The Giants and the Dodgers: Four Cities, Two Teams, One Rivalry (review)

Andrew Goldblatt, the author of this finely focused book, is an administrative specialist in the Office of Risk Management at the University of California-Berkeley. That is a Clark Kent-like identity if ever you've read one, for Goldblatt was born in New York and moved to California, just like the two teams about which he has written, and he has, as he confesses in his acknowledgments, "the requisite baseball and literary backgrounds." The result is a very good piece of baseball history, a nice effort of which both author and publisher should be proud.

What distinguishes this work most is Goldblatt's restraint in limiting himself to his chosen topic exactly and not trying to tell too large a story. Everybody knows that when the Giants were in New York and the Dodgers were in Brooklyn, their rivalry was just one leg of a complicated hate triangle. Yet here the Yankees are hardly mentioned. We read little of the mythic superiority of New York baseball generally and nothing about the Giants-Yankees battles in the 1920s and 1930s and the Dodgers-Yankees encounters in the post-World War II era. That is not what Goldblatt set out to do, and, truth be told, there are more than enough books on these topics.

Similarly, Goldblatt has not undertaken a complete history of two franchises. Several years ago Marvin Cohen, a New York teacher turned radio and television show host, self-published The Dodgers-Giants Rivalry, 1900-1957, a rather brief and methodical text that covers the year-by-year nuts and bolts. Fortunately, this new book rises far above that antecedent. Goldblatt has concentrated on the rivalry, and he has divided its history, 1883-2002, into seven parts. For each part he has written a nice introductory essay, plus an additional one, "The Interlude," covering the move of the teams from New York to the West Coast. The parts are then further divided into a total of twenty-four chapters, all of them save one centering on just one year. Each chapter covers a season in which either both the teams were good or, in cases like 1934, only one was good and the other had a real impact on its fortunes.

Goldblatt displays no arbitrary contrariness, but he does depart from baseball's conventional myths in two respects. First, he argues that Act II of the Giants-Dodgers rivalry, set in California, has been superior to Act I, set in New York. Second, he contends that this rivalry is baseball's best, surpassing the Yankees-Red Sox tiff for several reasons, including the notion that in a real rivalry, each side has to win every now and then. Readers can agree with these theses or not, but they will be impressed with Goldblatt's erudition, his knowledge of his sources, and his intelligent, sprightly writing. In short, this book is far from ordinary. It goes over familiar territory with a deft, insightful hand while totally avoiding the geocentric clichés that plague so many books that proclaim New York as the center of the baseball universe.

Two things need to be said about the production values of this book, and neither of them is favorable. The first is that a fair number of pages in the copy I read were printed with either the first few lines at the top or the last few lines at the bottom out of registration—that is, blurry. Perhaps this problem is isolated and does not affect the entire print run, but consumers faced with paying the relatively high prices that McFarland charges for its books should beware. The second concerns the quality of the photographic reproduction. Most publishers make authors foot the bill for the licensing fees photo agencies and archives charge for the use of their images. In return publishers owe authors an adequate return on their investments, namely, images reproduced crisply and with sufficient contrast. Unfortunately, that is...