Customer Reviews

A Tale of Three Cities: The 1962 Baseball Season in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

On the face, this book looks like a delightful trip back to the halcyon days of the National Pastime. It was an era of rapid change, a time when the greats of the Golden Age of the '50s were ending their careers and the young upstarts who would dominate the '60s were first showing their stuff. Expansion had introduced major league baseball to a New Generation of Americans. Latin and African-American players were beginning to show a dominance that exists to this day.

Sadly, Travers falls well short of these expectations.

The book describes itself as the story of three cities. But New York, the Center of the Baseball Universe for five decades, receives short shrift, even with the unbelievably inept New York Mets and the still dominant Yankees offering plenty of material.

He also presents a disturbingly biased attitude towards the Dodger-Giant rivalry. His disdain for the Giants, and anything associated with the city of San Francisco, is blatant and distracts from the story of an incredible pennant race.

However, the most disturbing thing is the haphazard, careless and amateurish editing throughout the book. Anecdotes are introduced, but left unfinished; other incidents are reported twice, with different facts; and some events (especially in recounting the World Series) are told in confusing, random order. There are even grammar and spelling errors that most 6th graders should catch.

1962 was a marvelous year for all of baseball (even though, as a Dodger fan, I found the conclusion depressing), but this book only manages to leave a bad taste in your mouth.

First, I'm an avid baseball fan and have been enjoying reading baseball books for over 20 years. Also, I've never reviewed a book up until now but this book aggravated me to the point that I felt obligated to warn others. This book stands out as one that should never have reached the printing press. The author repeats himself, is unorganized and the grammatical errors are an embarrassment. I'm not sure who decided to publish this bias, error filled, tale of TWO Cities, (NY is mentioned briefly), but they made a terrible decision.

In a book ostensibly about baseball, author Steven Travers offers naive and biased diatribes about political, social, and religious issues, interspersed with occasional (and often inaccurate) information about the 1962 baseball season. I'd advise anyone truly interested in this subject to avoid this book like the plague and instead pick up a copy of David Plaut's excellent "Chasing October: The Dodgers-Giants Pennant Race of 1962."

I was delighted to see a book written about the 1962 season. I was 11 years old at the time, a rabid Giants fan living in Moraga, California, and, without a doubt, it remains the greatest season I have ever witnessed. This book brought back to life many of the memorable moments of that thrilling pennant race with the Dodgers and the great games that were played during that season. That part truly was a good read, but I had some serious problems with the author's obvious political references to many of the Bay Area's icons like Herb Caan and Charles McCabe. Coming from a strongly left persuasion, I certainly didn't expect to be getting that message in a book about sports. The comments that really galled me were reserved for Jim Bouton in reference to having him want the United States to lose the Vietnam War in the interest of fairness. Ouch. I didn't think there were too many people left on the planet that still thought that somehow that conflict, from the United States' standpoint, was justified. Also, numerous references to "American Exceptionalism" brought back historical memories of the last country that entertained such hubris, Germany in the 1930s and the "Master Race." There were also several religious references in the book that frankly don't belong in this type of publication. But what was truly ugly was on page 220, when Mr. Travers summarized the careers of the Giant players and how they ended up, and his summary of Orlando Cepeda would lead one to believe that he didn't make it to the Hall of Fame. In 1999, the Veterans Committee voted Orlando Cepeda into the Hall of Fame, so his comments, such as "had he remained healthy, he would likely have compiled lifetime statistics worthy of Cooperstown, but it was not to be," make me wonder if he failed to get the memo.

In conclusion, I have never read any of his books before and I was certainly gratified to see someone write about this baseball season, but I would recommend in the future he drop the politics because it has no place in this type of publication. And no, that's not political correctness (an expression he references several times). It's just not the appropriate venue to communicate those types of opinions.

IF YOU READ THE OTHER REVIEWS, NOT MANY LIKED THIS BOOK. I LIKED THE PARTS CONCERNING THE WAY THE WEATHER AFFECTED THE GIANTS PLAY AT CANDLESTICK PARK. THE SMALL INSIGHTS INTO THE CHARACTER OF DRYSDALE, ALSTON AND KOUFAX. THE SUMMARY OF THE 1962 WORLD SERIES AND CASEY AND THE AMAZING METS. MUCH OF THIS BOOK NEEDS EDITING. BUT ALL IN ALL I LIKED IT. IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN THE 1962 WORLD SERIES AND THE GIANTS VS DODGERS RIVALRY THEN YOU WILL PROBABLY ENJOY THIS BOOK.

