Baseball in Brooklyn goes back to the beginning of the sport, when a young city embraced a new game and, like missionaries, carried it to the nation. This book tells the story of that beginning and concludes with the heart-wrenching move of the franchise to the West Coast after the 1957 season. Brooklyn Dodgers carries us from the birth of baseball in the streets of Brooklyn through the decades in Flatbush when Ebbets Field was the center of the Brooklyn community. That was a time when the players lived in the neighborhoods not far from the ballpark, side by side with their followers. Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Gil Hodges, and Johnny Podres all make appearances in this exciting selection of photographs.
A large part of Brooklyn Dodgers is dedicated to those teams of the 1950s and their irrepressible fans.
After the Dodgers moved west, a joke in Brooklyn ran like this. Question: You're in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O'Malley. You have a gun with only two bullets. What do you do? Answer: Shoot O'Malley twice to make sure he stays down.
Background Information
Brooklyn occupies the west end of Long Island and before its incorporation into New York City was America's fourth largest city in the 1890 census. Jackie Robinson was a star athlete at the University of Southern California before becoming the first baseball player to break the race barrier in 1947.