Through a series of happy circumstances, we happened to read Michael Shapiro‘s Bottom of the Ninth (out now from Times Books) and Robert Murphy‘s After Many a Summer—two baseball books positioned on opposite sides of the historical moment when the Giants left Manhattan and the Dodgers left Brooklyn—in close proximity, and we thought that what with Murphy (left) and Shapiro being in the area, we should try to get them together to talk shop. Murphy set the tone for the lunchtime conversation early; scanning the menu, he said playfully, “In honor of Walter O’Malley, I’ll have the California wrap.” (Ironically, a Dodgers/Diamondbacks game was playing on the big-screen TV behind him at the time.)
Murphy grew up within walking distance of Ebbets Field, so he took the departure of the Dodgers after the 1957 season especially hard. “I still rooted for the Dodgers in Los Angeles for ten years after they left, though,” he admitted, “even though I wanted to skewer O’Malley.” Shapiro also grew up in Brooklyn, but being a few years younger, he didn’t become a fan until 1961, when “by default there was only one team to root for,” he explained—but after a lifetime of rooting for the Yankees, even through the lean years, by 2001 he’d had enough and switched allegiance to the Mets. “You have different needs in a team when you’re middle-aged than when you’re younger,” he said. “I don’t need a team that could win the World Series every year, just as long as they stay at least a couple games over .500.”
(Both men agreed that the Brooklyn of the 1960s was a much different place than it had been in the previous decade—in addition to the departure of the Dodgers, the closing of the Brooklyn Eagle—once the most popular afternoon newspaper in the United States—and the shutdown of the borough’s trolley system eliminated, as Murphy put it, “all the things that held Brooklyn together as a community.”)
After Many a Summer deals with the years leading up to the departure of the Dodgers and the Giants, the culmination of a long period of speculation about major league baseball’s future in the post-WWII era. “It was a constant question in the 1950s,” Murphy told us. “Would the existing teams move or would the leagues expand?” Attendance was shrinking in just about every ballpark—American League teams pretty much counted on the annual visits from the Yankees to boost their revenues—but when a team like the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee, they found eager new audiences… and that’s the background that had O’Malley contemplating a move to California. (Unless, perhaps, at least in the early years, he could make a fantastic deal for a new stadium in Brooklyn…)
Bottom of the Ninth picks up the story after the two teams are gone, and various interests began maneuvering to bring a new baseball team into New York City—he focuses on the never-fulfilled plans for the Continental League, a third major league organization that was spearheaded by former Dodgers and Pirates executive Branch Rickey. At one point, Rickey was so confident this project would succeed that he went on What’s My Line? and declared it “as inevitable as tomorrow morning.”
“He really believed that,” Shapiro (who told us about the clip in the first place) elaborated. “And yet the other guys in the league sold him out in a New York minute. But he was never wrong about his goals, he was just wrong about the people he was dealing with.”