After Many a Summer: The Passing of the Giants and Dodgers and a Golden Age in New York Baseball

“I have never quite been reconciled to the Dodgers' being taken from me,” admits freelance writer Murphy, who grew up within walking distance of Ebbets Field and still lives in Brooklyn. He is able to put his feelings aside, however, in this objective reappraisal of the sequence of events that led Walter O'Malley (who “[left] Brooklyn a rich man and a despised man”) to take his team to Los Angeles—while, at the other end of New York City, Giants owner Horace Stoneham was making his own plans to leave town. Murphy is particularly eager to restore the reputation of Robert Moses, who has been accused of squeezing the Dodgers out. The city planner did offer solutions that could have kept the team in Brooklyn, Murphy reports, but the sites where O'Malley wanted to build his own stadium weren't zoned for that purpose. The Giants' story, though it runs concurrently, is much less dramatic; Murphy's most significant accomplishment lies in breaking down the nostalgic myths and sorting through the historical archives to get the real story behind the transformation of New York's baseball landscape. (June)