Brooklyn State of Mind: The Last Good Season Laments Dodgers' Move to L.A.
by Norman Oder, PW Daily for Booksellers -- Publishers Weekly, 4/28/2003
Perhaps the most acclaimed baseball book this spring is Michael Shapiro's The Last Good Season (Doubleday). Subtitled, "Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and their final pennant race together," PW called it "one terrific read." The book has already gone into its third printing.Of course, the Dodgers -- the "most romanticized team in baseball history," according to the Wall Street Journal 's Paul Steiger--might not seem to merit another book. But Shapiro, in a textured but hardly treacly narrative, not only provides sketches of the 1956 season and the team's diverse, remarkable personalities (Jackie Robinson, Sal Maglie, et al.), but also offers a persuasively revisionist view of the Dodgers' departure to Los Angeles in 1957. Much-vilified owner Walter O'Malley "is not the villain of this story," declares Shapiro, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism and a Brooklyn native (albeit one who was four years old in 1956). The "bad guy" was Robert Moses, the unelected czar (heading the city Parks Commission, among other agencies) who reshaped the New York region, building housing projects in the city and bridges and highways to the burgeoning suburbs. Moses fiercely resisted O'Malley's effort -- sincere if not equally forceful -- to build a new stadium in downtown Brooklyn near several subway lines. Neither O'Malley nor Moses "truly appreciated cities," Shapiro writes, since he feels that they failed to recognize that Brooklyn, however changed by suburbanization and an influx of minority residents, would have populated that new urban ballpark.
In his Journal review, Steiger wrote that Shapiro has "mustered compelling evidence" -- even without the help of O'Malley's son Peter, who, wary of journalists, refused to talk to the author or make any documents available.
The 1956 Dodgers, defending World Series champions, won their league pennant, but lost to their archrival, the New York Yankees, in a hard-fought seven-game World Series. The Dodgers -- the "most local team in baseball," since they represented part of a city -- soon became an emblem of America's newly-booming West Coast. A few years later, Robert Moses built Shea Stadium for the New York Mets...in Queens, near highways.
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