It was there that the first major league game was televised, where the batting helmet was developed, where the first walls were padded and the first outfield warning tracks laid down and-with the arrival of Jackie Robinson, it is where the color line was broken. These men were essential to the evolution of baseball, especially in their home of Brooklyn's Ebbets Field. Four men helped to change the sport as America knew it: Branch Rickey, Larry MacPhail, Jackie Robinson and Pete Reiser. The Brooklyn Dodgers In The 1940s by Rudy MarzanoÄĢefore the rise of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s, baseball was a game of white men, cloth caps and concrete walls. Roger Kahn, who covered that team for the New York Herald Tribune, makes understandable humans of his heroes as he chronicles the dreams and exploits of their young lives, beautifully intertwining them with his own, then recounts how so many of those sweet dreams curdled as the body of these once shining stars grew rusty with age and battered by experience. The team is the mid-20th-century Brooklyn Dodgers, the team of Robinson and Snyder and Hodges and Reese, a team of great triumph and historical import composed of men whose fragile lives were filled with dignity and pathos. 'At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams.' Sentimental because it holds such promise, and bittersweet because that promise is past, the first sentence of this masterpiece of sporting literature, first published in the early '70s, sets its tone. In short, it is a book fathers and sons and about the making of modern America. This is a book about what happened to Jackie, Carl Erskine, Pee Wee Reese, and the others when their glory days were behind them. It is a book by and about a sportswriter who grew up near Ebbets Field, and who had the good fortune in the 1950s to cover the Dodgers for the Herald Tribune. This is a book about young men who learned to play baseball during the 1930s and 1940s, and then went on to play for one of the most exciting major-league ball clubs ever fielded, the team that broke the colour barrier with Jackie Robinson. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Disclaimer: This site does not store any files on its server.
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