Each baseball season has the potential to be special and 1962 was no different. It was the year before JFK's assassination. It was the last Yankees World Championship for their old dynasty and the first potential post season meeting between bitter rivals since the move of the Dodgers and Giants to the west coast in 1958. And indeed elements of these points are in the book. But the author's treatment of the Dodgers, Giants and Yankees is not even handed nor even proportionate to their accomplishments that year. The Dodgers are lionized as the model franchise and L.A. as the city of the future. The Giants and the city of San Francisco are thoroughly trashed and the Yankees are only mentioned as an afterthought. As it happens, the Giants beat out the Dodgers in a three game playoff to win the NL flag and the Yankees were World Champs that year by beating the Giants. Also regretably, the author inserts his religious and political views--totally inappropriate for a book on baseball. This book could have been much more. Very disappointing.

I was attracted to the book because 1962 was also one of the first seasons I vividly recall. Although the story is compelling as far as it goes, the Angels and Mets--the Angels in particular--are given the short shrift although their season was one of the most miraculous ever. The inference that Sandy Koufax lacked courage could easily been omited. In the stretch drive of 1962, he didn't lack courage--he lacked health. The most significant factor in the NL race was his injured finger. But the most annoying aspect of the book were the obvious factual errors. Everybody knows that Ken Hubbs perished in a plane crash. He didn't drown. A mistake like that calls into question the veracity of the rest of the book. The lack of citations is glaring.

Steven Travers captures the essence of the 1962 season in Major League baseball, while painting a vivid picture of the changes taking place in American society. His work made for a compelling, if slightly uneven, saga.

The result is still a powerful perspective of the first "coast to coast" thrill ride in baseball history, as the transplanted Dodgers and Giants battled it out in epic fashion for the NL pennant, while the perennial champion New York Yankees would begin their gradual fade from Dynasty to also ran; supplanted at decade's end by the Amazin' Mets.

But still, the Yanks reigned supreme in '62 (barely), taking another World Series title against a solid San Fransico Giants team. It would prove to be their last championship for fifteen years, signaling a temporary end to Yankee supremacy.

The country itself was undergoing a metamorphisis, although we didn't realize it at the time; but the Cuban Missle Crisis was unfolding, the Civil Rights Movement was starting to heat up; along with Vietnam; and in a little over a year, President Kennedy would be assasinated.

The country experienced a great deal of turmoil during the '60s, and 1962 seemed to be the year the fuse was lit; the resulting "explosion" would change the fabric of American society, forever.

For the game of baseball, it signaled the beginning to a new era, where the National League style of play would reign supreme for three decades. But nothing lasts forever; nowadays the American League wins (or ties) every All-Star game, the country itself has become ObamaNation, and it seems like everyone in the world is hooked on Twitter.

This book is a well-written and bold endeavor; possibly attempting to take on more than it could handle, but nevertheless, a very worthy effort.

A Tale of Three Cities is a sometimes entertaining and nostalgic volume, but it is marred by one of the worst editing efforts I have ever seen. There are bizarre typos, incomplete sentences, dangling half-thoughts, and acres of irrelevant political comments. I don't mind political bias, but I do mind political preaching--especially in a sports book--and Travers could have used an editor with enough power to delete many of his comments. It is one thing to provide cultural and historical background to a period; it is quite another to distract the reader by inserting simplistic and biased interpretations of the period. Travers praises conservative viewpoints, adores the free market, and freely insults liberals. The last are cast as guilty of insufficent belief in American "exceptionalism," and ballplayers who opposed the Vietnam War are assumed to be liberal and unpatriotic. (What any of this has to do with the subject he is supposedly covering is a complete mystery--one that is never explained.) To give you an idea of the flavor of his comments, Travers lists Ann Coulter's screed "Treason" in the bibliography.

For reasons known only to him, Travers spends an inordinate amount of ink on what he believes are the shortcomings of San Francisco writers of the time, especially Charles McCabe who gets more lines of type than Buzzie Bavasi or Harvey Kuenn or Jose Pagan or several other ballplayers. Here is where Travers desperately needed an editor who would stop him from writing things such as this: "...In a scant 200 years [the United States] had become the most powerful empire in the annals of mankind. McCabe and his kind were the last people on God's Earth to embrace knowledge of the fact that such a thing could happen only by a divine, guiding hand." Travers is entitled to this opinion, and perhaps if expressed more eloquently, it could somehow (although I really don't know how) be appropriate in a sports book. Unfortunately, he had no editor who saw any problem with interjecting such a bald opinion into the text.

He also could have used a good fact checker: Walter Alston won four World Series, not three. Manny Mota did not retire with the astounding total of 1560 pinch hits. Fresco Thompson died of cancer in 1968, not of a heart attack in 1969.

TRAVERS HITS HOME RUNS IN THE TRADITION OF ANGELL, JORDAN AND MURRAY!

Steve Travers is as fine a sportswriter as there is in America. He has great wit and literary style, and his books are always chock full of fabulous anecdotes and information. I have long been a fan of his work, which reminds me of Pat Jordan, Jim Murray and Roger Angell. I highly recommend this and all his books. I can't put his books down, they read like novels; fast-paced and excellent from start to finish.