The pennant race was a pretty good one, with the Dodgers clinching the the title on the final day of the season after battling off the upstart Cincinnati Reds of Frank Robinson and Wally Post, and the Milwaukee Braves of Henry Aaron, Ed Matthews, and Walter Spahn. The Dodgers indeed became the World Champions, finally defeating their cross-town rivals the New York Yankees when young southpaw Johnny Podres pitched a shutout in the deciding 7th game, but they were also getting old. Jackie Robinson would be playing his final season. The Dodgers would make it back to the World Series but lose again to the Yankees and fall victim to Don Larsen's perfect game.
But while the baseball season had plenty of on field drama, behind the scenes O'Malley wanted to build a new domed stadium designed by visionary architect R. Buckminster Fuller of Princeton at Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues in Brooklyn. Ebbets field had lots of character, but it was old and it was small. Consequently, O'Malley told Mayor Robert F. Wagner and New York City's powerful urban planner Robert Moses that unless the city helped him build a new stadium for the Dodgers, the team was going to have to move. If you saw the Ken Burns documentary on "Baseball" you may well recall that Ebbets Field was built on a part of Brooklyn known as "Pig Town." O'Malley wanted to build his new stadium on the site of a meat market and needed the city to condemn the property so he could afford to buy it. However, Moses was planning yet another housing project for the same piece of land.
Of course, we know that no domed stadium grew in Brooklyn, but it still hard to shift the presumption of guilt from O'Malley to Moses. Shapiro points out that ever since he forced out Branch Rickey from the Dodger ownership in 1950 O'Malley had pushed for a new stadium. But O'Malley looked and talked the part of the villain in this story. The simple explanation, offered by Dodgers vice president Buzzie Bavasi, was that O'Malley "loved money too damn much." However, Shapiro provides ample evidence in "The Last Good Season" that O'Malley loved other things, such as his wife Kay, and that while he cannot be forgiven for the great sin of abandonment, there are mitigating circumstances that should be taken into account. More importantly, Shapiro is able to point to correspondence between O'Malley and Moses that showed O'Malley wanted to stay in Brooklyn but that Moses had already made up his mind.
But just as it is impossible to talk about the Brooklyn Dodgers team of 1956 without going back in history, the story of O'Malley and Moses goes back earlier as well. The most horrible revelation in the book for Brooklyn fans is that in 1953 Moses was apparently willing to let O'Malley build a new ballpark near the Pratt Institute. Moses then offered instead an unattractive site in Bedford-Stuyvesant and as the two exchanged letters it becomes painfully clear that the Brooklyn Dodgers, the heart of the borough, would not be allowed to build anywhere near its geographical center.
In the end, while the Dodgers played out their final season on the field, it is Moses whose dream of a modern stadium in Flushing Meadows, Queens, would end up with the creation of the New York Mets. But O'Malley became rich moving the Dodgers to Los Angeles and that ends up being the biggest sign of guilt in the public consciousness. Ironically, Shapiro makes a case for, if not forgiving O'Malley, then at least understanding that his greatest sin was that he could not see baseball as ever being more than a business. As such, O'Malley was certainly the most blatant owner to be hungry for money, but he was certainly not the only one in baseball.
As a Yankee fan I bear no love for the Dodgers, whatever coast they were playing on, but I certainly extend them the same sort of respect that Achilles had for Hector, Grant had for Lee, and Johnson and Bird had for each other. I picked up this book wanting to read about Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella and the other great ballplayers we see on the cover, safe in the knowledge that the Yankees would win the World Series. But instead what was captivating was the doomed dance between O'Malley and Moses as the days of the Dodgers in Brooklyn were numbered. As both a fan and a journalist, Shaprio's book provides both passion and objectivity. Those who love baseball should make a point of reading about these boys this summer.