So I just finished Michael D’Antonio’s Forever Blue, a look at the life of Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, who moved the team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles and made a major impact on the game of baseball.
THE GAME: First, I’m not a Dodgers fan. I grew up in the Bay Area, where you were expected to choose between the San Francisco Giants or the Oakland Athletics. The Dodgers were the “hated ones” in my neighborhood because 1) they were the Dodgers and an ever-present thorn in the Giants’ side, and 2) because they were from Southern California. (For NorCal residents, all things SoCal are evil and not to be trusted.) I got into baseball during the Tommy Lasorda era, so I heard all about the Dodgers, and did my best to root on my A’s.
As a kid, I only took in a few games in person. I recall a trip to Candlestick Park with my stepdad to see the Giants play (possibly against the Dodgers but more likely the Reds) and we sat on the third-base line and I was very concerned about catching a foul ball in that far left corner of the stadium. I think I went to the Oakland Coliseum once but I may have dreamt that. I do recall being very in tune with baseball and the teams during the 1989 World Series, when Oakland’s eventually victory was interrupted by at major earthquake. (My mother had been on a section of freeway that had collapsed only hours before the quake and she, my sisters and I delivered papers for my route the next morning in the eerie silence.)
The strike and my general dissatisfaction with baseball turned me away from the game for a few years. When I moved up to Washington, I reconnected with the game and my true hometown team, the Seattle Mariners, and found enjoyment in the simplicity of it all. I moved up there right before Seattle’s amazing 116-game win season and worked on the sports desk at the Yakima newspaper, so I had to stay in the know about the team and the game. (Yes, I got PAID to read about sports all day. What a life.) It also helped that my wife was a fan of the game — though the teams she supports changes from year to year — and baseball was a way for me as an adult to connect with my stepdad and have something in common.
It’s my dad’s love of the Giants that got me interested in Forever Blue. Though I’m an American League West fan, I try to stay on top of what the National League is doing so my dad and I have something to talk about when I call home on Sundays. (He does the same for me.) The Dodgers’ success (more specifically, their success over the Giants) is a source of contention and comment and criticism. It’s good conversation fodder and I like that my dad and I have common enemies in the Dodgers and the Yankees.
THE BOOK: I’ve read countless articles and magazine cover stories on sports, the games and the participants. I could care less about the day-to-day stuff, the regular standings or the stock quotes coaches and players seem to always give whether they win or lose. I’ve grown more fascinated with the behind the scenes stuff, the things you don’t see on TV or hear on the radio or read in the game report. So when I was meandering through my local library I spotted the O’Malley biography and got curious. I like to keep a couple of books going at one time and I found myself in a spot where I was really reading anything, so I figured I’d give it a shot.
I’ve always been curious to know how the Dodgers went from Brooklyn to L.A. I knew there had been a team in Brooklyn, the “Bums,” who’d been moved to L.A. decades ago. I grew up in the Expansion Era, so teams moving or popping up in different parts of the country is foreign to me. What I didn’t know is how things got to the point where the Dodgers HAD to move out West or who was involved.
D’Antonio does a great job at presenting a good amount of historical perspective as he tells the life of Walter O’Malley. There’s a great deal in the book about New York during the first half of the 20th century and a good deal about baseball as a business first, an entertainment product second, and finally, the game. It’s a solid read for anyone who likes baseball, history or biographies, and I highly recommend it. (Though, there are chunks of text and comments he tends to repeat too often.) There’s also some nice summary of Los Angeles during the 1950s and 1960s, how Hollywood and city politics shaped baseball’s future, and some intriguing notes about players like Jackie Robinson. I must praise D’Antonio for taking a more journalistic approach to the subject, but allowing for his own “love of the game” to slip through now and then. It’s stoked my own heart fires as Opening Day approaches.
Now, I’m not a Dodgers fan, and this book didn’t convert me. I have much more respect for the history of the team and the people who worked — through trial and error — to make the franchise (and the game) what it is today. I’ll still root against them whenever they play my dad’s Giants or make the occasional interleague trip to Seattle or Oakland.
But Forever Blue gave me a push toward reading more about the history of the game (I’m enjoying Jim Bouton’s “Ball Four” right now) and appreciating what the sport and people have meant to fans and each other. It’s easy to get disgusted with billionaires and millionaires squabbling over money most of us will never seen (and be the ones to willingly hand over), so books like these remind me it’s just a game, a game that’ll live on long after the professional leagues are gone or have morphed into something else.
