Book Description
In the bestselling tradition of The Boys of Summer and Wait ‘Til Next Year, The Last Good Season is the poignant and dramatic story of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ last pennant and the forces that led to their heartbreaking departure to Los Angeles.
The 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers were one of baseball’s most storied teams, featuring such immortals as Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, and Roy Campanella. The love between team and borough was equally storied, an iron bond of loyalty forged through years of adversity and sometimes legendary ineptitude. Coming off their first World Series triumph ever in 1955, against the hated Yankees, the Dodgers would defend their crown against the Milwaukee Braves and the Cincinnati Reds in a six-month neck-and-neck contest until the last day of the playoffs, one of the most thrilling pennant races in history.
But as The Last Good Season so richly relates, all was not well under the surface. The Dodgers were an aging team at the tail end of its greatness, and Brooklyn was a place caught up in rapid and profound urban change. From a cradle of white ethnicity, it was being transformed into a racial patchwork, including Puerto Ricans and blacks from the South who flocked to Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers’ black stars. The institutions that defined the borough – the Brooklyn Eagle, the Brooklyn Navy Yard – had vanished, and only the Dodgers remained. And when their shrewd, dollar-squeezing owner, Walter O’Malley, began casting his eyes elsewhere in the absence of any viable plan to replace the aging Ebbets Field and any support from the all-powerful urban czar Robert Moses, the days of the Dodgers in Brooklyn were clearly numbered.
Michael Shapiro, a Brooklyn native, has interviewed many of the surviving participants and observers of the 1956 season, and undertaken immense archival research to bring its public and hidden drama to life. Like David Halberstam’s The Summer of ’49, The Last Good Season combines an exciting baseball story, a genuine sense of nostalgia, and hard-nosed reporting and social thinking to reveal, in a new light, a time and place we only thought we understood.
Customer Reviews:
Amazingly Good.......2007-07-30
Wow. First let me say that I'm not a Brooklyn resident or a Dodger fan and picked this book up without knowing anything about it. The book turned out to be one of the best baseball books I've read in quite some time.
I was drawn into the book immediately. It is clear in the Prologue that Shapiro is a very good writer and that the book is as much about the fifties and Brooklyn as it is about a pennant race. The book is enjoyable on both fronts.
Shapiro does a great job of weaving a portrait of the changes going on in Brooklyn in the mid-fifties and giving younger readers a good idea of what it was like to grow up in that era. It is clear that Shapiro has done quite a bit of research and I think the reader really gets a good look into the personalities of the players and other characters in the story.
Any fan of baseball history will do himself a favor in buying this book. It truly deserves more acclaim than it has received.
Completely Satisfying.......2007-07-22
This book probably doesn't get the sales or the attention it deserves, because the title and the cover make it look as if it's intended just for baseball junkies. But it's far more than that. In just 332 pages, Shapiro tells four stories:
1. The story of the National League pennant race in 1956.
2. The story of why the Dodgers (and therefore the Giants as well) decided to move to California in 1958.
3. The social, demographic, and economic changes that Brooklyn (and, by extension, much of urban America) experienced in the post-World War II era.
4. Thumbnail sketches of the personal lives of the core players in the Brooklyn Dodger lineup from 1947 through 1956.
None of these four themes is given short shrift. Furthermore, Shapiro has organized this book beautifully. He seems to have done a perfect job in choosing exactly where to break the narrative of the Dodgers' wins and losses, and insert a section about the changing character of a neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Not only that, but Shapiro's writing is superb. Here is his account of the last pitch of the last Dodger game of the regular season - a game they had to win in order to clinch the championship, with Dodger Don Bessent pitching to Pittsburgh's Hank Foiles:
*****
Don Bessent went into his windup. The last thing he thought before releasing the ball was, he later said, "Tight, keep it tight."
Hank Foiles swung. The next thing he heard was the thud of the ball in Roy Campanella's mitt.
