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

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Even though I was only five years old when the Dodgers left Brooklyn, I always had a fond spot in my heart for the team. I collected Brookyn Dodger yearbooks over the years. This book, by Michael Shapiro, brought out many interesting facts which I did not know, such as it was only at the end of the season did the Dodgers actually sell out any games. Even though Ebbets Field only held 32,000 I assumed there were several sell outs during the season. Yes,the Dodgers were profitable but O'Malley was a business man and saw (like the Braves) he could make significantly more money. Knowing that area of Brooklyn, that if the stadium was built in 1957 and the teams which would have included Koufax and Drysdale they would have succeeded greatly. Also, the book points out the relationship between Robinson, Campenella and Newcombe. I was not aware of the relationship between the three. I could not believe Newcombe left Ebbets Field, after getting knocked out of the 7th game of the World Series. Yanks start Johnny Knucks against the leagues MVP and Cy Young winner and Newcombe gets knocked out and leaves the Field. I found it incredible that the day after the World Series the team leaves for Japan. I wonder how todays players would react. I wonder why Rachel Robinson declined to be interviewed by the author, I believe she could have added greatly to experiences at Ebbets Field and Brooklyn in the 1950's. I enjoyed the part when Sal Maglie first came to the Dodgers and his reception in the clubhouse. The best part was describing Brookyn in the 1940's and how it was transforming in the 1950's. I read the Boys of Summer many years ago, but this book by Michael Shapiro is clearly superior. I would recommend this book to any baseball fan from that era, especially Brooklyn Dodger fans. Both O'Malley and especially Robert Moses are the real villians here.

Books relating to specific years have been popular over the past several years with mixed results. Author Michael Shapiro has provided us with an outstanding portrait of an aging Brooklyn Dodgers' team going down to the wire in the 1956 season to eek out a pennant over the Milwaukee Braves during the final days of the season. The book is really two separate stories. One involving a lot of politics between Dodgers' owner Walter O'Malley and Robert Moses, an appointed New York official, over the location of a new playing site for the Dodgers. Moses wanted a site located on the present site of Shea Stadium while O'Malley wanted one nearer to Ebbets Field. Shapiro labels Moses as the villain in the move of the Dodgers while O'Malley needed help in acquiring a new stadium, but was not going to get it. Los Angeles promised him more than New York would even consider, so Walter made the move. The one thing O'Malley and Moses shared in common, according to Shapiro, was an ignorance between the team and its fans. Sometimes I felt overwhelmed with the politics involved between both sides in trying to get the deal each wanted, but Shapiro is very thorough in his research. The book's chapters are divided into each month of the baseball season and what took place during each month. A separate chapter is provided for the last week of the season and the World Series. Interesting stories about players such as Robinson, Campanella, Erskine, Reese, Furillo, Newcombe, Labine, and an early season pickup of Sal "The Barber" Maglie from the Cleveland Indians make for very interesting reading even if you are familiar with the Dodgers of this era from other books. It is ironic that former Giant and Dodger rival, Sal "The Barber" Maglie, was to be very instrumental in bringing the Dodgers home with the 1956 pennant. Interesting details of the deal that sent Maglie to the Dodgers from the Indians are provided. Maglie also authored his only no-hitter during the final week of the '56 season, before being victimized by Don Larsen's perfect game in the 5th game of the Series. For the most part America wanted the Milwaukee Braves to win the '56 pennant just to have a new team in the Series, but the St. Louis Cardinals snuffed out the Braves' hopes in St. Louis while the Dodgers were beating the Pirates in Brooklyn. If you feel you have read enough of the Brooklyn Dodgers in previous books, you owe it to yourself to read about this storied team during their Last Good Season.

Michael Shapiro has done a fabulous job of bringing the 1956 National League pennant race to life. Reading this book makes that season as vivid as if it were this year's season. His telling of the machinations of Walter O'Malley and Robert Moses gives a great look at New York in the Fifties. Although long time Brooklyn residents may disagree, Shapiro points to Moses as the real villain behind the Dodgers' exit from New York. His reasoning is sound and he does a great job of showing O'Malley to be the conniving businessman he was.

I was just 3 years old the last time the Brooklyn Dodgers went to the World Series. In 1956 the Dodgers were an aging team and were probably not even the best team in the NL (that being the Milwaukee Braves). Ironically by picking up old enemy Sal Maglie, Brookyn won the pennant on the last day of the season. They lost the World Series to the Yankees in 7 games (Game 5 was Larsen's Perfect Game) and it was a credit to them that they were able to take a superior Yankee team the distance.
The next year the Dodgers finished third and were a team that was "past it's prime and past its time." Walter O'Malley was not a nice man by any means. He was devoted to his family and had a great sense of business but as Michael Shapiro points out, should not have been a baseball owner. O'Malley was strictly a bottom line owner - he counted how many butts were in the seats at Ebbets Field. If you went to one game a season but followed the Dodgers passionately over TV, the radio and newspapers, and argued about them in the luncheonette, then by O'Malley's reckoning you were not a real fan. O'Malley missed the mystical connection between team and fans. However as Shapiro makes known, the real villain was the ubiquitous and dictatorial Robert Moses and the notorious way that business was done (and is still done) in New York. Moses refused to condemn land (something he loved doing - condemning land) to build a new stadium. At heart Moses (as was O'Malley) was not even a baseball fan and had little connection to the average Joe Sixpack who followed the team. Shapiro's book as well as being a great account of the 1956 season, is in ceratin ways a sociology and urban history book of New York in the 1950's as well. It is apparent that as beloved as the Dodgers were, they have been romanticized by people such as Roger Kahn way out of proportion. Jackie Robinson comes across as a fierce competitor whose will to win was unmatched, but as not such a nice person. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to follow the ups and downs of a legendary team and have the truth revealed about the 1958 move to Los Angeles.

