This is what we in journalism call a “sidebar,” and it goes with the main story that is the blog item just below this one. On Walter O’Malley and the Dodgers.

This sidebar is about one Vincent X. Flaherty, sports writer, sports columnist and, it turns out, mover and shaker in the Dodgers getting from Brooklyn to Los Angeles.

Or that is my take, anyway. Though the author of Forever Blue, Michael D’Antonio, seems to vacillate on just how important Flaherty was in getting the Dodgers to L.A. Sometimes putting him at the middle of the narrative, sometimes seeming to dismiss him as a sort of self-promoting buffoon or hometown-boosting pest who can be found in any city without a big-league baseball team.

Anyway, it’s an interesting little story, I believe, with a pathetic punchline at the end.

Vincent X. Flaherty could stand a biography of his own. He probably would have written an autobiography if he hadn’t spent so much time trying to change the city he worked in, and had he not invested so much time and energy into making contacts and friends.

There is, of course, very little on the Internet on Vincent X. Flaherty because he had the misfortune to die before newsrooms were computerized and long before most of them had Web sites. Well, and then there is the matter of the paper he was most closely associated with going out of business 20 years ago …

Here is the entirety of his bio on baseballlibrary.com:

“A nattily dressed night person, Flaherty worked for the Washington Times-Herald before going to the West Coast as a columnist for the Los Angeles Examiner. In the 1940s he was an early advocate of bringing a ML team to Los Angeles.”

I was born and raised in the Los Angeles market, and I have been reading local newspapers for a long time, and I can assure you I have never heard of Vincent X. Flaherty. Until reading this book.

In point of fact, it may well have been Vincent X. Flaherty, Examiner sports columnist, who first put the idea of moving to Los Angeles into the ear of Walter O’Malley, owner of the club. Certainly no later than 1950, according to D’Antonio’s book, and perhaps earlier. At least eight years before the Dodgers actually moved, that is.

D’Antonio writes of Flaherty: “… O’Malley would soon hear a direct pitch from columnist Vincent X. Flaherty of the Los Angeles Examiner, the Hearst paper. Flaherty was an old-school, fedora-wearing newspaperman who would have copped (his language) to lots of shoulder-rubbing with powerful people in politics and business. Not content to merely report the news, he wanted to make it by helping to bring the big leagues to Los Angeles. In 1948, he accompanied former county supervisor Leonard Roach to the American League’s annual meeting at Chicago’s Palmer House Hotel, where they promoted the city. In 1950, he contacted every single club in the big leagues, including the Dodgers, attempting to sell them on the idea of moving west.”

That is, the guy is writing columns, regularly, as well as making cross-country trips trying to get baseball for Los Angeles. That’s a busy bee.

Later, D’Antonio reintroduces Flaherty and refers to him as “newspaperman, civic booster and raconteur,” adding that “after getting a job with the (Examiner) he quickly found his way into the circles of power, becoming a volunteer staff man for the self-appointed Los Angeles Citizens Committee for Major League Baseball. … In Flaherty, they had a man who was convinced he was working for ‘the greatest thing in the history of baseball.'”

Flaherty makes numerous appearances in the text, always talking up Los Angeles, and turning into a man that Walter O’Malley clearly used, to his benefit, to help him get in touch with key players in Los Angeles and to keep him up to date on the L.A. political scene.

Flaherty is like the little angel (or devil) perched on O’Malley’s shoulder, whispering “Los Angeles, Los Angeles” into his ear — for nearly a decade — before O’Malley actually does take the plunge.

Clearly, it does D’Antonio no good to write a book in which O’Malley is sold on Los Angeles by a newspaper columnist (sports writers can’t really be the source of big ideas) … but Flaherty is always in the background of D’Antonio’s book, showing up at baseball meetings on the East Coast and spending lots and lots of time with O’Malley, telling him how wonderful things would be in Los Angeles. About which he was correct, of course.

So, finally, the Dodgers moved, and Flaherty no doubt took credit for it in a newspaper that exists now only on old library microfilm, if that … and eventually he sinks from view, behind politicians and money men and O’Malley himself.

Two pages from the close of the final chapter in “Forever Blue,” Flaherty makes one last appearance — which isn’t listed in the index, for whatever reason.

In it, the author describes Flaherty as one of those who “came to O’Malley with grievances or requests he couldn’t accommodate.”

Writes D’Antonio: “Vincent X. Flaherty, who took to calling himself ‘The Forgotten Dodger Man,’ wrote rambling notes to remind O’Malley of all he did in the past. ‘I alone am responsible for major league baseball AND pro football on the West Coast,’ wrote Flaherty, as he compained about credit lavished on others. When he wrote of his struggles to find work, O’Malley asked members of the Dodgers staff to help him but apparently nothing worked out. In 1974, Flaherty told of how he had listened to radio broadcasts of the Dodgers-Athletics World Series because his television was broken. It was his last letter.”

Flaherty has two entries on imdb.com, with “adaptation” credit for significant movies … once as “Vincent Flaherty” for “PT 109,” which came out in 1963; and once as Vincent X. Flaherty for “Jim Thorpe — All-American,” which came out in 1951.

Other than that … he has left behind little record. Which he probably realized, toward the end of his life.

His self-pity, in the final note, is understandable. Because journalists, like most people, pretty much are forgotten within minutes of leaving the stage. The thing is, journalists routinely are surprised by this, having molded and shaped and responded to public opinion for so long that they often are stunned, disillusioned — and sometimes left bitter by the experience.

(I know of another former Los Angeles sports columnist of some renown, retired for quite some time, who is nearly forgotten, as well, and regularly tells his handful of visitors that “nobody calls.” As if he expected it to be otherwise, as in the days when he was writing three or four times a week.)

Anyway, Vincent X. Flaherty deserves to be remembered as a prime mover in the entire history of the Los Angeles Dodgers. We can’t help him now with some plasma TV so he can watch the Dodgers play … but at least we can acknowledge “this guy was very important in making this all happen.” As journalists, we know it, and we recognize it, but we rarely are willing to give credit to those who came before us.