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The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together

Michael Shapiro

Paperback | Pages: 384 pages

Rating: 4.07 | 180 Users | 18 Reviews

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Title	:	The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together
Author	:	Michael Shapiro
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 384 pages
Published	:	March 9th 2004 by Broadway (first published 2003)
Categories	:	Sports. Baseball. Nonfiction. History

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In the bestselling tradition of The Boys of Summer and Wait ‘Til Next Year, The Last Good Season is the poignant and dramatic story of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ last pennant and the forces that led to their heartbreaking departure to Los Angeles.

The 1956 Brooklyn Dodgers were one of baseball’s most storied teams, featuring such immortals as Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, Gil Hodges, and Roy Campanella. The love between team and borough was equally storied, an iron bond of loyalty forged through years of adversity and sometimes legendary ineptitude. Coming off their first World Series triumph ever in 1955, against the hated Yankees, the Dodgers would defend their crown against the Milwaukee Braves and the Cincinnati Reds in a six-month neck-and-neck contest until the last day of the playoffs, one of the most thrilling pennant races in history.

But as The Last Good Season so richly relates, all was not well under the surface. The Dodgers were an aging team at the tail end of its greatness, and Brooklyn was a place caught up in rapid and profound urban change. From a cradle of white ethnicity, it was being transformed into a racial patchwork, including Puerto Ricans and blacks from the South who flocked to Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers’ black stars. The institutions that defined the borough – the Brooklyn Eagle, the Brooklyn Navy Yard – had vanished, and only the Dodgers remained. And when their shrewd, dollar-squeezing owner, Walter O’Malley, began casting his eyes elsewhere in the absence of any viable plan to replace the aging Ebbets Field and any support from the all-powerful urban czar Robert Moses, the days of the Dodgers in Brooklyn were clearly numbered.

Michael Shapiro, a Brooklyn native, has interviewed many of the surviving participants and observers of the 1956 season, and undertaken immense archival research to bring its public and hidden drama to life. Like David Halberstam’s The Summer of ’49, The Last Good Season combines an exciting baseball story, a genuine sense of nostalgia, and hard-nosed reporting and social thinking to reveal, in a new light, a time and place we only thought we understood.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Original Title:	The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers and Their Final Pennant Race Together
ISBN:	0767906888 (ISBN13: 9780767906883)

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Ratings: 4.07 From 180 Users | 18 Reviews

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A great recounting of the Golden Age of New York City baseball, the Giants, Dodgers and Yankees all had a place in New Yorkers' hearts. The heyday of the Dodgers before moving to LA. The players were a intergral part of the neighborhood.

The last good season is the Brooklyn Dodgers next to last season in Brooklyn. It is a year after the Bums finally beat the Yankees in the 1955 World Series and their team is aging, their home ballpark decrepit, and their owner apparently losing a political battle with Robert Moses that might have kept the Dodgers in Brooklyn. In 1956 the Dodgers win the pennant on the last day of the season, take the first two from the Yankees in Brooklyn before losing three at Yankees stadium, winning game six

Surprisingly good account of the aging Dodgers in the 56 pennant race, O'Malley's eventual move to LA, and a changing Brooklyn.

Well written and researched The attention to individual stories of Brooklyn residents combined with the high-powered wrangling of politicians makes this more than a baseball book.

A real gem of a book that I came across this year. Shapiro gives some really nice up close profiles of the players, what type of men they really were. A very personal and human view of the players and the owner Walter OMally- who was no Branch Rickey. He clearly shows the powerful hand of New Yorks power broker, Robert Mosses, and reminds us that NOTHING got built in NYC without his approval. He also covers in depth the way Brooklyn was changing in the 1950s. I picked up this book for my father

As a 72 year-old lifetime Dodgers fan, I have read a lot of Dodgers books, but this is one of the very best. 1956 was the last National League championship in Brooklyn. In 1958, the Dodgers were in Los Angeles. The book does an excellent job of describing the season, each section of the book focusing on one month of the season. But the book is also about Brooklyn and the sociological dynamics and changes in that borough, and the politics involved in trying to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn.

This book covered all the bases: good baseball stories: players, games played, fans. Good politics: Robert Moses and his devious plans; good history: how the Dodgers became the Dodgers, the business of baseball; and good sociology: the team in Brooklyn and what it meant to neighborhoods and the city at large. I have a large baseball library and this one is one of the best ~ right up there with Men at Work and Wait Til Next Year.