The Team That Forever Changed Baseball and America: The 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers

by Lyle Spatz, Maurice Bouchard (Editor), Leonard Levin (Editor)

Of all the teams in the annals of baseball, only a select few can lay claim to historic significance. One of those teams is the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers, the first racially integrated Major League team of the twentieth century. The addition of Jackie Robinson to its roster changed not only baseball but also the nation. Yet Robinson was just one member of that memorable club, which included Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, Pete Reiser, Duke Snider, Eddie Stanky, Arky Vaughan, and Dixie Walker. Also present was a quartet of baseball’s most unforgettable co-owners Branch Rickey and Walter O’Malley, suspended manager Leo Durocher, and radio announcer Red Barber.


This book is the first to offer biographies of everyone on that incomparable team as well as accounts of the moments and events that marked the Dodgers’ 1947 Commissioner Happy Chandler suspending Durocher, Rickey luring his old friend Burt Shotton out of retirement to replace Durocher, and brilliant outfielder Reiser being sidelined after running into a fence. In spite of all this, the Dodgers went on to win the National League pennant over the heavily favored St. Louis Cardinals. And of course, there is the biggest story of the season, where history and biography Jackie Robinson, who overcame widespread hostility to become Rookie of the Year—and to help the Dodgers set single-game attendance records in cities around the National League.

Genres: Baseball

400 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2012

Reviews

[RICK "SHAQ" GOLDSTEIN]

RICK “SHAQ” GOLDSTEIN SAYS: ”A 4-STAR-BOOK… A 5-STAR-ENCYLOPEDIA MADE FOR BROOKLYN DODGER & OLD-SCHOOL BASEBALL FANS”
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As always… I write my reviews in such a way as to present to a potential purchaser the type of information and feelings that I myself would hope to get reading someone else’s review before I purchased a book. So the first thing I will take my own literary license with is that I consider this ”book” to be more of an encyclopedia than what most everyday people would consider a “book”. This encyclopedia of the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers which of course was the year and team that Jackie Robinson broke the modern color line in Major League Baseball with, and the title of the book is one-thousand-percent correct when it says the Brooklyn Dodgers… *FOREVER CHANGED BASEBALL AND AMERICA!*

As a born and raised Brooklyn Dodger fan… with parents that made the lovable “Bums” part of my everyday life… and whom to this day I say that my Mother (let alone my Father) knew more about the Dodgers and baseball than anyone else in my neighborhood. I bought this book about seven months ago and never finished it completely till now. During this period I did read and complete about twenty other books. Why you may ask? Aaah… well here’s why I addressed the problem of describing this as more of an encyclopedia than a book. First of all for an old-time-old-school… not only Brooklyn Dodger… but an any team old-school-baseball fanatic… as interesting as each short biographical story was on each player… each player’s story ended much like an extra-large baseball card might end. In other words… it ended… and then another player with no continuing story or saga tied to the end of the prior player began. So in essence that’s why I have gone to the detail I have to give it a separate rating as a book AND as an encyclopedia. And I feel I’m not alone in stating that a normal person wouldn’t sit down and start reading an encyclopedia from start to finish. So I read other books during the time period I read more and more of this encyclopedia.

If that’s understood… let me now tell you about this encyclopedia of the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers. The author’s should be highly complimented on their research. The detail from birth to death (if now deceased) is amazing! The author’s include every single Dodger that even played one game during this historical season. It also is very sad in a way… because as you get to know even the mostly unknown members of this team… due to 1947 being so long ago… most of the player’s story end with their death. So just after getting to know them intimately… you literally have to say goodbye to them… as the old saying goes “We hardly knew ye”.

There are also almost daily update summary pages of the season… and detailed reporting on the 1947 World Series… reviews of all the major awards for the season including MVP… Rookie Of The Year… Top Pitcher… stories on the Dodger broadcasters, advertisers and owners.

The quotes regarding some of the greats… not so greats… and hanger-on’s… are priceless. There are so many… so it’s hard to pick one or two to tempt a potential reader… but two that I’d love to share with you are regarding “Pistol Pete” Reiser… who might have been the greatest player to ever grace a ball field. Unfortunately **PISTOL-PETE-NEVER-MET-A-WALL-HE-DIDN’T-LIKE!**

Why would I say he may have been the greatest player who ever played? “Before his multitude of injuries, “teammate (and future Hall Of Famer) Billy Herman-who had played with hall Of Famers Chuck Klein and Hack Wilson-said Pete Reiser was the greatest player he had ever seen on a baseball field.” If that isn’t enough for you… how about Hall Of Fame Manager Leo Durocher who also managed a pretty good ballplayer by the name of Willie Mays who said: “Pete Reiser might have been the best ballplayer I ever saw.” In addition to Reiser once having last rites performed on him while he lay on the field. Here is a quote from this encyclopedia about Reiser’s injuries in his career:

“THERE IS NO OFFICIAL COUNT OF Reiser’s baseball injuries, but the best guess reads something like a dozen collisions with unpadded fences, five skull fractures (though he claimed only four), a chronically dislocated shoulder, two broken ankles, damaged knee cartilage, torn muscles in his left leg, and two beaning’s in the days before batting helmets. As a player HE WAS CARRIED OFF THE FIELD ON A STRETCHER ELEVEN TIMES-SIX TIMES CONSCIOUS, FIVE TIMES NOT.”

This is the type of priceless anecdotes that pepper this wonderful encyclopedia. If you get it… take your time and enjoy it!

[Logan]

Because of my interest in the racial integration of Major League Baseball, I bought a couple of used books to help me quench my thirst for more knowledge. This one piqued my interest because it was specifically about the the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers, the team Jackie Robinson played for when he crossed the color line. What I realized only too late was that “The Team that Forever Changed Baseball and America” is closer to an encyclopedia than a nonfiction book (and not just because of its physical size and the number of words on a page). It contains biographical chapters about the players and coaches from the history-making team, along with a few essays describing the historic moments from that team’s season. Everything in it can be found online for free, on the Society of American Baseball Research’s website. Don’t get me wrong, SABR is a fantastic resource for anyone looking for well-researched baseball information, but the way this book is edited made it feel really disjointed. There’s no connective tissue, because the chapters were all written individually, by separate authors. They’re written to be read alone, without having to read the others. Therefore, a lot of them cover certain topics over and over again. They’re not building on each other. I wanted to read a book about the 1947 Dodgers, but this book is about entire lifetimes of players. Their biographies treat 1947 as just another year. I didn’t feel like I learned a lot about what I wanted to learn about. The biography of Jackie Robinson is a well-written introduction, but it’s only 10 pages long. Robinson could (and should, and probably does) have volumes written about him, but this is only slightly better than reading Wikipedia. The other biographies are even shorter. And since they don’t make connections to each other, my brain didn’t really get much from the chapters. If anything, reading a biography of a player who appeared in three games in 1947 is more of a distraction than an asset. I’m not sure if this concept works as a book. It’s too loosely tied together. It’s not telling a story. I guess, if I have to pay it a compliment, it taught me what the typical life of a mid-century baseball man looked like. Most of the biographies have a familiar pattern of going back and forth between the minors and the majors, between playing and managing. A lot of these guys had a lot of different jobs in baseball, and it was interesting—after reading so many biographies—to see those patterns. It’s not what I wanted to learn, but at least it’s something. It wasn’t entirely a waste of time, but I’ll have to look elsewhere for the more specific information I craved.

5/10