”DiMaggio's grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a symbol of the limitless potential of the human individual. That an Italian immigrant, a fisherman's son, could catch fly balls the way Keats wrote poetry or Beethoven wrote sonatas was more than just a popular marvel. It was proof positive that democracy was real. On the baseball diamond, if nowhere else, America was truly a classless society. DiMaggio's grace embodied the democracy of our dreams.” Joltin’ Joe DiMaggioJoe DiMaggio was 6’2”, a big man, but a man graced with natural elegance. Off the field he dressed well, reinforcing that image of cool, calm, and collected. As one of his dates was surprised to discover she was not the focus of the male attention in the room. ”Dining with Joe DiMaggio, Ms. Cosgrove felt, gave her a remarkable insight into the male animal. The entire restaurant came to a halt for two hours. The chair of every man was angled so that its occupant could keep an eye on her date.”It was a nation wide man crush before we knew what to call it.On the other side of the coin was Ted Williams. As much as the press loved Joe DiMaggio they hated Ted Williams. The feeling was mutual. DiMaggio was the best player of his era, but no one would question who was the best hitter. Williams was the first to really look at hitting as a science. ”Nothing was left to chance. If he was batting and a cloud passed over, he would step out of the batter’s box and fidget until the light was just a little better. He honed his bats at night, working a bone against them to make the fibers harder. He was the first to combine olive oil and rosin in order to get a better grip on the bat. He learned to gradually decrease the weight of his bats as the summer wore on and fatigue set in.” Ted WilliamsTed Williams was a throwback to another era. ”As he aged he became even more handsome, his face now leathery. he was crusty, outspoken, and unbending, a frontier man in the modern age, the real John Wayne. ‘He is not a man for this age,’ his old friend and teammate Birdie Tebbetts said of him. ‘The only place I would put him, the only place he’d be at home, is the Alamo.’”DiMaggio was the Yankee Clipper and Williams was a Boston Red Sox. In the summer of 1949 those two teams were squaring off to see who would go to the World Series. To make things even more interesting Joe’s little brother Dom played for the Red Sox. His whole career was spent in the shadow of his brother, but he was one hell of a player in his own right. The Red Sox got down early in the season, at one point by eleven games, but then clawed their way back into the race. Hollywood couldn’t have drawn up the ending any better. The Yankees and Red Soxs met in a final series at the very end of the season to determine who was going to win the pennantIt was very simple…win or go home.David Halberstam gives us an inside look, not only at the stars, but each significant player involved in this rivalry in 1949. Most of the players came from very humble origins. They all dealt with the stresses of the game different. Ellis Kinder, the great Red Sox pitcher was probably my favorite to read about. The night before he was supposed to pitch he’d stay up all night drinking and chasing women. He’d pour coffee into himself on game day to get ready to pitch. It is amazing to me that he could abuse himself that much and still be one of the premier pitchers in the league. He wasn’t alone, other players as well partied on their off hours as hard as they played on the field. Ellis KinderYogi Berra was the first ball player to get an agent. A man by the name of Frank Scott noticed that Yogi was being paid in watches instead of money whenever he would give speeches or attend events. Scott saw an opportunity for Yogi to make a lot more money and for Frank Scott to be paid for making the arrangements. The dealings between management and players was also beginning to change. The owners took advantage of the players to the point that it made a Union not only viable, but necessary. It made Tommy Henrich, who spent his whole career with the Yankees, uneasy watching this transition. Certainly some of the charm of the game was lost when players went from being blue collar workers to being millionaires. I feel very fortunate to own this baseball card of Yogi Berra. It was one of my Dad’s.This is also the era when owners were struggling with the allure of radio and television. There was fear that it would significantly reduce stadium attendance. Little did the owners know the revenue that would be eventually generated from, especially, television contracts. I’ve been a long suffering Kansas City Royals fan, but last season ended the long playoff drought that had extended back to 1985. The 2014 season was so exciting it was almost worth the wait. I didn’t see these young ball players as millionaires, maybe because they didn’t act like millionaires. They played like kids with exuberance and joy that was contagious to the crowds in the ballparks and the viewers on television. The way they played, referred to as small ball, was like seeing baseball as it was played many decades ago. From the days when players used to run out every play at first; or they would steal without giving a thought to the cost to their bodies; or lay out for spectacular catches in the outfield. These young men from the Royals played last season seemingly unaware of the stats sheet. It was all about sacrifice, hard work, and driving other teams crazy. I have been seeing more spectacular plays this year than I ever remember seeing before and not just from the Royals. It was as if the Royals woke the whole league up and reminded everyone of when a baseball game was as magical as anything Walt Disney ever dreamed up. Eric Hosmer the talented very young first baseman for the Kansas City Royals. Here them ROAR indeed.If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