*****
You don't have to be a baseball fan to enjoy this book. You just have to enjoy good writing and a wonderful story, wonderfully told.
Book Marred By Misleading Revisionism On O'Malley.......2007-07-15
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.
Let's Not Forget Neil J. Sullivan.......2007-07-14
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..."
Great Story.......2007-01-15
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.
Book Description
The companion piece to his baseball classic The Long Season, Mr. Brosnan's Pennant Race recounts the game-by-game lives of the Cincinnati Reds during their pennant-winning 1961 season. He was a pitcher with Cincinnati that season, but also one of the sharpest and wittiest writers baseball ever produced. One of the best baseball books ever written...probably one of the best American diaries as well. --New York Times Book Review
Customer Reviews:
A very good follow-up to a baseball classic.......2006-08-24
Jim Brosnan's second book is also a diary, this one on his 1961 season spent with the eventual National League champion Cincinnati Reds. Brosnan's wit, cynicism, and wry observations on the game of baseball make this an entertaining read. He enjoys interacting with his teammates (most of the time) and one conversation in particular involving Brosnan getting on a teammate for his grammar is priceless. It would have been nice had Brosnan included his spring training experience and the Reds' involvement in the World Series that year. Despite lacking those two elements, "Pennant Race" is an easy recommendation. It's not as good as "The Long Season", but it's still a very good read.
Another Witty, Fun Read By Brosnan.......2005-04-12
In his second player diary, pitcher Jim Brosnan describes his day-to-day participation as a member of the pennant-winning 1961 Cincinnati Reds. Brosnan writes with the same wit and amused irreverence he used two years earlier in his superb initial diary, THE LONG SEASON. Here we get an insider's view of star teammates like Frank Robinson (that year's MVP), Vada Pinson, Jim Maloney, manager Fred Hutchinson, etc. Readers will enjoy hearing about now-forgotten players in long-gone ballparks like Crosley Field, Shibe Park, Forbes Field, etc. We also get the tension and thrill of a pennant race. Unfortunately, the author omits spring training, and he ends the diary on the last day of the regular season, before the Reds played the Yankees in that year's World Series - thus I gave the book just four stars instead of five.
Brosnan was a college-educated player who gained recognition (and notoriety) for his writing. PENNANT RACE is as readable and charming as its predecessor, and once again landed Brosnan in some hot water with baseball's establishment.
The Best Baseball Book.......1999-11-22
Pennant Race and its companion book, The Long Season, are the best baseball books ever written. I enjoyed Ball Four, written ten yeras after The Long Season, but it is a pale imitation. Brosnan's style and perspective are unique; his blend of candor and cynicisn unmatched; his writing subtleties are brilliant. I have read hundreds of baseball books, and these two, which I basically consider one volumne, are unequaled.
Excellent! One of the best baseball books ever!.......1999-08-26
Although most of the players from the 1961 Cincinnati Reds are forgotten now (exception: right fielder and National League MVP Frank Robinson), this book remains current due to the good humor and insider's view it affords the reader. Nearly 40 years old now, it shows how timeless the game of baseball is.
I'm a lifelong NY Yankees fan, but this remains one of my favorite books on any subject.
One note: this is one of the only baseball books that was _really_ written by the named author. Brosnan had no ghostwriter.
Book Description
The best team in baseball statistics takes on one of the great unanswered questions: Why do teams win pennant races?
Pennant races are arguably the most important aspect of baseball. Players, teams, and franchises are all after one goal: to win the pennant and get into the post-season. But what really determines who wins?
Statistical analyses of baseball abound: different ways of breaking down everyone's individual performance, from hitters and pitchers to managers and even owners. But surprisingly, team success--what makes some teams winners over an entire season--has never been looked at with the same statistical rigor.
