The Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s »

"Before the rise of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s, baseball was a game of white men, cloth caps and concrete walls. Four men helped to change the sport as America knew it: Branch Rickey, Larry MacPhail, Jackie Robinson and Pete Reiser." These men were essential to the evolution of base ball, especially in their home of Brooklyn's Ebbets Field. It was there that the first major league game was televised, the batting helmet was developed, the first walls were padded and the first outfield warning tracks laid down and - with the arrival of Jackie Robinson - the color line was broken. This history explores how a crucial decade of Dodger accomplishments transformed American baseball.

Library Journal

The 1940s was a good decade for the Brooklyn Dodgers: The team won three National League pennants and placed second and third three times each. But while they were winning, the Dodgers were also innovating, introducing protective batting helmets, padding the Ebbets Field outfield walls, constructing a nearby warning track (in an attempt to save the career-and quite possibly the life-of inveterate wall-crasher Pete Reiser), and introducing Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play major league baseball. Pulitzer Prize-winning sportswriter Marzano tells the story of this decade in a chatty style, almost like an old-timer recounting the glory days to his grandchildren, but he tends to digress from the Dodgers and onto other tidbits of baseball lore. The book is carefully researched, however, containing some 450 footnotes. Unfortunately, a good share of that scholarly sheen is jeopardized by the author's opinionated nature. Useful as a history of the Dodgers in this era but necessary only to larger public libraries.-Jim Burns, Jacksonville P.L., FL Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.