Brooklyn Remembered

Forty-nine years before the Boston Red Sox finally defeated the New York Yankees and ended as baseball’s champions, the Brooklyn Dodgers overcame a similar struggle to win the 1955 World Series. The Dodgers had established a relationship with their fans much like the one now held by New Englanders – the team was revered as a friend and constant acquaintance. Unfortunately, Maury Allen’s Brooklyn Remembered fails to do justice to this relationship or the hold the Dodgers really had on the community. In fact, the book fails to really accomplish much of anything.

Looking back on a team so memorable that it inspired a fan to create a commemorative banner for the SABR Convention in Toronto, Maury Allen somehow recycled many well-known stories or pieces of hyperbole without including any actual substance. The book is stocked full of phrases like “Nobody could hit a ball as far as …” or “Nobody could throw as fast as …” or “Gil Hodges is the best player not in the Hall of Fame” without ever actually quantifying or illustrating these comments. While the book does not need to support every statement, it would be nice to have even a quote from an old newspaper column or catcher or opposing batter detailing the speed of Sandy Koufax or Don Newcombe’s fastballs. The fact that Hodges’ widow wants him in the Hall of Fame somehow accumulated multiple pages, but the only actual justification given to support his inclusion can be summarized as, “He was the first baseman for Da Bums.”

The writing and editing are equally poor.  It reads in parts as if it were written by Grandpa Simpson, and the book apparently skipped the editing stage as many passages are poorly organized and unclear. For example, in the middle of a chapter on Jackie Robinson, a random sentence about Gil Hodges’ wedding is inserted for no apparent reason. On a much larger scale, the chapters are also not arranged in any coherent manner. Allen does not even attempt to follow the season chronologically and the players are not introduced in order of importance, with the obvious exception of pairing pitcher Johnny Podres with the section about the World Series. Otherwise, role players are interspersed with All-Stars

While the target audience is likely the elderly and members of the baby-boomer generation who are old enough to remember when the Dodgers played in Brooklyn, this book likely fails to offer even enough substance to keep reading. After all, pretty much the entire book could be accumulated by watching just twenty minutes of Ken Burns’ documentary or other common baseball material. If a person born over a quarter-century after the series had already managed to know all of the stories then a new book really fails to serve any purpose whatsoever.

Sadly, fifty years from now, we can all be virtually guaranteed that shallow books like this will be published from New England looking back fondly at the 2004 Red Sox and striving to explain that everyone connected with team, all the way down to Dale Sveum, was the very best at their individual role in the entire league for that one magical season.

In short, if you are an old Brooklyn Dodgers fan, go ahead and skip this book because you likely already own a much better set of material detailing the season. If you are just a baseball fan in general, there are probably thousands of other books that will leave you with a better sense of fulfillment.