In It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over, The Baseball Prospectus Team of Experts introduce the Davenport Method of deciding which races were the most dramatic--the closest, the most volatile--and determine the ten greatest races of modern baseball history. They use these key races (and a few others) to answer the main question: What determines who wins? How important are such things as mid-season trades, how much a manager overworks his pitchers, and why teams have winning and losing streaks? Can one player carry a team? Can one bad player ruin a team? Can one bad play ruin a team's chances?
This fascinating and illuminating book will change your perception of the game.
Customer Reviews:
errors.......2007-09-21
Terrence is correct-a lot of errors.A few examples--Steve Goldman has Bob Lemon as a left handed picther.He also said Lemon came up as a third baseman.Didn't it occur to Mr. Goldman that if he came up as a third baseman, he would not have been a lefty thrower? Alex Belth had Pittsburgh winning 7 NL East titles in the 70's (actually won 6) In the Index section, Denny McLain is listed twice-spelled McLain and McClain.These were just found in the first half of the book--who knows what I will find in the second half.The Baseball Prospectus authors have got to do a better job on the research. Allen Barra's book-Brushbacks and Knockdowns contain a ton of errors , but that is another story for another day.
a disappointment.......2007-09-17
This book contains several factual errors, most notably in the chapters on the 1967 AL race and the 1972 AL East race (including a continual misspelling of Denny McLain's name). Given the number of easily-found mistakes in this book, one starts wondering if there are other errors embedded in the statistical analyses that aren't readily apparent. Many of the chapters also skim the surface and don't delve into issues surrounding teams that didn't win; for example, the chapter on the 1964 NL race just about ignores the Reds, arguably the best team in the league that year (and the team with the highest Pythagorean won-lost mark, presuming they did the math right), led by a manager dying of cancer. In short, this book was a bit of disappointment, and certainly not Baseball Prospectus' best work; there are still some neat things in here, but this book is not worth paying full price for.
entertaining.......2007-08-17
This is a good book for those who enjoy baseball stats--the WARPs, VORPs, pythagorean expectations and the like. It looks at a number of pennant races and has analyses of those races. It also has some very interesting analyses of related and unrelated topics as well. One of the more enjoyable sections involves an "antipennant" to see who would "win" the rating of the worst baseball team (not surprisingly the 1899 Cleveland Spiders). Unlike many (much) older books, It Ain't Over often features computer replays--millions of replays to get a better statistical view. Hence when they say that Team X should have won the pennant, or that the 1899 Spiders were musch worse than the other worst teams, it carries more weight. (If you want to read more extensively about the worst teams, try the wonderful "On a Clear Day They Could See Seventh Place"--used, through Amazon).
I did have a couple of problems with the book. First, it's edited, not written by one person, and so the writing is not always uniform--a bit like an anthology of short stories by different authors. Second, I would myself probably have picked some different races here and there. I found myself asking "What makes a pennant race exciting?" Suppose you have three very mediocre teams in a weak division--and all three finish closely
with a record of, say, about 78 wins and 84 losses. It may be close, but is it exciting? It reminds me of some Monday Night Football games between
two teams that are 4 and 10 in which there are 8 fumbles and 10 interceptions. The game may be close, but I probably wouldn't call it exciting, except in a kind of morbid way.
The 1908 National League race which featured the "Merkle boner" is of course included in the book. The Cubs won, with the Giants and Pirates just one game back. But to my disappointment, the American league race for that same year is not included, and I didn't see any explanation why it was not included. The Tigers won, with the Indians 1/2 game back and the White Sox 1 1/2 back. This race didn't get as much attention as the NL race. But in 1908 rainout games didn't have to be made up if they affected the pennant. Detroit was 90-63, Cleveland 90-64, and Chicago 88-64. If Detroit had to play their missing game and had lost, and Chicago had won both of their missing games, all three teams would have finished at 90-64. So I think that both the NL and AL races should have been in the book.
Lots of tables, lots of stats--fun to read!
Book Description
The Story of "Da Curse of the Billy Goat."
