Bums

Bums
Author: Peter Golenbock
Publisher: Courier Corporation
Total Pages: 562
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0486477355

It's been over 50 years since they moved to Los Angeles, but the Brooklyn Dodgers remain ingrained in the fabric of our national pastime. Golenbock's oral history of these "lovable losers" tells the team's tale through the words of Pee Wee Reese, Leo Durocher, Duke Snider, and other Brooklyn greats.

Brooklyn's Dodgers

Brooklyn's Dodgers
Author: Carl E. Prince
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 1996
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195099273

Carl E. Prince captures the intensity and depth of the baseball team Brooklyn Dodger's relationship to the community and its people in the 1950's. Ethnic and racial tensions in Brooklyn were smoothed by the Dodgers' presence.

The Boys of Summer

The Boys of Summer
Author: Roger Kahn
Publisher: Aurum
Total Pages: 560
Release: 2013-08-01
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1781312079

This is a book about young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s, and then went on to play for one of the most exciting major-league ball clubs ever fielded, the team that broke the colour barrier with Jackie Robinson. It is a book by and about a sportswriter who grew up near Ebbets Field, and who had the good fortune in the 1950s to cover the Dodgers for the Herald Tribune. This is a book about what happened to Jackie, Carl Erskine, Pee Wee Reese, and the others when their glory days were behind them. In short, it is a book fathers and sons and about the making of modern America. 'At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams.' Sentimental because it holds such promise, and bittersweet because that promise is past, the first sentence of this masterpiece of sporting literature, first published in the early '70s, sets its tone. The team is the mid-20th-century Brooklyn Dodgers, the team of Robinson and Snyder and Hodges and Reese, a team of great triumph and historical import composed of men whose fragile lives were filled with dignity and pathos. Roger Kahn, who covered that team for the New York Herald Tribune, makes understandable humans of his heroes as he chronicles the dreams and exploits of their young lives, beautifully intertwining them with his own, then recounts how so many of those sweet dreams curdled as the body of these once shining stars grew rusty with age and battered by experience.

The Greatest Ballpark Ever

The Greatest Ballpark Ever
Author: Bob McGee
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2005-06-22
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0813537754

Generations after its demise, Ebbets Field remains the single most colorful and enduring image of a baseball park, with a treasured niche in the game's legacy and the American imagination. In this lively story of sports, politics, and the talented, hilarious, and charming characters associated with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Bob McGee chronicles the ballpark's vibrant history from the drawing board to the wrecking ball, beginning with Charley Ebbets and the heralded opening in 1913, on through the eras that followed. McGee weaves a story about how Ebbets Field's architectural details, notable flaws, and striking facade brought Brooklyn and its team together in ways that allowed each to define the other. Drawing on original interviews and letters, as well as published and archival sources, The Greatest Ballpark Ever explores the struggle of Charley Ebbets to build Ebbets Field, the days of Wilbert Robinson's early pennant winners, the eras of the Daffiness Boys, Larry MacPhail, and Branch Rickey, the tumultuous field leadership of Leo the Lip, the fiery triumph of Jackie Robinson, the golden days of the Boys of Summer, and Walter O'Malley's ignominious departure. With humor and passion, The Greatest Ballpark Ever lets readers relive a day in the raucous ballpark with its quirky angles and its bent right-field wall, with the characters and events that have become part of the nation's folklore.

The Last Years of the Brooklyn Dodgers

The Last Years of the Brooklyn Dodgers
Author: Rudy Marzano
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2015-02-16
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 1476612951

This work, which picks up where the author's previous book, The Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s (McFarland, 2005), left off, covers the Dodgers' final eight years in Brooklyn. Chapters carry the reader from the 1951 playoffs, when a late season collapse and Thomson's "Shot Heard Round the World" dealt Brooklyn a heartbreaking blow, through the 1955 World Series title, and finally to Walter O'Malley's controversial decision to move the team to Los Angeles. The author covers each season in-depth and assesses popular perceptions of the Dodgers, their players and owners, and considers O'Malley's culpability in the team's departure, which ended a string of 74 years in which Brooklyn had major league baseball.

Brooklyn Dodgers in Cuba

Brooklyn Dodgers in Cuba
Author: Jim Vitti
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2011
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 9780738574271

The Brooklyn Dodgers held spring training in Havana in 1947 so Jackie Robinson could practice safely. Yet that was hardly the beginning: the Bums played in Cuba over 60 seasons, from 1900 to 1959. Ballplayers drank hard with Hemingway. Some found themselves in Cuban jails. Pitcher Van Lingle Mungo, barricaded in the Hotel Nacional with two women, fended off an angry husband (and his machete). Leo Durocher got into a brawl with an umpire, after Lippy's translator correctly cursed him in Spanish. Vin Scully watched machine gun-toting barbudas enter the room. An outfielder leaped into the stands, with a loaded gun, to chase a fan. Several players encountered Castro, who once walked onto the field in his fatigues, patted his pistol, and said to Lefty Locklin, "Tonight, we win."

The Team that Forever Changed Baseball and America

The Team that Forever Changed Baseball and America
Author: Lyle Spatz
Publisher: Jewish Publication Society
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2012-04
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0803239920

Tells the story of the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers in contextualized biographies of the players, managers, and everyone else important to the team.

The Dodgers Move West

The Dodgers Move West
Author: Neil Sullivan
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 279
Release: 1989-06-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195059220

For many New Yorkers, the removal of the Brooklyn Dodgers—perhaps the most popular baseball team of all time—to Los Angeles in 1957 remains one of the most traumatic events since World War II. Sullivan's controversial reassessment of this event shifts responsibility for the move onto the local governmental maneuverings that occurred on both sides of the continent. Set against a backdrop of sporting passion and rivalry, and appearing over thirty years after the Dodgers' last season in Brooklyn, this engrossing book offers new insights into the power struggle existing in the nation's two largest cities.

Brooklyn Dodgers

Brooklyn Dodgers
Author: John Robert Nordell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 103
Release: 2007
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780976507291

No baseball summer is as memorable for me as that July when the Dodgers began a winning streak in a suddenly torrid, topsy-turvy National League pennant race. Fifty years after they played their last baseball game, the Brooklyn Dodgers are still remembered by millions of people. From 1947 to 1956, the Dodgers captured six out of ten National League pennants and they defeated the mighty New York Yankees in the 1955 World Series. The year 1957, however, is recalled mainly for the decision by Dodger president Walter O'Malley to move his team to Los Angeles the following year. In Brooklyn Dodgers: The Last Great Pennant Drive, 1957, author John Nordell tells the story of the Dodgers' mid-season surge in the standings during that last year in Brooklyn. Using research from a variety of sources, Nordell recreates the excitement of following the Dodgers and their National League rivals in the daily drama of a five-team pennant race. The author also draws on his own youthful memories of that year and describes the unforgettable thrill of seeing a game at Ebbets Field. The book includes numerous photographs and a concluding chapter that discusses the outcome of the 1957 pennant race, the major factors and personalities involved in the Dodger move west, and the end of an era in baseball.

Bums No More!

Bums No More!
Author: Stewart Wolpin
Publisher: St Martins Press
Total Pages: 130
Release: 1995
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 9780312115760

A portrait of the Brooklyn Dodgers recreates their 1955 championship season, chronicling in words and photographs the most important events leading to their World Series victory