The
Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together
by Michael Shapiro
Book Description: In the bestselling tradition of The Boys of
Summer and Wait ‘Til Next Year, The Last Good Season is the
poignant and dramatic story of the Brooklyn Dodgers' last pennant and the
forces that led to their heartbreaking departure to Los Angeles.
The 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers were one of baseball's most storied teams,
featuring such immortals as Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider,
Gil Hodges, and Roy Campanella. The love between team and borough was equally
storied, an iron bond of loyalty forged through years of adversity and
sometimes legendary ineptitude. Coming off their first World Series triumph
ever in 1955, against the hated Yankees, the Dodgers would defend their
crown against the Milwaukee Braves and the Cincinnati Reds in a six-month
neck-and-neck contest until the last day of the playoffs, one of the most
thrilling pennant races in history.
But as The Last Good Season so richly relates, all was not well under
the surface. The Dodgers were an aging team at the tail end of its greatness,
and Brooklyn was a place caught up in rapid and profound urban change.
From a cradle of white ethnicity, it was being transformed into a racial
patchwork, including Puerto Ricans and blacks from the South who flocked
to Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers' black stars. The institutions that
defined the borough – the Brooklyn Eagle, the Brooklyn Navy
Yard – had vanished, and only the Dodgers remained. And when
their shrewd, dollar-squeezing owner, Walter O'Malley, began casting his
eyes elsewhere in the absence of any viable plan to replace the aging Ebbets
Field and any support from the all-powerful urban czar Robert Moses, the
days of the Dodgers in Brooklyn were clearly numbered.
Michael Shapiro, a Brooklyn native, has interviewed many of the surviving
participants and observers of the 1956 season, and undertaken immense archival
research to bring its public and hidden drama to life. Like David Halberstam's
The Summer of '49, The Last Good Season combines an exciting baseball story,
a genuine sense of nostalgia, and hard-nosed reporting and social thinking
to reveal, in a new light, a time and place we only thought we understood.
Hardcover from Doubleday
Book Published: 18 March, 2003 |
