The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together (review)

The Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s continue to captivate the public imagination, providing a nostalgic vision of post–World War II America. The story of the beloved working-class Dodgers finally defeating the wealth and power of the New York Yankees in 1955 only to be betrayed by the greed of ownership two years later has inspired such fine baseball writing as Doris Kearns-Goodwin's Wait Till Next Year, Roger Kahn's Boys of Summer, and Neil J. Sullivan's The Dodgers Move West. The latest Dodger offering is by Michael J. Shapiro, a Brooklyn native and professor at the Columbia School of Journalism.

Shapiro focuses on the 1956 season, which he labels "the last good season." After winning the World Series in 1955, an aging Brooklyn club captured the 1956 National League pennant on the season's final day, overtaking the Milwaukee Braves, who had occupied first place for most of that summer. The Dodgers once again played the Yankees in the World Series, but the Bums returned to form, losing the Series, which featured Don Larsen's perfect game. And things were never the same in Brooklyn. Jackie Robinson retired rather than accept a trade to the New York Giants. The Dodgers failed to contend in 1957, and the team departed for the greener pastures of Los Angeles.

The first half of Shapiro's chronological account details the efforts of Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley to secure a new stadium in Brooklyn, while the latter section relates the 1956 pennant race. Shapiro's portrayal of the Dodgers during the 1956 campaign is drawn from journalists and interviews with such former Brooklyn players as Clem Labine, Carl Erskine, Roger Craig, Ed Roebuck, and Duke Snider. Based on the testimony of former teammates, Shapiro describes Don Newcombe as moody and somewhat of a negative influence in the clubhouse. On the other hand Sal Maglie, who was traded to the Dodgers from Cleveland early in the 1956 season, emerges as a heroic figure. He does not sound like the same Maglie who was an object of ridicule in Jim Bouton's Ball Four.

The most fascinating aspects of The Last Good Season, nevertheless, take place in the political arena rather than on the baseball diamond. Employing a series of personal vignettes from Brooklyn residents during the 1950s, Shapiro contends that, indeed, the social and class composition of Brooklyn was changing in the postwar era. But such changes need not have fundamentally altered Brooklyn as an urban space. Similar to the arguments of historian Thomas Sugre in The Origins of the Urban Crisis, of which Shapiro is apparently unaware, Shapiro asserts that government policies exacerbated social and class differences in the 1950s.

Walter O'Malley thus is not the villain of this book. According to Shapiro, O'Malley was simply a businessman who had little sense of community and wanted to maximize his profits. Finding no evidence that O'Malley received any firm offers from Los Angeles before the fall of 1956, Shapiro maintains that the Dodger owner was sincere in his efforts to build a new stadium in Brooklyn. O'Malley's efforts, however, were thwarted by New York's urban planning czar Robert Moses. Shapiro depicts Moses as an "arrogant, imperious, and cruel" man who cared little for people of color. "He was," writes Shapiro, "building parks for white people and highways to towns where white people lived. He did not want a ballpark in downtown Brooklyn. He wanted it on the highway to Long Island so that the people for whom he was building the city could come to take in a game" (p. 307). Shapiro laments that neither O'Malley nor Moses had any appreciation for the types of urban communities described by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Much of the ground plowed by Shapiro is hardly new. The book includes a list of sources but...