The Last Good Season
Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together
by Michael Shapiro
Doubleday, 356 pp., $24.95 The Pride of October
What It Was to Be Young and a Yankee
by Bill Madden
Warner, 453 pp., $24.95
THEY WERE CALLED the Dodgers because in Brooklyn, where the team began, residents had to dodge the borough's numerous trolley cars, and their nickname, "da bums," referred to their ineptitude during the 1920s and 1930s. ("Ya bums, ya!" a true son of Brooklyn was heard to say, and the label stuck.) But in the years immediately before World War II, and in the decade after, the Dodgers became the greatest team in the National League--the greatest, but prone to heartbreak as they repeatedly lost pennants and World Series by the narrowest of margins. Not for nothing was "Wait till next year!" the motto of the raucous crowd in tiny Ebbets Field.
Brooklyn in those days consisted mainly of blue-collar and lower-middle-class neighborhoods where kids played stickball in the streets and people socialized on front stoops or over clotheslines. Brooklynites discussed Dodger baseball on every street corner and in every saloon and candy store. And there was real intimacy between the public and the players, most of whom lived in the borough--not in the smallest row houses or red brick apartments beneath clattering El trains, perhaps, but in bungalows just a cut or two above. In 1947 the Dodgers broke baseball's infamous color line, bringing up Jackie Robinson as the first African American to play in the major leagues. Robinson, along with shortstop Pee Wee Reese, formed the nucleus of a team that finally won the World Series in 1955.
Team owner Walter O'Malley moved the club to Los Angeles after the 1957 season--and thereby was born the myth of the Brooklyn Dodgers, a myth of paradise lost. (He also persuaded New York's other National League team, the Giants, to move to San Francisco in order to recreate their rivalry on the West Coast.) With the same intensity that Brooklyn had loved its team, it hated the man who had absconded with the borough's great unifying institution. Some years ago, in "Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers," Peter Golenbock told the now-legendary story of Pete Hamill and Jack Newfield, Brooklyn-born newspaper writers, having dinner one night and trying to decide who were the three worst men in history. Each had the same list: Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O'Malley.
Now, in "The Last Good Season," Michael Shapiro stakes out a revisionist position: O'Malley was not Hitler or Stalin, but simply a businessman with a more-or-less ordinary lust for profit and power. Whatever O'Malley's limitations, Shapiro contends, he was a devoted family man and a New Yorker who would have kept the Dodgers in Brooklyn but for the indifference and intransigence of city officials. (Neil J. Sullivan, in his 1987 "The Dodgers Move West," made similar arguments, but Shapiro has added new archival materials and interviews; no source notes, though.)
The situation was this: Ebbets Field, in Brooklyn's Flatbush section, was old and crumbling, and the area was suffering from urban decay, crime, and white flight. The Dodgers' fan base, now in Long Island, couldn't find adequate parking near the ballpark, so people watched the games on television. Fan attendance plummeted despite the team's success.
O'Malley needed an attractive and accessible part of Brooklyn for his dream stadium, a flashy modernistic structure based on Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome, with a translucent ceiling and real grass. But he also needed public support in the form of roads, ramps, parking, and condemnation of property. The man who might have provided those necessities--and, for Shapiro, the real "bad guy in this story"--is Robert Moses, the parks commissioner, who exercised near-dictatorial control over what was built and demolished in the city. Moses was a genius but also an elitist who didn't understand the human elements that make a modern city livable. He routinely destroyed thriving neighborhoods by running highways through them, and he had no appreciation for baseball as part of the fabric of life in New York.
ALMOST TO THE END, O'Malley thought he would be able to build his new stadium, according to Shapiro, and Moses strung him along even though he had no intention of relocating the Dodgers to prime real estate in Brooklyn. Moses's idea was for the city to build, and then rent to the Dodgers, a bland, multipurpose stadium in the Flushing Meadows section of Queens--basically, the middle of nowhere and certainly not Brooklyn. (In the 1960s this site would be used for the New York World's Fair and for Shea Stadium, home to a new National League team, the Mets.) Los Angeles made an offer O'Malley couldn't refuse, and the rest is history.
