TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

I’ve wanted to pick up and read a couple of Dodger/Giant history books for a while now. I’d been waiting to read about one as a reference in some other book but it hasn’t come up. So, I just picked one at random. I went with Brooklyn’s Dodgers by Carl E. Prince.

In the future, I need to be careful not to pick up a book by and for sociologists (I still love you Mr. and Ms. The Big Show) when what I want is a history book.

This is one of the few books that I actually gave up on. If you’re the type of baseball fan that finds baseball books by statisticians to be snooty and superior, you’d be blown away by the general snootiness and superiority of the author. Keep in mind, I like stat books and I thought the author was snooty. There were two and a half interesting chapters. The Jackie Robinson chapter spoke to how the other players and the borough accepted Robinson and how management dealt with those who didn’t (Hint: lots of trades with the Cardinals). The second explored the Dodgers’ and the women of Brooklyn. Surprisingly, it wasn’t about young Dodger players mowing through the daughters of Brooklyn. It more dealt with Walter O’Malley and Branch Rickey being amongst the first owners in baseball to reach out to women in the surrounding neighborhood to fill empty seats during day games. They were the first owners in baseball to realize the income potential in women’s afternoon free time and how they went about overcoming stereotypes about women who hung out at ballparks. The half chapter of interest was about the reserve clause. It included the “indentured servitude” speech that accompanies all stories about the reserve clause, but also outlined how the “overgrown boys playing a game” stereotype came about. It was something the owners actively spread through the papers to keep player salaries down. “Why should we pay these guys a lot of money when they’re just boys playing a game?” I’d never thought of that before.

Unfortunately, there were other chapters. Specifically, the parts talking about the macho male culture of Brooklyn and bars as they relate to baseball fans. Much like the “this is a lot of paper to tell me we need clean water” Sprint firefighter commercial, Prince spent an awful lot of paper to tell me that guys who didn’t have TV went to bars to watch or listen to baseball games, sometimes would get in to fights with fans of the other New York teams, and that baseball teams do a lot of posturing toward each other to throw opponents off their game. I just summed up four chapters in two sentences.

I did, however, take two things away that I look forward to seeing more of in future books. First, had the Dodger’s never left Brooklyn, their fans would be as annoying as Red Sox fans. Boston has this provincial “if you weren’t born here three generations ago and you don’t like the Sox, you’re not worth anything.” Brooklyn natives are like this, too, AND have accents that grate on outsiders. Second, the hatred between Dodger fans and Yankee fans would be on the order of the hatred between the White Sox and the Cubs. It would represent everything from borough pride to income levels — white collar vs. blue collar and everything in between. Extending that, the idea of having two teams in the same division in the same city is mind-blowingly awesome. If the Dodgers and Yankees hated each other and they only met maybe once a year, then the Dodgers/Giants rivalry, while getting much less press, must have been great. I can’t even imagine the extra bile and hatred that would exist between Brooklyn and Manhattan if they had a sports feud with each other. I know the Dodgers and Giants carried their rivalry all the way out to the west coast… what it must have been like when they were separated by 13 miles instead of 400 must have been something to behold.

I need to find books on the Dodgers not like this one. Strongest recommendation to avoid.