An anecdotal rendering of the exciting pennant race between the Red Sox and the Yankees in 1949. Although technically it is not, this almost acts as a prequel to Halberstam's October 1964 about the World Series that year between the Cardinals and the Yankees. Halberstam writes about the relationship (very one-sided in those days) between the owners and the players. One really comes to realize just how horrible owners and general managers (and sometimes managers) treated the players. The players were used up until most of the usefulness was squeezed out of them, then they were unceremoniously released, or sent to some backwater minor league farm club. While things have certainly swung completely around today and now feature the prima donna millionaire athletes who are so out of touch with the common person and society that they have no sense of direction, back then the owners dominated the players in all respects. It is almost a justification for the flip-flop that has occurred. Or, if not that, at least one can say that the owners got what was coming to them.He also writes about the coming influence of TV, and how this new medium had just begun to start changing the game, although no one as yet really knew it. This, of course, helped lead to the players gaining the upper hand over the owners. Halberstam, being a former newspaper reporter himself, focuses much attention on the print media, and also on radio as that was then the mass means of communication used to broadcast the games. In another theme that he develops more fully in his later book, he describes the sometimes subtle and oftentimes not-so-subtle racism on the part of white owners, managers, and general managers, While Halberstam does not dwell on this, he draws an excellent conclusion that the endemic racism in both of these organizations led them to eventually fall form grace in the American League, and for the American League in general as well. The 1950s and 1960s saw NL teams such as Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis sign and develop star black athletes. Much of what Halberstam writes is based on recollections by the participants themselves. Obviously, this can lead to some of the statements being embellished, twisted, or fabricated when you factor in the passage of time and also the bravado and machismo that many of these guys possessed. Nonetheless, how else can one get such details about people, places, and events? Too bad Joe DiMaggio refused to sit for an interview. The only part of the book that I did not care for was the Epilogue: it seemed like Halberstam quickly slapped it together, as if he was trying to hurry onto his next book. He skims over the later years of some of the participants, but omits many important details (example: he makes no mention of Ted Williams' disastrous managerial career). Overall, a good baseball book that was a pleasure to read.Grade: B+
Do You like book Summer Of '49 (2006)?
My baseball reading never disappoints. It seems each baseball book is better than the last. I loved this book. My husband teases that each summer I declare that "This is the greatest baseball book I've ever read!" It is true that I adored both Bless You Boys and Last Days of Summer, and cried reading both. While I did not cry this time, I still thought the Summer of '49 is a nonfiction sports gem. Good sports writing is a fantastic art and Halberstam weaves the facts into a wonderful story. It's perfectly written.Read more: http://knowledgeiscool.blogspot.com/2...
—Eva Gogola
I had never heard of this book or the author until I saw it at a Sam's Club years ago. The price was right and I love baseball history, so I bought it and took it home. Though I enjoy nonfiction, it is slower reading for me, but this one is written so well that it went by quickly for me. Not only does it cover the players and teams from the era, but it gets into some of the people close to the game, like the radio announcers, which was sort of a fun insight into a part of the game that we don't get to experience today in the same way. It is definitely a nostalgic look at a sport and a period of time in American history that has changed dramatically in the decades since, but I think that's part of why I, and a lot of others, love baseball. The glory days and the simplicity of a time when players weren't making hundreds of millions of dollars and when "love of the game" was still a truism. Going back to some of the biggest teams, the biggest rivalries, and the best known players, this book offers a glimpse into the game as it used to be. A fun, entertaining read for baseball fans, history buffs, and nostalgia-lovers alike!
