effort, over a full decade, trying to get a new stadium built in Brooklyn for his team. He lived in Brooklyn for much of his life, even if he was extremely well-connected among NYC elite (and would always have an NYC feel to him).

–The real villain in the failed attempt to get a new stadium was NYC power broker Robert Moses, who apparently was not fond of O’Malley or the Dodgers or Brooklyn — and perhaps all three — and torpedoed all of O’Malley’s attempts to get a new stadium. As well as many of Brooklyn’s attempts to save itself from turning into one large slum.

–Brooklyn gave up on the Dodgers long before the Dodgers left Brooklyn. The Dodgers sold 1.8 million tickets in 1947, but after a decade of great “Boys of Summer” teams attendance was down to 1.03 million in 1957. A lot of that was about the rotting out of the entire Brooklyn area, a rotting that included scads of employers closing up shop, the middle class fleeing to New Jersey or farther out onto Long Island and the death of the borough’s last newspaper, the Brooklyn Eagle, in 1955.

–Ebbets Field was, to O’Malley’s mind, not a ballfield that could be saved or improved. Ebbets Field was ancient, landlocked and decrepit. There was almost no parking around the ballpark, public transportation was whithering, the stadium was essentially falling apart and the neighborhood was decaying. Maybe it should have been saved as a historic site, but that wasn’t what we did to old ballparks in the 1950s and 1960s. We tore them down.

–O’Malley was in the forefront of integrating baseball and perhaps actually did more about actually making it happen than did Branch Rickey, his former co-owner — who generally gets about 99 percent of the credit for Jackie Robinson and the breaking of the color line in 1947.

–Somebody was going to take advantage of the vast new markets sitting open in California and the West. Why shouldn’t O’Malley be one of the owners who did? (Horace Stoneham, owner of the Giants, also moved, from New York to San Francisco, before the 1958 season but, oddly, he escaped the opprobrium routinely apportioned to O’Malley for the next 40 years.)

–O’Malley’s “land grab” in Chavez Ravine, and an accompanying “destruction of a vibrant and ancient neighborhood” has somehow hardened into unassailable historical fact. But the author of “Forever Blue” insists only a handful of houses remained in that downtown neighborhood by the time construction on Dodger Stadium began, the result of what had been planned as a huge tract of government housing until the plan was  shelved — leading to the clearing of nearly the entire area before O’Malley ever got to L.A.  As for the land grab, O’Malley swapped the old (L.A.) Wrigley Field for the open territory … and built the stadium with private funding. That is, his own money. Which never, ever happens anymore.

Walter O’Malley succeeded, ultimately. He won in Brooklyn, he won in Los Angeles, he got a massive stadium built, he became quite wealthy and he created an L.A. institution of significance.

However, he still is generally seen in a bad light because the New York media tarred him for decades for leaving Brooklyn, and because he did little or nothing to address his image as a penny-pinching, old-school, behind-closed-doors schemer and manipulator in Los Angeles.

Ultimately, O’Malley lost the media-relations battle. How he could be so successful in so many other endeavors yet be crushed in the Battle of Public Perception is not quite explained in this book. At the end, O’Malley allowed himself to be defined by bitter NYC media and Los Angeles pettifoggers. He apparently thought it unseemly to go head to head (and in public) with the people who vilified him, but at the same time he seemed to prefer — and was able to — keep his business dealings private. Leading to speculation that was never flattering.

For purposes of this book, O’Malley’s children, former Dodgers president Peter O’Malley and his sister, Terry Seidler, decided to make the O’Malley files available. They, at least, grasped that their father had won the war but had not written the history of it.

While much of the correspondence that D’Antonio examines and some of the conclusions he draws are new, the thrust of this isn’t exactly virgin territory. The baseball historian/researcher Bill James, writing in “The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract,” published in 2001, was more than a little sympathetic to Walter O’Malley, and for many of the same reasons.

Wrote James: “Perhaps I should make this a separate article, called ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ but consider honestly the position of Walter O’Malley in 1957. After purchasing a property in receivership, historically mismanaged and with more failures than successes behind it, after having built that team, by hard work and astute judgment, into the strongest franchise in the league, he continues for ten years to produce outstanding baseball teams — yet he watches that position of leadership slip away from him, as the attendance of his team falls to fifth in the league, and less than one-half of that enjoyed by the owners of the Milwaukee franchise, who had the courage to seize new territory. His protests about inadequate parking and facilities are ignored, merely lame complaints of a pampered businessman. What is he then to do?”

O’Malley died in 1979, aged 79. He didn’t live to see his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, in 2008. He deserves the spot. And anyone who wants to know more about the history of the Dodgers, and the owner who reminded me of Old Man Potter, go out and get yourself a copy of “Forever Blue.” You won’t be disappointed.