On October 6, 1945, William "Billy Goat" Sianis, a Greek immigrant who owned a nearby tavern, came to Wrigley Field with two box seat tickets for the fourth game of the 1945 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Detroit Tigers. One ticket was for himself and the other was for his pet goat Murphy. A squad of usher at the stadium failed to keep Sianis and his pet billy goat out of the ball park. Once inside the stadium, Sianis took the goat onto the playing field, causing an uproar from the crowd before ushers intervened to end the stunt.
After a heated argument, Sianis and the animal were allowed to occupy the box seat for which he had tickets. Sianis and his goat were ejected from the stadium, however, prior to the end of the game at the command of Cubs' owner Philip Knight Wrigley, reportedly because of the animal's objectionable odor. Sianis was outraged by the ejection, and in response, he placed a curse upon the Cubs that they would never another pennant of play in a World Series. The Cubs eventually lost the 1945 World Series when they were soundly beaten in game seven. After the loss, Sianis sent a telegram to Wrigley that read, "Who Smells Now?"
With the passage of time and repetitive losing seasons, the Curse of the Billy Goat gradually became an urban legend in Chicago. The late-season collapse of the 1969 Cubs, and the postseason collapses of the 1984, 1989, and 2003 Cubs continue to torment fans. Each time the Cubs fail to reach the World Series, the hex is blamed. No other team in baseball history has gone longer without winning a championship or pennant.
Today, the Curse of the Billy Goat has found a permanent place in baseball lore as one of the most famous sports curses of all time, and it is inextricably intertwined with the history of the Chicago Cubs.
Customer Reviews:
The Story of One of the Most Famous Curses in Sports.......2005-04-06
This interesting and insightful book looks into one of the most famous and long-lived curses in sports; the billy goat curse of the Chicago Cubs. In October of 1945, the Chicago Cubs were playing the Detroit Tigers in the World Series. Games 1-3 were held in Detroit, where the Cubs won two of the three games. Returning to Chicago, the Cubs had hopes of closing out the series in front of the hometown fans. One of the fans who came to see the Cubs was William "Billy Goat" Sianis, a Greek immigrant who owned a nearby tavern.
Sianis came to the park with two box seat tickets; one for himself and the other for his pet billy goat "Murphy". Ushers immediately tried to prevent Sianis and his goat from entering, but they failed to keep them out. Once inside, Billy and his goat made their way onto the field before the ushers intervened again. Billy and Murphy were allowed to take the seats they had purchased, but, under orders from Cubs owner Phillip K. Wrigley, Billy and Murphy were ejected from the game due to, according to Wrigley, the goat's odor. Outraged, Sianis placed a curse on the Cubs that they would never win another pennant or play in the World Series. The birth of the "billy goat" curse had occurred.
The Cubs eventually lost the 1945 World Series to the Tigers and Sianis sent a telegram to Wrigley stating "Who stinks now?"
From that fateful series against the Tigers until today, the Cubs have never won a pennant or played in a World Series, just as Sianis said they wouldn't. There have been close calls (1969, 1984, 1989, 1998, and 2003), but ultimately something happened to spoil the Cubs dreams, such as the black cat incident in New York in 1969, Leon Durham's misplayed ground ball in 1984, and the infamous Steve Bartman foul ball interference in 2003. Although classifed as an "Urban Legend", many Cubs fans really believe in the curse. I must say that everything that Sianis said would happen to the Cubs has happened. How much can be attributed to the curse or to just poor luck or bad play?
I enjoyed this book a great deal. Although it is relatively short, it still gives very good information about the curse and some of the other lesser-known Cubs curses, such as the curse of Fred Merkle. I highly recommend this book. Baseball fans and, more specifically, Cubs fans like myself, will enjoy this fun look at one of the most famous curses of all time and how it has affected the Cubs for sixty years.
Average customer rating:
- Riling Giants and Other Stories
- Worth maybe a library rental, but not a purchase.