Shapiro recounts this political drama against the background of Brooklyn's last great season, 1956, with all the ups and downs from April through October. The Dodgers, defending World Champions, began abysmally before fighting their way to mediocrity. They surged to first place toward the end of the season, stumbled briefly, but then recovered in time to win the pennant. In the World Series they reverted to their old habits and lost to the Yankees.
"The Last Good Season" will inevitably be compared with "The Boys of Summer," Roger Kahn's unforgettable memoir about the 1952 and 1953 Dodgers and possibly the greatest book ever written on baseball. Shapiro's work, unlike Kahn's, is not a meditation on the passage from youth to manhood or the fleeting nature of fame, but it is nonetheless a terrific read and a valuable contribution--for its literary grace and skillful interweaving of narratives, its wise perspective on the larger social context of baseball, and its sober, fair-minded judgments.
His sketches of the 1956 Dodgers are sharp and fresh--not only of Robinson and Reese, but, as Kahn described them, the whole "fascinating mix of vigorous men": Campy, Newk, and "the Duke," "Skoonj" (short for the Italian scungili, or snail, Carl Furillo's favorite dish), "Oisk" (Brooklynese for Erskine), Hodges, Labine, Craig, Bessent, Roebuck, and Loes (who said he lost a ground ball in the sun and was traded in mid-season), two guys named Sandy, a Randy, a "Junior," a "Barber," a "Rube," and Johnny Podres, whose heroics in the 1955 World Series caught the attention of his draft board. He spent the 1956 season in the Navy.
The departure to Los Angeles of a team this talented and eccentric froze in New York's collective memory an image that has yet to disappear. Much of it is idealized--like that of a poet who dies at twenty-one and is remembered as a golden youth rather than the cranky septuagenarian he would have become. Still, Jimmy Cannon, a leading columnist of the day, had it right when he prophesied of those Brooklyn Dodgers: "You'll be talking about them for a long time."
OF COURSE one can hardly talk about the Brooklyn Dodgers without also discussing their great nemesis, the New York Yankees. Even in the middle of the century, the Yankees were often denigrated as a rich team that simply outbid the poor ones for the best talent. But the truth is that monetary advantage was somewhat less important in the era before free agency. For that matter, in the 1940s and 1950s, when the Yanks beat Brooklyn in the World Series six out of seven times, the Dodgers actually had the more profitable franchise.
The key to Yankee success was less cash than a winning attitude and an air of invincibility. It was Lou Gehrig, laboring in the shadow of Babe Ruth, who instilled the tradition of quiet professionalism, supreme confidence, and a mental toughness bordering on arrogance that runs through the team's history. The late Eddie Lopat, a crafty left-handed pitcher, explained it this way: "We just had that inner confidence we could beat them at anything--tiddly-winks, bowling, whatever. It probably wasn't justified--those were great Dodger ball clubs--but we just felt that way."
SUPERSTARS ALONE do not account for the Yankees' unprecedented success (thirty-eight American League pennants and twenty-six World Series championships). In every generation they have relied on gutsy, everyday players whose ability to perform in clutch situations is reflected less in their statistics than their nicknames--guys like Tommy Henrich ("Old Reliable"), Gene Woodling ("Old Faithful"), and Hank Bauer ("the Old Marine"). "They had an expression on the Yankees," Bauer once said, referring to the World Series jackpot: "'Don't screw with our money,' because we were going to the bank every October." Many players, to be part of that great tradition--and to enjoy the expected World Series bonus--declined contracts from other teams and signed with the Yankees for less money. To an extent then, you could say it was the Yankees' winning that made them rich, rather than their riches that made them win.
Now Daily News columnist Bill Madden has captured the Yankee ethos beautifully in "The Pride of October," an oral history based on interviews with seventeen retired Bronx Bombers. (Arlene Howard, widow of Elston, provides an eighteenth interview.) What seems to unite these men, so diverse in status and time, is the way they define themselves by their Yankee-hood, not just as ballplayers but as human beings. It is something that brightens their days and nights, and if they feel a downside at all, as some do, it is invariably an unresolved aspect of their relationship with the team--a feeling that they were excluded or betrayed or cheated, or that they failed to make the kind of contribution they had wished for.
