Download The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together AudioBook Free
In the best-selling custom of The Males of Warmer summer months and Delay 'Til Next 12 months, The Last Good Season is the poignant and remarkable story of the Brooklyn Dodgers' last pennant and the pushes that resulted in 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 evenly storied, an iron bond of loyalty forged through years of adversity and sometimes renowned ineptitude. Coming off their first World Series triumph ever in 1955, up against the hated Yankees, the Dodgers would protect their crown up 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 exciting pennant races in history. But as The Last Good Season so richly relates, all was not well under the top. The Dodgers were an increasing age team at the tail end of its greatness, and Brooklyn was a location caught up in swift and profound metropolitan change. From a cradle of white ethnicity, it had been transformed into a racial patchwork, including Puerto Ricans and blacks from the South who flocked to Ebbets Field to view the Dodgers' black stars. The institutions that described the borough - the Brooklyn Eagle, the Brooklyn Navy Yard - acquired vanished, in support of the Dodgers remained. And when their shrewd, dollar-squeezing owner, Walter O'Malley, started out casting his eyes in other places in the lack of any viable plan to replace the increasing age Ebbets Field and any support from the all-powerful metropolitan czar Robert Moses, the times of the Dodgers in Brooklyn were evidently 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 episode to life. Like David Halberstam's The Warmer summer months of '49, THE VERY LAST Good Season combines an exciting baseball story, a genuine sense of nostalgia, and hard-nosed reporting and communal thinking to show you, in a fresh light, a time and place we only thought we grasped.