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Pennant Races
Dave Anderson
Manufacturer: Doubleday
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It Ain't over 'til It's over: The Baseball Prospectus Pennant Race Book
ASIN: 0385425732
Release Date: 1994-02-01 |
Customer Reviews:
Riling Giants and Other Stories.......2002-08-23
Pulitzer Prize winning sportswriter Dave Anderson of the New York Times supplies readers with a wide variety of stories about the leading pennant races in baseball history. His succinct sportswriter's prose is ideal to depict time ticking events in the hot, humid days of summer as races move toward dramatic climaxes. The winners will go on to the World Series while the losers go home to contemplate what went wrong.
Two crucial pennant races which came down to the wire involved instances where the Dodgers and Giants respectively became aroused as a result of slights. The first instance was in 1934, when New York Giants' first baseman and manager Bill Terry was summarizing his view of the upcoming National League pennant race with New York reporters. When asked about the Giants' bitter Gotham rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers, then experiencing hard times, Terry smiled and exclaimed, "Are the Dodgers still in the league?"
As the pennant reached its crucial closing stages, and Terry's Giants were locked in a tight race with the "Gashouse Gang" St. Louis Cardinals with the Dean brothers, Joe Medwick, and playing manager Frankie Frisch,they concluded the season with two games at Ebbets Field against the Dodgers. Remembering the Terry slight, Casey Stengel, who would later win five straight world titles from 1949 to 1953 with the New York Yankees, relished the opportunity along with his players to knock their New York rivals out of the race. Stengel's Dodgers won both games and the Cardinals won the pennant, defeating the Detroit Tigers in seven games in the World Series.
The Dodgers failed to profit from history, since in 1951, seventeen years later, they defied the adage, "Never rile a Giant." After sweeping the Giants at Ebbets Field, the Dodgers taunted the team they believed to be out of the pennant. In the small Ebbets Field clubhouse the home and visiting teams were separated by a tissue paper wall. The Giants listened in helpless rage as Dodger manager Chuck Dressen and his team sang, shouted, and taunted the Giants. Jackie Robinson pounded a bat repeatedly against the wall.
Leo Durocher's Giants then came back from their presumed demise, winning 37 out of their last 44 games to finish in a first place tie with their hated rivals as the regular season ended. The immortal three game playoff ended with Bobby Thomson's 3-run homer off of Dodger pitcher Ralph Branca for a 5-4 victory and a Giant pennant, a blast known as "the hit heard round the world."
Another example of a presumed slight which helped change baseball history was in the second to last game of the 1949 season at Yankee Stadium. The Boston Red Sox moved into New York up one game, needing only a split with the Yankees to qualify to play the Dodgers in the World Series. Boston catcher Birdie Tebbets, a legendary bench jockey, chided Yankee shortstop Phil Rizzuto in the first game that the Red Sox would be starting their rookie fresh from college the next day. An angry Rizzuto walked back to the bench and repeated the comment. The inspired Yankees won both games and went on from there to defeat the Dodgers in five games in the World Series.
Anderson has plenty of interesting races to write about in addition to the aforementioned, including Gabby Hartnett's home run in the darkness in 1938 which propelled his Cub team to victory over the Pittsburgh Pirates, and ultimately the National League pennant, along with the 1908 pennant races, when Detroit won a cliffhanger in the American League and the Cubs prevailed in a playoff game against the Giants of John McGraw, a contest resulting from Johnny Evers's protest over Fred Merkle failing to touch second base after the apparent winning hit had enabled the Giants to prevail.
