Roger Kahn - The Boys of Summer

I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils.

D YLAN T HOMAS

At a point in life when one is through with boyhood, but has not yet discovered how to be a man, it was my fortune to travel with the most marvelously appealing of teams. During the early 1950s the Jackie Robinson Brooklyn Dodgers were outspoken, opinionated, bigoted, tolerant, black, white, open, passionate: in short, a fascinating mix of vigorous men. They were not, however, the most successful team in baseball.

During four consecutive years they entered autumn full of hope and found catastrophe. Twice they lost pennants in the concluding inning of the concluding game of a season. Twice they won pennants and lost the World Series to the New York Yankees. These narrow setbacks did not proceed, as some suggested, from failings of courage or of character. The Dodgers were simply unfortunateit is dreamstuff that luck plays everyone the sameand, not to become obsessively technical, they lacked the kind of pitching that makes victory sure. In the next decade, a weaker Dodger team, rallying around Sandy Koufax, won the World Series twice.

But I mean to be less concerned with curve balls than with the lure of the team. Ebbets Field was a narrow cockpit, built of brick and iron and concrete, alongside a steep cobblestone slope of Bedford Avenue. Two tiers of grandstand pressed the playing area from three sides, and in thousands of seats fans could hear a ball players chatter, notice details of a ball players gait and, at a time when television had not yet assaulted illusion with the Zoomar lens, you could see, you could actually see, the actual expression on the actual face of an actual major leaguer as he played. You could know what he was like!

I start in toward the bench, holding the ball now with the five fingers of my bare left hand, and when I get to the infieldhaving come down hard with one foot on the bag at second baseI shoot it, with just a flick of the wrist, gently at the opposing teams shortstop as he comes trotting out onto the field, and without breaking stride, go loping in all the way, shoulders shifting, head hanging, a touch pigeon-toed, my knees coming slowly up and down in an altogether brilliant imitation of The Duke. Philip Roth as Alexander Portnoy as Duke Snider. In the intimacy of Ebbets Field it was a short trip from the grandstand to the fantasy that you were in the game.

My years with the Dodgers were 1952 and 1953, two seasons in which they lost the World Series to the Yankees. You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in life as becomingly as leaving it. A whole country was stirred by the high deeds and thwarted longings of The Duke, Preacher, Pee Wee, Skoonj and the rest. The team was awesomely good and yet defeated. Their skills lifted everymans spirit and their defeat joined them with everymans existence, a national team, with a country in thrall, irresistible and unable to beat the Yankees.

Baseball writers develop a great attachment for the Brooklyn club if long exposed, Stanley Woodward, an extraordinary sports editor, complained in 1949.

This was so in the days of Uncle Wilbert Robinson [1920] and it is so now. We found it advisable [on the New York Herald Tribune] to shift Brooklyn writers frequently. If we hadnt, we would have had on our hands a member of the Brooklyn baseball club, rather than a newspaper reporter. The transpontine madness seems to affect all baseball writers, no matter how sensible they outwardly seem. You must watch a Brooklyn writer for symptoms and, before they become virulent, shift him to the Yankees or to tennis or golf.

By the time Woodward was writing, the concept of the Dodgers as appealing incompetentsDem Bums in a persistent poor jokewas dying. Research suggests that when they were incompetent, the Dodgers appealed as a conversation piece, but not as an entertainment. I remember a succession of mots about a shortstop named Lonny Frey, fl. c. 1935, who made more than fifty errors in one season. People said, Theres an infielder with only one weakness. Batted balls. Everyone laughed, but few chose to pay to see Frey fumble. Attendance was so poor that by the late 1930s the Dodgers, a chronic second division team, to quote the sportswriters, had passed from family ownership to the Brooklyn Trust Company. It took a succession of winning teams, with dependable shortstops named Durocher and Reese, to rescue the franchise from receivership.

Accents echo in the phrase Brooklyn Dodgers. The words strike each other pleasantly, if not poetically, suggesting a good-humored bumping about. You get an altogether different sense from other nicknames. The Brooklyn Astros would skate in the Roller Derby. The Brooklyn Tigers would play football in a stony sandlot. The Brooklyn Braves would be an all-black schoolyard basketball team in 1945. The Brooklyn Yankees will not penetrate the consciousness. It is an antiphrase, like the Roman Greeks.

As far as anyone knows, the nickname proceeded from benign absurdity. Brooklyn, being flat, extensive and populous, was an early stronghold of the trolley car. Enter absurdity. To survive in Brooklyn one had to be a dodger of trolleys. After several unfortunate experiments in nomenclature, the Brooklyn National League Baseball Team became the Dodgers during the 1920s, and the nickname endured after polluting buses had come and the last Brooklyn trolley had been shipped from Vanderbilt Avenue to Karachi.

Brooklyn is not an inherently funny word, although the old Brooklyn accent, in which one pronounced oil as earl and earl as oil, was amusing. The native ground might be enunciated Bvooklyn and thirty was a phonetists Armageddon. It could be tirdy, toidy, dirty, doity, tirty, toity, dirdy or doidy. But dialect, all dialect, Brooklyn, Boston, German, Jewish, British, Russian, Italian dialect, is the stuff of easy rough humor. Have you ever heard a Georgia belle insert four question marks into a declarative paragraph? Ah went to Rollins? Thats in Florida? South of heah? An real pretty? When a Georgia girl says no, she asks a question.

The lingering sense of Brooklyn as a land of boundless mirth with baseball obbligato was the creation of certain screen writers and comedians. Working for a living, they synthesized that Brooklyn. In one old patriotic movie, Bing Crosby defends the American flag against a cynic by asking others to say what Old Glory stands for. A Southerner talks of red clay and pine trees. A Westerner describes sunset in the Rocky Mountains. But it is a Brooklynite who carries the back lot at Paramount Pictures. His speech begins with the apothegm, Hey, Mac. Ever see steam comin out a sewer in Flatbush? As if that were not enough, can anyone forget William Bendix dying happy in a mangrove swamp? Just before a Japanese machine gunner cut him in two, Bendix had heard by shortwave that the Dodgers scored four in the ninth. Requiescat in pace. Winning pitcher: Gregg (7 and 5).

The Brooklyn of reality, where one Harold Dana Gregg pitched inconsistently for five seasons, suffered a wartime disaffection from baseball. Selective Service hit the Dodgers particularly hard and the 1944 team finished seventh. At about the time screenwriters were conceiving other, yet more heroic deaths for Baseball Bill Bendix, genuine Dodger fans sang parodies of the soldiers song, Bless Em All. In Brooklyn, the words went, Lose em all. That was the darkness before the sunburst of peace and the great Jackie Robinson team.