Like the army veteran who forever thinks of himself as "an old soldier," an old Yankee never dies. Infielder Jerry Coleman, for instance, flew 177 combat missions as a Marine pilot in World War II and Korea, but he seems more in awe of Joe DiMaggio than of General MacArthur. The Yankees "weren't just a baseball team," he tells Madden. "They were a religion. . . . I can't imagine what it would have been like to play for any other team." Charlie Silvera, a little-used backup catcher of the same era, could have been a starter with most other teams, but considers himself blessed to have cashed his World Series checks and been "a spear carrier to the kings."
Whether intentionally or not, Madden helps refute the negative stereotypes of the Yankees as a corporate behemoth manned by cold-blooded mercenaries. "Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel," detractors sneered after the Yanks in 1953 won an unprecedented fifth consecutive world championship. No doubt the team's own publicity, on yearbook covers and such, reinforced the unsympathetic Goliath view of themselves, with illustrations of the typical Bronx Bomber as a big strapping guy with broad shoulders and a large jaw. There were some who looked like that, of course, but many more of those Yankees didn't --because the Yankees' management always thought, as we like to say nowadays, outside of the box.
HERE'S A CASE IN POINT: Phil Rizzuto, "the Scooter," a Hall of Fame shortstop, the American League's most-valuable player in 1950, and only five feet, six inches tall. Now eighty-five years old, Rizzuto doesn't even have that height anymore. Madden visits him at his home in Hillside, New Jersey, where, from the top floors, they can see Manhattan. "I can't bear to look out there anymore," Rizzuto says, referring to the missing towers of the World Trade Center. "They're gone and I feel as empty as my view."
He's not even a nasty little guy, like the characters played by Joe Pesci in the movies, but a nice one. "I've had the most wonderful lifetime that one man could possibly have," Rizzuto says. "And I owe everything to the Yankees." Indeed, this Brooklyn-born overachiever could not even get a tryout with the Giants or the Dodgers. In 1935, Dodgers' manager Casey Stengel told him "to go get yourself a shoeshine box." (Stengel would later become the Yankees' most successful skipper, but Rizzuto never forgot the slight.)
Another case in point is catcher Yogi Berra, Rizzuto's teammate and best friend, winner of three most-valuable-player awards, ten World Series rings, the wise collaborator of Yankee pitchers for two decades, and author of such famous truisms as, "It ain't over till it's over."
Yogi, as Madden describes him, is a man of "short, squatty physique" with "large protruding ears, and a gap-tooth smile." Passed over by the St. Louis Cardinals in favor of Joe Garagiola, he might also have seemed an unlikely Yankee, hardly a successor to Bill Dickey, the tall, handsome Louisianan who once roomed with Lou Gehrig. But, as Madden points out, the Yankees were able to recognize what many other teams missed: that they had a diamond in the rough, a baseball genius hidden behind a clownish image. Stengel always considered him the team's "assistant manager." (Of Dickey, his mentor, he is alleged to have said, "He learned me all of his experiences.")
Whitey Ford--"Slick" to his pals--provides yet another refutation of Yankee hatred. A fairly small lefty (5'10" is short for a pitcher) with cunning and control rather than overpowering stuff, Ford remains, at seventy-four, the same cocky, wisecracking city kid he was in 1950, when, while still in the minors, he phoned New York and offered his services to help the Yankees win a tight pennant race. And he delivered. Whitey provided the margin of victory for the pennant that season, won the last game of the World Series against Philadelphia, and went on to become one of the greatest big game pitchers ever, winning a record ten World Series games and hurling a record thirty-two consecutive scoreless innings in Series play. Of Whitey's legendary self-confidence Mickey Mantle once said, "Stick a baseball in his hand and he became the most arrogant guy in the world."