Worth maybe a library rental, but not a purchase........1999-07-02
The author makes some good choices on which seasons to profile,such as 1908, 1951, 1991, etc. Also, he makes a pertinent point for all 1998-nuts, titling his chapter on 1993 "The Last Pure Pennant Race." However, the author is obviously prejudiced toward the era he grew up in, selecting no less than FIVE of the fourteen profiled from the 1940's. Indians only won the pennant because the Black Sox were throwing games down the stretch! 1964? You've got to be kidding! The Phillies experienced one of the all-time "crash-and-burn" moments in baseball history, losing their final ten games, allowing St. Louis to "back into" the pennant! The major factor in weighing the "all-time greatest pennant races" should hinge mainly on the fan excitement they create. Here, Anderson spends two of his choices on great collapses, where only the eventual winner's fans benefit; rather than picking two other races where BOTH teams played great ball down the stretch, giving fans in BOTH cities something to cheer about! The 1904 Boston-N.Y. American League race , or the 1915 Boston-Detroit AL race would have been much better choices. At any rate, I wasn't all that impressed with Anderson's writing style. It lacked tension, organization, and failed to present some of the really great races in a wider historical context. Mostly valuable for it's details of baseball's greatest and most suffocating pennant race, 1908.
Amazon.com
At no time in the 1948 season did any team lead the American League by four games. With less than a month remaining, the Yankees, Red Sox, Indians, and A's charged down the stretch heads apart. Cleveland eventually captured the flag in a one-game playoff against Boston, but it wasn't just the pennant race that year that was so remarkable; it was the season itself. In Cleveland, Lou Bourdreu experienced his greatest days as player-manager, Larry Doby took his place in the outfield, and the team's charismatic owner, Bill Veeck, brought in a 42-year-old rookie named Satchel Paige, who won six, lost one, did to Major League hitters what he'd been doing to their Negro League counterparts for decades, and perfectly complemented a couple of other Hall of Fame hurlers, Bob Feller and Bob Lemon. In Boston, long-time Yankee manager Joe McCarthy went over to the enemy, and Ted Williams came off a Triple Crown title with a season just as good. The A's, under Connie Mack, naturally folded first, but the Yankees, behind the heroics of an injured Joe DiMaggio and the emergence of Yogi Berra, stayed in it until the last weekend.
Using interviews with such stars as Doby, Feller, Dom DiMaggio, and virtually every newspaper and magazine account of the times, Kaiser, a historian by profession, replays the season in painstaking detail, almost game by game, keeping in sight his larger context: a postwar game for a postwar nation. From time to time, that bigger picture turns his prose a little purple, but his subject is big enough to deflect that like an overmatched fastball. To keep things feeling contemporary, he drops the standings in every few pages, a visually dramatic effect that, like a good cliffhanger, keeps you gasping for how it all turns out, even though it turned out the way it did 50 years ago. --Jeff Silverman
Customer Reviews:
PLEMTY OF DETAIL.......2001-07-02
THIS BOOK IS A GREAT READ. A DAY BY DAY ACCOUNT OF THE AMERICAN LEAGUE PENNANT RACE OF 1948. MR. KAISER HAS DONE HIS HOMEWORK ON THIS VERY FACT FILLED NOVEL. I FELT LIKE I WAS BACK IN 1948 ENJOYING THIS GREAT RACE. HE HAS MUCH DETAIL AND ANALYSIS FOR EACH TEAM IN THE RACE. IT IS THRILLING FOR AN INDIAN'S FAN, AND HEARTBREAKING FOR A REDSOX FAN. A GREAT WRITING ABOUT A GREAT SEASON IN AMERICAN LEAGUE HISTORY. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
An entertaining, absorbing addition to baseball history........1998-09-20
David Kaiser's excellent book recaptures the era of the late forties and early fifties, when the major leagues consisted of only 400 players on sixteen teams - most of whom were familiar to any serious young student of the game. His detailed descriptions of the teams, the players, and the season regenerate fond memories of afternoon games, All-Star game ballots cut from the newspaper, and hours of studying season statistics in the Sunday newspapers.
For those of you are old enough to remember the time, the book faithfully recalls the suspense of the season and the games that made it that way. To those who have known only pampered stars with million-dollar salaries, the book provides a window into a purer form of baseball.
