After Many a Summer
The Passing of the Giants and Dodgers and a Golden Age in New York Baseball
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
By the mid-1950s, New York had been the unrivaled capital of America’s national pastime for a century, a place where baseball was followed with truly fanatical fervor. The city’s three teams—the New York Yankees, the New York Giants, and the Brooklyn Dodgers—had over the previous decade rewarded their fans’ devotion with stellar performances: from 1947 to 1957, one or more of these teams had played in the World Series every year but one. Yet on opening day 1958, the Giants and the Dodgers were gone. Their owners, Walter O’Malley and Horace Stoneham, had ripped them away from their longtime home and from the hearts of millions of devoted and passionate fans and taken the teams to California.
How did it happen? Who was to blame?
The relocation of the Giants and the Dodgers, an event that transcended sports and altered the landscape of New York City, has never been addressed with the depth, detail, and insight offered here by Robert E. Murphy. As informed as it is entertaining, After Many a Summer is rich in baseball lore, civic history, and the wheeling and dealing, alliances and betrayals, and sharp-elbowed machinations of big-city business and politics.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I have never quite been reconciled to the Dodgers' being taken from me," admits freelance writer Murphy, who grew up within walking distance of Ebbets Field and still lives in Brooklyn. He is able to put his feelings aside, however, in this objective reappraisal of the sequence of events that led Walter O'Malley (who " Brooklyn a rich man and a despised man") to take his team to Los Angeles while, at the other end of New York City, Giants owner Horace Stoneham was making his own plans to leave town. Murphy is particularly eager to restore the reputation of Robert Moses, who has been accused of squeezing the Dodgers out. The city planner did offer solutions that could have kept the team in Brooklyn, Murphy reports, but the sites where O'Malley wanted to build his own stadium weren't zoned for that purpose. The Giants' story, though it runs concurrently, is much less dramatic; Murphy's most significant accomplishment lies in breaking down the nostalgic myths and sorting through the historical archives to get the real story behind the transformation of New York's baseball landscape.
