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