The writing carries the reader through the season just as it happened, the suspense is allowed to build, and the foibles of the teams and players are described and analyzed. The research is excellent, and the organization crisp. The season's end leaves the reader satisfied that the winner rose to the occasion and the almosts gave a good accounting of themselves.
This reader can offer only one disappointment. The author obviously came to be very familiar with the players that made it all happen. Had he weaved into the text a more detailed set of profiles that captured more of the players' personal essence, the richness of the read would have been greater.
In summary, the book was well written, makes a serious contribution to the written history of baseball, and is highly recommended to anyone who enjoys the national pastime.
Thorough, insightful, well-organized, densely packed.......1998-05-17
This analysis of the 1948 American League pennant race has several strengths. Author David Kaiser has gone to great lengths to gather all possible information about the events of the year, and left no stone unturned (statistical or historical) in finding ways to place the story of the season in context for us. This wealth of material requires a sure hand to organize and present in a coherent way, and Kaiser is equal to the task.
The writing, itself? It's not bad. It won't make anyone forget Thomas Boswell, but it is clear and orderly and doesn't get in the way of the story.
The book isn't a casual read. There is so much to tell about the '48 season that you actually have to pay attention to the abundance of detail in order to take in everything there is to take in.
In other words, it doesn't have that great a beat, but you can still dance to it... I give it a 68.
And if you're specifically interested in the Indians of that era, or the '48 race itself, then of course the book is completely indispensable.
Average customer rating:
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Down to the Wire: BASEBALL'S GREAT PENNANT RACES (DK READERS)
DK Publishing
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ASIN: 0756608376 |
Book Description
The championship chase brings out the best in baseball teams and players. Who will come out on top?
DK Readers is a multi-level learning-to-read program combining DK's highly visual style with appealing stories at four graduated levels. Stunning photographs and engaging, age-appropriate stories are guaranteed to capture a child's interest while developing reading skills and general knowledge. DK Readers allow progression from stories for beginning readers with simple sentences and word repetition through to stories with rich vocabulary and more challenging sentence structure for proficient readers.
Customer Reviews:
Each of these pictures is truly worth a thousand words.......2006-01-01
This book is obscure, hard to find, rare. I stumbled across my copy at a bookstore that has since closed down. It quickly became one of the invaluable prizes in my baseball library.
A few qualifiers: This is only for baseball nuts. Casual fans shouldn't bother. Also, the book is only current through 1980.
Now, what the book is. It's every pennant race in baseball history, displayed in graphic form. On the left side of each graph, the teams all start at zero. Time passes from left to right. As teams win, their lines move up. When they lose, their lines move down. Each team is shown at each point on the graph with respect to their number of games above or below .500. Come the far right of each graph, you'll see how they finished.
Well, that really loses a lot in translation, but please take my word for it: the excitement of a pennant race really comes through on these graphs, often more than is the case with just a written description. You can feel the flavor of each pennant race -- the closely fought battles with teams moving back and forth throughout, the amazing comebacks, the sudden collapses, the teams that stumbled along until mid-June or so and then suddenly got hot, the blowouts -- all the different flavors of pennant races are here in full detail.
Many a book has been written that covers many of these pennant races, but try as they might, they can't convey all the information, all the drama, that these graphs do. In many of these books, every so often, the narration will stop to show you the standings at a certain point -- the author's attempt to show you a glimpse of the story that these graphs tell more thoroughly.
For the best pennant races, the author has presented "close ups" -- magnified portions of the closing dates on the graph, the sections involving the key teams, with the scores of key games printed over the points where they occurred.
These graphs really bring a lot of dramas back to life, and are a wonderful supplement to the great tales you might have read elsewhere: the 1908 donnybrook, the 1914 Miracle Braves, the incredible 1920 season, the 1934 Gas House Gang comeback to surpass the Giants, the 1951 Miracle at Coogan's Bluff, anong others.
