Brooklyn's Dodgers

All Brooklynites loved their "Bums" - Branch Rickey, Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, all the parade of regulars who, after years of struggle, finally won the World Series in 1955. One could not live in Brooklyn and not catch the spirit of its devotion to its baseball clubs. This works aims to capture 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 Dodger's presence smoothed the rough edges of the ghetto conflict always present in the life of Brooklyn. The Dodger-inspired baseball programme at the Parade Grounds provided a path for the boys that occasionally led to the prestigious "Dodger Rookie Team": and sometimes to Ebbets Field itself. This work 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 owner's manipulation of Dodger male egos, opponents' race-baiting and the macho bravado of the team. 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 a sad day in Brooklyn's history. 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.