Book Marred By Misleading Revisionism On O'Malley

books:


	• The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together Michael Shapiro Broadway, 2004 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 26 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

The Truth Shall Set You Free

This is an amazing book. Less about baseball and more about life. It takes a reader from the end of the 1955 season, when the Dodgers won the World Series through the 1956 National League Chapionship to the dark days of 1957, when the Dodgers left for Los Angeles.

What's special is that few books tell the story as Shapiro did. To get the understanding of Shapiro, one would have to read volumes on the iconoclastic Robert Moses and on baseball. He tells the plight of the Dodgers as few have, laying the blame squarely on Robert Moses, public works czar of New York City, who failed to see the virtue in a Dodgers stadium while conspiring to build a dull monolith of his own in Flushing, which became Shea Stadium.

In between, we find a well-researched, well-thought-out view of the Dodgers, aging and all. About Pee Wee and Jackie's future, about Furillo and Hodges. The people we learned about in "The Boys of Summer," become "The Men of Late Autumn."

A tremendous read, especially in conjunction with "The Lords of the Realm," which discuss the business side of baseball.

for more information click here

Great Story

Michael Shapiro manages to find a new, informative, and well-argued story in the timeless tail of 1950s baseball in New York. His argument shows the changes in NYC during the time period, with the growth of the suburbs leading Robert Moses to believe that the future of pro sports and high society in general are outside the cities. But this only leads to Brooklyn having one of its few identities ripped away, while the likes of Shea Stadium (Moses' master plan) portends one of the more dismal eras in stadium building and location.

On the other hand, Shapiro discusses how even after the Dodgers became in interested in moving, their dream deal at Chavez Ravine could easily have collapsed.

Meantime, there is a game on the field and Shapiro details how the Dodgers, despite the age/physical breakdown of most of their stars, and all sorts of other problems, fight for one more National League pennant, leading to the last and probably best of the Subway Series'.

Definitely worth reading.

for more information click here

Let's Not Forget Neil J. Sullivan

Other reviewers on this site have done a good job in giving the reader a sense of what this outstanding Brooklyn Dodgers book is about. I have many Dodgers books, & this is one of the best. I would just like to call attention to something that is lacking in all the previous reviews, & that is the fact that Neil J. Sullivan wrote a book called "The Dodgers Move West" in 1987. In a lot of detail & with dozens of references, Sullivan explored the Robert Moses factor (in terms of the Dodgers not staying in Brooklyn). I was reminded of this omisssion after recently watching the HBO special, "Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush," in which author Shapiro is (appropriately) interviewed, but again, this special program makes nary a mention of Sullivan's earlier, pioneering work in this area. Mr. Shapiro himself fully acknowledges Mr. Sullivan's book, on p. 337 of "The Last Good Season..." So my comments are "just for the record..."

for more information click here

The Real Bad Guy

Not that either one of the two men most responsible were saints, but Shapiro's book justly lays the discredit for the Dodgers move to California on Robert Moses' egotistical head. All these years O'Malley has been looked upon as the villain when it was Moses who was the real culprit. Shapiro's book is a mash up of Brooklyn Dodger 1950's history, and Brooklyn post war history with the changes in demographics that led to the Dodgers decline at the turnstiles. More importantly it is a study of how one tyrant with unelected powers was able to prevent the Dodgers from building a new stadium in a choice part of the borough as the politicians stood by pathetically impotent. A sad story but one I couldn't put down. And a greatly warranted revision to Robert Moses' legacy. A must for all Brooklyn Dodger fans.

for more information click here

Book Marred By Misleading Revisionism On O'Malley

The three stars I will give for what Shaprio tries to do in recreating the story of the last Brooklyn pennant drive. But this book deserves no more than that for its promotion of an appalling bit of revisionist history that tries to take the blame off Walter O'Malley for moving the Dodgers, and transferring it instead to Robert Moses. Neal Sullivan in "The Dodgers Move West" was the first to push this idea, but Shapiro takes it to new heights, declaring boldly that "Robert Moses is the bad guy in this story" for not in effect giving O'Malley what he wanted at an Atlantic Avenue site.

One could say that Shapiro's analysis is really the flip-side emotional argument against Moses, the same way so much of the old arguments against O'Malley from Brooklynites were rooted in emotion. And in Shapiro's case, the blunt facts are that on an emotional AND economic level, his attempt to paint Moses as the real villain has absolutely no validity.

On an emotional level, the argument fails because O'Malley was ultimately the one who had to make the final call, and it was O'Malley who failed to understand the depth of meaning the team had to a community that made it ethically dubious (though perfectly legal) to decide he, a man who had owned the team outright for only seven years, had the right to take a 67 year civic institution 3000 miles away for his own personal edification. If O'Malley suffered from a genuine financial hardship case (which he did not), then he should have sold the team. The argument that Shaprio makes "O'Malley had not spent all his time and energy and divested himself of all his holdings but his baseball team in order to take Robert Moses' on-the-cheap-deal in Flushing Meadows" is somehow designed to make us feel sorry for O'Malley in the sense that as a businessman he had no choice but to do what he did. That is simply nonsense.

Fortunately, Henry Fetter's "Taking On The Yankees" written after Shapiro's book, has offered some much needed post-revisionism to this story by offering the kind of full-blown economic analysis of O'Malley's Atlantic Avenue plan that one will not find in Shapiro's book. What Fetter points out, and what Shapiro neglects to do is note that O'Malley was only prepared to pay the city $1 million for the land he expected the city to condemn at Atlantic Avenue in order for him to build his stadium. The true value of the land, given the costs of relocation of a major meat market and a rail terminal though, would have been more on the order of $9 million, meaning in effect O'Malley wanted a sweetheart deal of a kind that would have represented civic extortion at its worse. Robert Moses offered a perfectly legitimate site in Flushing Meadow that would in time prove to be a profitable draw for the ex-Dodger fanbase who became Met fans, and which answered all the concerns over parking and transportation access that supposedly made Ebbets Field obsolete at this point (though Fetter's analysis notes that the complaints about Ebbets Field were almost identical to ones being sounded a decade later about Fenway Park in Boston, and Fenway as we know, still survives in a bad neighborhood and the same low capacity that Ebbets Field had). O'Malley rejected the offer because he wasn't going to get a big cash cow for himself, which he tried to paper over with the dubious argument that moving the Dodgers to Queens would be no different than moving to Los Angeles.

O'Malley might have been a man who loved his family, but as a sports owner, he was as ethically dishonest as Art Modell was to Cleveland Browns fans a generation later and as such, should not be given Hall of Fame recognition, ever. It's really a sad comment that because of the impact of Robert Caro's "The Power Broker", Robert Moses has become a convenient whipping boy for revisionist authors like Shapiro and Sullivan who believe in rehabilitating O'Malley no matter what. But while Moses was a man whose faults should be duly documented, he is totally blameless on the matter of why the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles.

for more information click here

reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

hot

not?

What's your opinion?

Write a review and share your thoughts!

recommendations

My favorite sports books

search for books
last good, brooklyn, dodgers, final, pennant, season, their, together

Impressum / about us