An unexpected bonus is that the author's capsule prose rundowns of each pennant race are usually quite well written.
Again, this isn't for everyone; this is for the sort of fan who gets something out of graphs. If you're not a numbers person, this probably isn't for you. It's for the type of obsessed baseball fan who has the time and inclination to sit around looking at these pictures and discovering new stories in them.
'Graphic View' is pennant race student's dream.......2003-05-26
John Warner Davenport's 1981 book "Baseball's Pennant Races: A Graphic View" presents a series of graphs showing every American and National League pennant race from 1901-1980. When you think of the nature of pennant races, from wild season-long battles between two or more teams to runaways by one dominant team, chances are the way these graphs look is the way you'd see those races in your mind.
For all of the marquee races during this span -- the 1908 chases in both leagues; the 1920 American League battle between the Cleveland Indians, Chicago White Sox and New York Yankees; the 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers-New York Giants tussle; the Philadelphia Phillies' 1964 collapse that created a heated four-team struggle; and others, Davenport gives us "close-up" graphs, that chronicle each day's scores over a period of one or more months. These closeups really give an insight into what was actually happening to these teams day by day, and in some cases, what effect teams outside the race were having on the final result.
In the regular, more broad-based graphs, we get a glimpse at interesting also-rans who were either on the rise -- like the Philadelphia Athletics of 1926-28, right before their domination of the American League over the following three seasons -- or on the way down. These are indicated by bolder lines in Davenport's graphs (as are the teams who won the race).
Perhaps the ideal combination would be this book's graphs and the pure numbers available in Neft and Cohen's "The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball." Having both books separately is good enough, however.
While on one level it's unfortunate that this book hasn't been updated, either by Davenport or someone else, for some people an update would only be valuable through 1993, in any case. After '93, the Wild Card was introduced, devaluing the pennant race for many observers. Of course, the real purists might point to 1968 as the last year of true pennant races (though neither was particularly close), coming on the eve of divisional play in 1969.
"Baseball's Pennant Races: A Graphic View" is a fine addition to any baseball fan's collection, its lack of updating notwithstanding.
Average customer rating:
- A Painful, Glorious Account of When Baseball Mattered Most
- Well Researched and Readable
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Chasing October: The Dodgers-Giants Pennant Race of 1962
David Plaut
Manufacturer: Diamond Communications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0912083697 |
Customer Reviews:
A Painful, Glorious Account of When Baseball Mattered Most.......2004-09-14
During the summer of 1962 I was 11 years old, and baseball was the most important thing in my life. That summer I listened to every Dodger game and lived and died with every pitch. I knew all the players in both major leagues, but the Dodgers were my life. I can still remember the Koufax no-hitter against the Mets, the sweep of the Giants in L.A., and getting swept by them in S.F., and the September swoon by the Dodgers was epic (leading by 4.5 games with 7 to play!).
The 9th inning of the 3rd playoff game was a trauma that took weeks to recover from (no, I'm not a hopeless case like Red Sox fans!), but something that I still vividly recall today. David Plaut's book brings 1962 back in narrative, chronological form, and while I knew most of the things noted from the Dodgers' perspectives, I gained new insight into what the Giants clubhouse went through, and what their great players thought of the Dodgers, and the pennant race.
This was a classic pennant dogfight with two evenly matched teams going down to the final pitch of the year. Sandy Koufax's ailment can't be used as an excuse - the Giants played better when it counted, as no one remembers who finished second, except for broken-hearted Dodger fans, and David Plaut, who has put together a wonderful reminiscence of that magical summer of 1962.
I highly recommend this book to baseball fans of any age.
Well Researched and Readable.......2003-06-05
I read this book several years ago and found it quite enjoyable. I like to read about baseball pennant races and this one was an unforgettable one. Very thorough and readable!
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