The Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush (review)

Myths and nostalgia constitute a significant part of the appeal of baseball. Beyond the actual games, journalistic accounts, statistics, and analyses, historical perspectives on past seasons produce narratives that create nostalgia and myths. One of the abiding myths concerns the “Boys of Summer,” the Brooklyn Dodgers of 1947–1957 who won six pennants and one glorious World Series against the mighty New York Yankees in seven attempts. This decade was characterized by the great success of the three New York teams, who played in every Series but one; there were seven “Subway Series,” and the city captured nine championships.¹

The discreteness of a decade enhances the status of the myth as a discontinued period that existed only in a halcyon past but paradoxically is forever enshrined in a timeless present. It’s the baseball equivalent of Camelot—a time and a place that involved the integration of baseball by Jackie Robinson in 1947; the union of a borough with its team in a close and satisfying relation; the despair of losing an “insurmountable” lead in 1951; the fulfillment of a quest to defeat their nearly invincible opponents; and then the tragedy of a departure from the borough, a move to the gold field of Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles and a new life apart from beloved Brooklyn. It’s a tale of an abiding loyalty betrayed by big business and power interests that carried out their maneuvers without considering local opinion. It’s a tale that has been told over and over again in numerous books like Roger Kahn’s classic Boys of Summer and in various videos like The Shot Heard ’Round the World, the definitive five-part series The Brooklyn Dodgers: The Original America’s Team, Baseball When It Was a Game II, Baseball, and now The Ghosts of Flatbush, which serves as a compendium of the previous works with some excellent additional factual and visual details to recreate and sustain the myth.

This documentary elicits various levels of nostalgia, depending on the audience addressed. Its most general audience consists of baseball fans who may have been somewhat aware of the story before and now can see it recreated as the basic tale of Walter O’Malley and Robert Moses’s betrayal of the fans. On a second level, it can appeal to people under the age of sixty living in Brooklyn today—those who are aware of the Dodgers primarily from the historical accounts and from the commemorative plaques, the highway, bridge, and street named after Robinson, Gil Hodges, and Carl Erskine, respectively, and the Jackie Robinson-Pee Wee Reese memorial commemorating the time Reese put his arm around Jackie to indicate he was supporting him as a member of the team. Through the film, locals can get a vivid, more emotional sense of what the team meant to Brooklyn. Finally, the audience for whom the title and documentary really register is my generation of Brooklynites, now in their late sixties and beyond, who lived the myth from 1947 through 1957 and remember it viscerally. For this audience, whether or not we continue to live in Brooklyn, the video is a visit to our past. As we get older, our memories of the past become more nostalgic, so the title The Ghosts of Flatbush alludes to ourselves as well as our Dodgers. When we see the Boys of Summer in action, we are the boys of Brooklyn growing up and watching the Dodgers.

Thus this video’s value is not primarily as a historical document but as an emotional artifact, a careful arrangement of voices, images, music, and historical details to produce another version of the lament over the demise of the team in Brooklyn. That the Dodgers disappeared at the height of their popularity, when it appeared that the team would remain (albeit in a new stadium), and left behind a beloved and doomed field, which had its own charisma, and a borough known as a zany but lovable place with its own...