Brooklyn Boro

New book on LA Dodgers is perfect summer read about perfect summer game

Brooklyn BookBeat: Molly Knight’s ‘The Best Team Money Can Buy’ is Passionate, Nuanced

July 31, 2015 By Peter Stamelman Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
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When I was five and still in short pants, my father and uncle brought me to a sacred shrine in Brooklyn at the intersection of Bedford Avenue, Sullivan Place, McKeever Place and Montgomery Street. (Some say it was Flatbush, some say Crown Heights.) This holy sanctuary had been designed by an architect named Ebbets and the congregation was overseen by a high priest named O’Malley. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was to become a fervent member of the flock. (If only Robert Moses had granted Walter O’Malley’s request to build a new stadium at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic, we’d still have the Dodgers, rather than the Nets and Barclays Center. I think most Brooklynites would take that trade…. 

Reading Molly Knight’s outstanding and exceptionally entertaining new book “The Best Team Money Can Buy: The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Wild Struggle to Build a Baseball Powerhouse” had the same effect on me as eating the madeleine had on Proust. Especially since, after growing up in Brooklyn then moving, post-college to Los Angeles for my career, I have rooted for the Dodgers on both coasts and anything about them is like catnip to me. While Knight did not grow up in Brooklyn (in fact, she’s that rare breed of Angeleno whose family roots in Southern California go back to the 1800s) she is a lifelong Dodgers fan. By email she tells me, “My dad’s family is from Cleveland Ohio, but they did live in New York for a while in the early 30s. They became Brooklyn Dodgers fans then, and moved out to LA [later] in the ’30s. When the Dodgers moved out here they were all in.” 

Knight, who for eight seasons wrote about baseball for ESPN the Magazine, is not interested in a tell-all. In the same email she says, “It’s not really a sex, drugs and rock n’ roll book. ​I would hope anyone who reads the book will see I agonized over being fair.” It’s precisely this avoidance of tabloid journalism that makes “Best Team” so refreshing and readable. What the book is about is the team, the game and the turbulent 2013 season when the Dodgers made a sensational turnaround in July and August that lead to the best fifty game stretch of baseball (42-8) of any team since World War II. Of course, with vivid characters like the infuriatingly unpredictable Yasiel Puig, the constantly kvetching Matt Kemp, the talented but temperamental Hanley Ramirez (whose name would have been “Hamlet Ramirez”, if the birth certificate clerk hadn’t spelled it wrong; Ramirez’s grandmother revered Shakespeare) and the exuberant cutup Juan Uribe, the book is anything but dull. (Unlike the insufferably boring mid-’70s Dodgers, who were once described as “a bunch of off-duty cops playing a pickup game.” Having slept through many of their games, I can attest to that accuracy of that statement.) 

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Although Molly Knight may not have grown up in Brooklyn or experienced, as I did on my second Ebbets Field visit, the thrill of having Junior Gilliam push you to the diamond and snarl “Get out of my way, kid” (no cellphones to name and shame in those analog days), she does have the Dodgers’ jones, and her book is the better for it. She’s not a daily beat writer, so why should she have to camouflage her passion? Her reportage is both fair and nuanced. She even gives Puig the benefit of the doubt. 

Knight is especially lucid and evocative when writing about Clayton Kershaw, who is the centerpiece of the book’s prologue and, essentially, of the book itself. Opting for understatement over hype, she depicts a modest, but intensely competitive 27-year-old who just happens to be the best pitcher in baseball. Her account of his eerily restrained, low-key reaction upon receiving the news of his record shattering $215 million contract is, well, priceless. As is her meticulous description of Kershaw’s Zen-like pregame preparation, including three minutes of “zoning out,” sitting on the bench just staring at the ground or into space. When Mark Walter, the Dodgers’ principal owner, once tried to start up a conversation with his ace during his trancelike ritual, Kershaw “looked the man in the eye, apologized and ran.” And that was before a spring training game! 

Droll and revealing, meticulous and unashamedly partisan, “The Best Team Money Can Buy” is the perfect summer read about the perfect summer game. 

Molly Knight, doff your cap, you’ve hit a walk off home run. 


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