I found this book gripping in its remarkable story line. It is indeed much more than a baseball book in its insights into the social history of the time and place. The depictions of the team and its season made thrilling reading even though I knew the end of the tale. I was surprised,resistant, but ultimately convinced by the author's careful marshalling of documentary evidence that O'Malley really wasn't the evildoer that I had always pictured. It's a terrific read and a marvelous book.

I was born in Brooklyn about four years after the Dodgers left for Los Angeles, so I never had the opportunity to experience the Brooklyn Dodgers firsthand, but Michael Shapiro does a wonderful job capturing the Dodgers final years in Brooklyn, and the struggle between Dodger owner Walter O'Malley, who wanted a new stadium in Brooklyn, and New York' master builder Robert Moses, who had other plans for the Brooklyn site and wanted (and eventually did) build a stadium in Queens.
Shapiro tells the story of the fight between O'Malley and Moses, and he truly captures how important the Dodgers were to Brooklyn. Although the team in their last few years in Brooklyn did not draw particularly well, they were still beloved, and an important part of the borough -- with stars such as Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges living in Brooklyn during the season, their wives shopping in local stores, and their children attending the local schools.
To a certain extent I'm sure many of the Brooklyn fans thought their team would never leave. The book illustrates, however, that the teams' fate was in the hands of O'Malley, a businessman only interested in turning a profit, and Moses, a planner who virtually ruled over New York for decades, was more powerful than many mayors, and literally changed the face of the city as well as the state. The fans, caught in the middle, counted for nothing.
Shapiro also portrays the personalities of many of the Dodger stars, with insight into clubhouse relationships and why they performed so well as a team.
In many ways this book is a study in urban politics and baseball. He shows how one affected the other in a profound way, and ultimately, with the move of the Dodgers and Giants to the West Coast, brought baseball into a new era.
If you like baseball or have an interest in New York politics, then this book is for you. Highly recommended.

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.

This is a gripping and well-written account of the last days of the Brooklyn Dodgers, their final pennant race in 1956 and the battle to keep the team in Brooklyn.

If you've read The Boys of Summer, this is a good companion because that book focuses on the early 1950s teams and then the players in later life. This fills in some of the gaps in that narrative.

Shapiro is an outstanding writer and historian. If he has a weakness, it's that he's not a baseball writer per se, and his descriptions of some of the game action can be a bit disjointed. But he more than makes up with it in his accounts of the social fabric of Brooklyn and the political wranglings that eventually led Walter O'Malley to move his team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. His profiles of the key players, both on and off the field, are also exceptional.

This is a book that will make you yearn both for the start of a new baseball season and a simpler day when the fans felt a sense of kinship with the players.

The Dodgers of Brooklyn are now mythic. After one reads a wonderful book like Boys of Summer and hears stories about the Bums, you can't help but believe it. However, the Last Good Season brings some balance to the stories and memories. He honors the men who played a boys game in a decaying old stadium. He does not villify O'Malley, but does Robert Moses who was not a great force for good. The book is not a pure baseball book, but as a self-styled historian (using the term very loosely), I enjoyed the views of the Brooklyn and the large social change. Shapiro does not make the Dodgers more than they are. If anything, he is understated in his discussions of the power of baseball. It works beautifully. The book is engrossing and by the end, you can't help but the love Dodgers more. Once you have read this (and you must read Boys of Summer first) go read The Sandy Koufax book, A Lefty's Legacy which really is a nice a bookend to the Dodgers glory years of the 1950s and 1960s (to say nothing of the '70s and '80s).

The conventional story of the Brooklyn Dodgers' demise is largely familiar to most baseball fans by now. The Borough of Brooklyn saw the working-class white families who had supported the Dodgers flee en masse in the decade after World War Two, replaced by blacks, Puerto Ricans and others of different customs and values. Meanwhile, greedy Dodger owner Walter O'Malley, after making a pretense of wanting to stay in Brooklyn, quickly packed his bags for the more lucrative territory of Los Angeles. If this is the storyline you cling to, be prepared to re-think it. In "The Last Good Season," Michael Shapiro provides a thoroughly-researched, gracefully-written account of the Dodgers' final pennant race and the transformation of Brooklyn.

"I see the boys of summer in their ruin," Dylan Thomas had written in a poem that would forever become linked to the Dodgers. Roger Kahn's masterpiece was still in the future in 1956, but the great Dodger team that had dominated the National League for a decade was clearly approaching the end of the line. Age and injuries were taking their toll on men like Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Carl Erskine and Pee Wee Reese. Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax were on hand, but were still untested youngsters, not the dominant pitchers they would become on the west coast.

Shapiro interweaves an account of the 1956 season with the story of Brooklyn's transformation in the postwar years. Yes, many whites were fleeing to the suburbs, but Ebbets Field was still filled with fans. In fact, he suggests, it was a wonderful, if brief period when black, brown and white fans came together for a common purpose.

What seems abundantly clear from the archives Shapiro has mined is that far from looking for a quick exit, O'Malley was seeking every opportunity to stay (although on his terms.) All he wanted--reasonably enough, in his view--was the city's help in securing the site for a new stadium. Here, though, he came up against the most powerful man in New York--Robert Moses. It was a battle he was destined to lose. Interestingly enough, while Shapiro refuses to condemn O'Malley as a carpetbagger, he does conclude he never should have owned a baseball team. Why? He simply didn't understand the game, or its true meaning to its fans. O'Malley was the kind of owner who could maximize the bottom line, and knew how to successfully market his product--but that's all it ever was to him. A product. As Shapiro's book makes clear, for millions of fans, the Brooklyn Dodgers represented so much more.--William C. Hall