I read when I fly. If I don't fly, I don't read. I wish this wasn't the case, but it/
So, I recently flew. And I read. I am certainly glad I had.
Truth be told, "Forever Blue" has been sitting on my book shelf since 2009 when it first came out in hard cover. The photo above is of the paperback edition. It took me five years to get to it. And the main reason I tackled it now is because I am trying to bone up on Dodger history for business purposes. Hopefully, I will explain that some day very soon.
Putting all the apologies aside, "Forever Blue" by Michael D'Antonio is terrific. You must be a good baseball book if you actually can teach yours truly a few things. Yes, I was pleasantly surprised by some of the factoids I gleaned from this work, which is essentially a history of the O'Malley family who owned the Brooklyn Dodgers and later moved them to Los Angeles.
Mention the latter to anybody from Brooklyn and the venom pours out against Walter O'Malley. There's the famous gag. You have a gun with two bullets and you're in a room with Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Walter O'Malley. Who do you shoot?
Answer from a Brookynite: You shoot O'Malley twice.
Forget the fact that Brooklyn in the 50s was dying. Ignore the notion that Ebbets Field was falling apart by the concrete junk. Discount the news that most of the Dodger fans were fleeing the borough themselves for the safer and---yes, gang---whiter environs of Long Island. Nope, O'Malley left Brooklyn for Los Angeles and that's akin to drowning a dozen puppies.
D'Antonio does a top notch job of providing an unbiased and fair account of the Walter O'Malley era with the Dodger franchise. You get the good. You get the bad. You see the rainbows. You see the warts. Like it or not, the man himself was a visionary. After all, he wanted to erect a new Ebbets Field at a spot where Brooklyn has finally turned the corner in 2014. It's the location of the new Barclay Center and, years later, we see that O'Malley was right all along.
Indeed, "Forever Blue", while dealing with baseball, is not a game-by-game account of the Dodgers. It delves more into the inner workings of a baseball organization. The stadium maintenance. The TV and radio rights. The marketing of a brand. Things I wanted to know right now. And got it all, thanks to Michael D'Antonio.
And, oh, yes, the aforementioned things I never knew?
I never realized that, back in the late 40s and 50s, a partial owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers was Pfizer Pharmaceuticals which was based in Brooklyn at the time.
When Walter O'Malley was looking for a new partial owner, he almost closed a deal with...of all people...Joseph Kennedy. Had that happened, Papa would have installed his son Jack as president of the Brooklyn Dodgers. That astounded me. And, had it actually come to pass, that might have been the type of presidency role that doesn't put you in a limousine cruising downtown Dallas.
D'Antonio is also bold enough to give us an accurate description of Jackie Robinson. PS, he wasn't necessarily the beloved icon that has been depicted over the years. As the years wore on with the Dodgers, Jackie was a bit of a dirtbag. Surly and not necessarily the ideal teammate. So, there.
If you want to experience a great history set in the baseball world, "Forever Blue" is ideal. Had I only known what a great read it was when I originally bought it five years.
Dinner last night: Beef and vegetable stir fry.
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