Brooklyn's Dodgers

The Bums, the Borough, and the Best of Baseball, 1947-1957

Carl E. Prince

During the 1952 World Series, a Yankee fan trying to watch the game in a Brooklyn bar was told, "Why don't you go back where you belong, Yankee lover?" "I got a right to cheer my team," the intruder responded, "this is a free country." "This ain't no free country, chum," countered the Dodger fan, "this is Brooklyn." Brooklynites loved their "Bums"--Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, and all the murderous parade of regulars who, after years of struggle, finally won the World Series in 1955. One could not live in Brooklyn and not catch its spirit of devotion to its baseball club.
In Brooklyn's Dodgers, Carl E. Prince captures the intensity and depth of the team's relationship to the community and its people in the 1950s, showing how the team extended its influence well beyond the sports arena. He captures both the racial intensity surrounding Jackie Robinson's breaking the color line, and the controversy it generated on the team, in baseball, and the nation. He takes a hard look at the Dodger's ubiquitous presence in the life of Brooklyn, the team's closeness to the children, female fans, and Brooklyn's diverse ethnicity. Prince goes on to open the door to the male culture of Brooklyn's bars, the wonderful baseball played by thousands of Brooklyn's boys on the Parade Grounds, including many who made the leap to the Dodger's minor league farm system, as those who made the ultimate jump to the majors. And Prince doesn't ignore the underside of the Dodger experience: the paternity suits and "baseball Annies," the routine baseball-related 50's sexism, and the ethnic conflicts that went with the Brooklyn territory.
In this superb volume, Carl E. Prince provides a stirring history of the depth and intensity of the relationship between Brooklyn and its Dodgers in the golden years after the Second World War.

Brooklyn's Dodgers

The Bums, the Borough, and the Best of Baseball, 1947-1957

Carl E. Prince

Description

During the 1952 World Series, a Yankee fan trying to watch the game in a Brooklyn bar was told, "Why don't you go back where you belong, Yankee lover?" "I got a right to cheer my team," the intruder responded, "this is a free country." "This ain't no free country, chum," countered the Dodger fan, "this is Brooklyn." Brooklynites loved their "Bums"--Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, and all the murderous parade of regulars who, after years of struggle, finally won the World Series in 1955. One could not live in Brooklyn and not catch its spirit of devotion to its baseball club.
In Brooklyn's Dodgers, Carl E. Prince captures the intensity and depth of the team's relationship to the community and its people in the 1950s. Ethnic and racial tensions were part and parcel of a working class borough; the Dodgers' presence smoothed the rough edges of the ghetto conflict always present in the life of Brooklyn. The Dodger-inspired baseball program at the fabled Parade Grounds provided a path for boys that occasionally led to the prestigious "Dodger Rookie Team," and sometimes, via minor league contracts, to Ebbets Field itself. There were the boys who lined Bedford Avenue on game days hoping to retrieve home run balls and the men in the many bars who were not only devoted fans but collectively the keepers of the Dodger past--as were Brooklyn women, and in numbers. Indeed, women were tied to the Dodgers no less than their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons; they were only less visible. A few, like Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Marianne Moore and working class stiff Hilda Chester were regulars at Ebbets Field and far from invisible. Prince also explores the underside of the Dodgers--the "baseball Annies," and the paternity suits that went with the territory. The Dodgers' male culture was played out as well in the team's politics, in the owners' manipulation of Dodger male egos, opponents' race-baiting, and the macho bravado of the team (how Jackie Robinson, for instance, would prod Giants' catcher Sal Yvars to impotent rage by signaling him when he was going to steal second base, then taunting him from second after the steal).
The day in 1957 when Walter O'Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, announced that the team would be leaving for Los Angeles was one of the worst moments in baseball history, and a sad day in Brooklyn's history as well. The Dodger team was, to a degree unmatched in other major league cities, deeply enmeshed in the life and psyche of Brooklyn and its people. In this superb volume, Carl Prince illuminates this "Brooklyn" in the golden years after the Second World War.

Brooklyn's Dodgers

The Bums, the Borough, and the Best of Baseball, 1947-1957

Carl E. Prince

Author Information

Carl E. Prince is Professor of History at New York University, and a past chair of the department. A specialist in early American history, he has written several books and many essays on early American political culture. With this book he picks up professionally a subject in which he has had a life-long interest.

Brooklyn's Dodgers

The Bums, the Borough, and the Best of Baseball, 1947-1957

Carl E. Prince

Reviews and Awards

"[Prince] has rummaged through long-departed newspapers...and tracked the usual volumes and them some, to explain the loyalty of Brooklynites to the Dodgers."--The New York Times

"A book that should resonate deeply for those who were there."--USA Today

"At long last, a scholar using the tools of modern history has demythologized the Brooklyn Dodgers."--Sporting News

"This is a book Dodger fans...will find fascinating and revealing. It is a story of the scars left behind on a borough by the departure of its baseball team, and in light of the talk today about the Yankees' possible departure from the Bronx, it offers some clues to the impending fate of that borough."--New York Newsday

"Likely to appeal to those who remember Jackie Robinson dancing off first base or rounding the bases as among the most lyrical images in the history of baseball."--The New York Times

"[Prince] offers new perspective on baseball's most treasured nostalgic icon."--Sports Collector's Digest

"How the Dodgers affected both men and women, kids growing up and Brooklyn's relation to the outlying boroughs is studied in a scholarly but not stuffy manner."--USA Today Baseball Weekly