The Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s: How Robinson, MacPhail, Reiser and Rickey Changed Baseball, and: A Brooklyn Dodgers Reader, and: The Brooklyn Cyclones: Hardball Dreams and the New Coney Island, and: When Baseball Returned to Brooklyn: The Inaugural Season of the New York-Penn League Cyclones (review)

In 1898, when the city of Brooklyn was consolidated into Greater New York, it had its own newspaper, its own eponymous bridge, and its own Major League baseball team. Sixty-one years later only the bridge remained. According to Brooklyn's fans the collective tragedy of the departure of the Dodgers for Los Angeles in 1957 far outweighed the loss of the Daily Eaglea year earlier. Perhaps this is because many, though certainly not all, of the Ebbets Field faithful had themselves fled Brooklyn for points east and south, most notably the suburbs of Long Island and New Jersey. Nevertheless, since Walter O'Malley—named by journalists Pete Hamill and Jack Newfield as the third member of what might now be called the true axis of evil, along with Hitler and Stalin—uprooted the beloved Bums from Flatbush, their history has been celebrated and their departure mourned in a significant number of books. The Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s, by Rudy Marzano, and Andrew Paul Mele's A Brooklyn Dodgers Readerrepresent two of the more recent productions of this nostalgia-fueled cottage industry.

Focusing on the contributions of Larry MacPhail, Branch Rickey, Pete Reiser, and Jackie Robinson, The Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940spromises to provide some new insight not just into Brooklyn baseball history but also into the evolution of the professional game itself. Individually and, on occasion, collectively, to one degree or another, MacPhail, Rickey, Reiser, and Robinson were responsible for, or intimately involved in, the early embrace of television as a medium for the consumption of their product and, of course, for the integration of the Major Leagues. Perhaps less famously, but no less importantly, they were instrumental in introducing vast improvements in player safety.

The Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940sis most successful when it looks directly at these innovators and their innovations, linking Brooklyn's baseball past to the larger history of the sport. Too much space, however, is devoted to long descriptions of individual games that, while interesting, do little to further Marzano's argument. At the same time, short shrift is given to important events, incidents, and details, such as television coverage of the first World Series in 1947, the legacy of MacPhail's infatuation with the medium, and Robinson's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, for example. Indeed, with very few exceptions, Marzano's actual subject matter seems to be an afterthought.

And while game descriptions do relate, however indirectly, to the topic at hand, The Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940sall too frequently veers off course. Writing about the connection between the extraordinarily talented Reiser, with his penchant for colliding with both balls and walls, and the development of the batting helmet, Marzano gives a painstaking account of the beaning incident involving Mike Piazza and Roger Clemens, not as an illustration of the helmet's importance but as part of a sermon exemplar on the evils of the designated hitter. This and similar digressions, occasionally bordering on rants, add little to his argument.

A former reporter for the Newark Evening News, Marzano writes in a tone that is informal and anecdotal rather than journalistic. While information gleaned from personal interviews and reminiscences add to the reader's appreciation of his subjects, their innovations, and the milieu in which they worked...