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
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.”