Baseball Books: Two Homers

The Braves play in Gwinnett, but this is no lament. A recent

Times-Dispatch Public Square focused on a stadium in Shockoe Bottom. Today this space discusses baseball books. We endorse two new ones.

• Michael D'Antonio's Forever Blue relates "the true story of Walter O'Malley, baseball's most controversial owner, and the Dodgers of Brooklyn and Los Angeles." Revisionism is not limited to the histories of nations or to political biography. Forever Blue corrects the image of O'Malley as the villain who betrayed Brooklyn, the city's most romanticized borough. Although O'Malley was not a victim by any means, he tried to stay but Robert Moses -- New York's controversial parks director -- thwarted his plans.

O'Malley may have been not only the most controversial baseball owner but also the most consequential. The Dodgers broke the color line. By moving to California, they and the Giants truly made baseball a national pastime. Baseball seemed to mean something in those days. Blue offers insight into the politics of New York (O'Malley had Tammany ties) and in the City of Angels. D'Antonio tells a great story well.

• Michael Shapiro hits another one out of the park with Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball From Itself. The story is complicated, and we're too busy trying to save the world to relate every detail here. Shapiro takes two strands. One follows the 1960 World Series between the Yankees and the Pirates; the other follows Rickey's attempts to form the Continental League, which would have become baseball's third major. Subplots involve the American Football League, and pro football's rise to popular dominance.

Rickey comes off as a visionary, baseball's establishment as conniving, vain, and short-sighted. The Continential League proposed a business and competitive model quite similar to that perfected by the NFL. If Rickey had succeeded perhaps baseball would not have lost its grip on the national imagination. Fans with short memories (or with unpatriotic tendencies) will learn from Bottom of the Ninth about the man for whom Shea "It's a Dump, but Our Dump" Stadium was named. The opening of Ninth is as perfect as a pitch from Bob Gibson: "Later, when people spoke about the game and how it was won and what it had been like to be in the ballpark that afternoon, they spoke of the silence that came just before the end. Odd, given how things had unfolded." The photograph on the cover is worth the price of admission, too.

. . .

We have not read the biographies of Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez, but might. According to reviews, both relate sordid tales and describe a climate of corruption. Perhaps during the last years of the old century and the first years of the new, a wayward culture received the baseball it deserved. Poets, novelists, philosophers from Flatbush, and towheads from the Hollywood Hills have sung hymns to the diamond's glistening glories. We like to think that not all the tributes have been fantasies.