—Jessica Lave
Goddamm, But Playing Baseball Is Fun, 9 Aug 2007 "Old-time baseball players and fans love to denigrate the modern ballplayer. "Baseball today is not what it should be," one old-timer once wrote. "The players do not try to learn all the fine points of the game as in the days of old, but simply try to get by. They content themselves if they get a couple of hits every day or play an errorless game... It's positively a shame, and they are getting big money for it, too." Bill Joyce, 1916 Ballplayer 'The Golden Age of Baseball' began when players returned from the war until 1958, when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants decided to continue their rivalry in California. That time saw many of the most memorable and significant events in the game's history: in 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier; that same year, the second Yankee Dynasty began with its first of ten pennants and eight championships in a twelve-year span; in 1951, Bobby Thomson hit the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" to win the pennant for the Giants; in 1954, Willie Mays made his spectacular World Series catch; in 1956, Don Larsen pitched the only perfect game in World Series history. For those of us who are Boston Red Sox or New York Yankee fans, one of the biggest baseball rivalries in history, 'Summer of '49' explains much of the history and romance of these two teams. David Halberstam brings to us the glories, the rivalaries, the drinking, the social and personal stories of the players on both sides. The subject is the pennant race of 1949 between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox which wasn't decided until the last game of the season. Is there really any value to another book telling us what a legend Joe DiMaggio was, or what a great hitter Ted Williams was, or what a great team the Yankees were? Yes,indeedy.1949 was the perfect year, because it marked a turning point in the history of American sport, which is one reason why David Halberstam wrote this book. Baseball was the number one sport, but professional basketball and football were beginning to gain acceptance. Television was just beginning to make its mark. The impact of black ballplayers was only beginning to be felt. David Halberstam brings us the day to day spotliughts of the Red Sox and Yankees for an entire year, from the end of the 1948 season through 1949. During the summer of '49, the two teams had one of the classic pennant races of all time. The Sox struggled at the beginning, while the Yankees, took a commanding early lead. But Boston chipped away at the lead until the final day of the season, when the two teams met to decide the pennant. Sound familiar? David Halberstam reveals the characters and gives us a glimpse of baseball during The Golden Age. He interviewed almost every living member of those teams and several people on the outside--fans, broadcasters, baseball executives, writers, relatives of players--over a hundred in all. The one interview he couldn't get, was from the most important member of the Yankees: Joe DiMaggio. Each team was made up of twenty-five men, plus perhaps ten or twelve others who played a little. We are introduced to every one of them, the drinkers, womanizers, country boys, city boys, the marginal players for whom 1949 will be their only season of glory. We feel a part of the team, traveling with them between games. And at the end of the book, he tells us what has become of them. In the conclusion, David Halberstam tells us how enjoyable it was to write this book, to interview his idols, to do research that many would consider fun. "I was the envy of my male friends who shared my enthusiasm for baseball in those years. Caught up in the more mundane tasks in journalism or Wall Street or the law, they would gladly have traded jobs with me." "But probably the best reasons for Halberstam to choose 1949 were, first, that it was a terrific, dramatic pennant race between two hated rivals; and, second, perhaps most importantly, as he explains in the author's note, Halberstam was fifteen years old that summer and a devoted Yankee fan. The men he describes in his book were his heroes, and he lived and died with the fortunes of his favorite players." David Martinez David Halberstam is gone now. However, his writing will live on, and those of us who loved his writing will remember him well. What Summer of '49 does for me is to renew my love for baseball, and in particular, my love for the Boston Red Sox. Ted Williams, after reluctantly leaving the batting practice cage, once said, "Goddam, but this is fun. I could do this all day--and they pay me for it." Highly Recommended. prisrob 8-05-07
—Pris robichaud
