Brooklyn's Dodgers

During the 1952 World Series, a Yankee fan trying to watch the game in a Brooklyn bar was told, "Why don't you go back where you belong, Yankee lover?" "I got a right to cheer my team," the intruder responded, "this is a free country." "This ain't no free country, chum," countered the Dodger fan, "this is Brooklyn." Brooklynites loved their "Bums"--Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, and all the murderous parade of regulars who, after years of struggle, finally won the World Series in 1955. One could not live in Brooklyn and not catch its spirit of devotion to its baseball club.
In Brooklyn's Dodgers, Carl E. Prince captures the intensity and depth of the team's relationship to the community and its people in the 1950s, showing how the team extended its influence well beyond the sports arena. He captures both the racial intensity surrounding Jackie Robinson's breaking the color line, and the controversy it generated on the team, in baseball, and the nation. He takes a hard look at the Dodger's ubiquitous presence in the life of Brooklyn, the team's closeness to the children, female fans, and Brooklyn's diverse ethnicity. Prince goes on to open the door to the male culture of Brooklyn's bars, the wonderful baseball played by thousands of Brooklyn's boys on the Parade Grounds, including many who made the leap to the Dodger's minor league farm system, as those who made the ultimate jump to the majors. And Prince doesn't ignore the underside of the Dodger experience: the paternity suits and "baseball Annies," the routine baseball-related 50's sexism, and the ethnic conflicts that went with the Brooklyn territory.
In this superb volume, Carl E. Prince provides a stirring history of the depth and intensity of the relationship between Brooklyn and its Dodgers in the golden years after the Second World War.