MADDEN ALSO REVEALS the regrets and disappointments of those who, for one reason or another, were unable to fulfill their Yankee destiny. Lou Piniella was a star outfielder for the Yankee championship teams of the late 1970s and had a brief tenure as manager in the 1980s. He went on to great success managing other clubs (including a World Series victory with Cincinnati in 1990) but is nagged by "one regret"--that he "didn't get the opportunity to win in New York."
Then there's Reggie Jackson, whose World Series heroics in 1977 (three home runs in the sixth game) earned him the sobriquet "Mr. October." But his self-defeating egomania clashed with the megalomania of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner. Jackson, now seemingly more mature, occasionally works for the Yankees in vaguely defined roles as a "special adviser," but he clearly burns with a desire somehow to contribute and "be more a part of it all."
And there are the guys who had potential and squandered it. Like Joe Pepitone, child of Brooklyn's streets and sandlots, a colorful and likeable player who had some good years in the 1960s. He has the distinction of being the first man to bring a hair dryer into the locker room. But Peppy couldn't resist the wine, women, and pills. A promising career sputtered into mediocrity, and later conviction for illegal possession of cocaine and a pistol. (He overslept his first appointment for an interview with Madden, perhaps making up for the sleep he missed during his playing days.) On the whole, though, Peppy seems to have gotten himself together, with the help of his wife of thirty years. His lawyer helped, too, as did George Steinbrenner, who got him into a work-release program from Riker's Island. He has a good life now and knows it, but the title of his autobiography--"Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud"--reveals he still thinks about what might have been.
In the 1970s Ron Blomberg was the Jewish Joe Pepitone, another charming eccentric who could have been great but didn't take care of himself, suffering injuries and losing the good will of some of his teammates. His most impressive statistic is having eaten twenty-eight hamburgers in one sitting, beating Babe Ruth's twenty-four hot dogs, and all without gaining weight. Blomberg holds the absolutely unbreakable record of having been the first player to step to the plate as a DH--designated hitter, or as Blomberg liked to call himself, a designated Hebrew.
MOST HEARTBREAKING of all are the stories of Bobby Murcer and Don Mattingly, fan favorites who had all the right stuff to be October heroes, but were thwarted by fate. Murcer was the best hitter of the Yankees' lean years, between Mickey Mantle and Reggie Jackson. The easygoing Murcer was, like Mantle, an Oklahoman and a shortstop who became a centerfielder, and he was for a time touted as Mantle's heir. In a move later regretted even by the Yankee front office, Murcer was traded to San Francisco after the 1974 season, and he missed the pennant and world championship seasons of 1976, 1977, and 1978. He was later brought back as a part-time player and has since become a popular Yankee announcer. Madden shrewdly observes that Murcer never disappointed anyone by failing to be the next Mantle, but he is a man who was "deprived of fulfilling his Yankee destiny." In a strange twist, the fans have accorded Murcer the respect due one of their World Series winners, almost as if in some alternate universe he had actually been permitted to fulfill that destiny.
Even more poignant perhaps is the case of Don Mattingly, the team's undisputed leader in the 1980s and a superb clutch player. Despite his modest stature, Mattingly used to hit scorching line drives, exhibiting the kind of power that Lou Gehrig was famous for, and playing first base with even greater skill than Gehrig. Yet "Donnie Baseball," as he was nicknamed, never played in a World Series because the Yankees were in a long drought period. (The team, he tells Madden, kept trading for more hitters when it really needed better pitching.)
Injuries forced Mattingly into a premature retirement after the 1995 season, just before the Yankees began their most recent streak of World Series appearances and championships. "Sometimes in life you just don't get what you want," he says. "You can try your hardest, do everything you think you need to do, . . . and sometimes you still don't get there."
That's a lesson that the Brooklyn Dodgers' players and fans had to learn long before the Yankees'. But it's a lesson that comes to all of us, in the end.
Matthew Berke is a writer living in New Jersey.
To order Michael Shapiro's "The Last Good Season," click here.
To order Bill Madden's "The Pride of October," click here.