The Last Years of the Brooklyn Dodgers
It starts out well.Author Rudy Marzano cuts straight to correcting misconceptions and debunking myths about the Dodgers and their fans, and the tone has a very faint sour top note — a whiff of simultaneous hauteur and beleaguerment, which is frequently the unattractive default manner for a student of something beautiful and worthy and also long dead, which Latin geeks like myself can recognize immediately because we’ve used it so often ourselves.Still, only a faint top note, and Marzano is in his eighties, so I don’t pay much attention to it.Until page 10.
Page 10 finds Marzano setting the cultural scene for the reader.The book concerns itself with the Dodger franchise from 1950-1957, so the author gives us a bit of background on the contemporary popularity of other sports, and the effect of TV on all sports, before widening his focus to include world events:
As baseball’s 1950 spring training season was beginning we as a nation proved again that we could fight awar with our left hand while the home front, as in World Wars I and II, went on with its usual concerns about things like sports, the stock market and a fascination with Hollywood sluts and their male counterparts.
Cue the Paulie Walnuts “…Ohhhh!” from yours truly.”Sluts”?Really, Uncle Rudy?But I decide I must have missed a signal, an indication that Marzano means the word sardonically.
Nay.After a short graf which Marzano uses to indict America’s fascination with baseball during a time of war as frivolous and unseemly — in a book about baseball — Marzano empties both barrels into 21st-century Hollywood, and our society’s guilty-by-association interest in it:
In those days in our fascination with Hollywood we at least knew that the stars and the studios were staunch allies as we went to war, making picture after picture praising our military and selling millions of war bonds to help finance the fighting.Today there’s a different breed out there on the Coast, with the 2006 Academy Awards a case in point.As Jonathan Stewart and the likes of George Clooney droned on through the telecast, there was not one mention of the war on terror, Iraq, or Afghanistan.This on an evening when thousands of our troops were fighting and dying thousand [sic] of miles away.No other nation in history has been able, as we are in our might, to mix such frivolity with the fierceness of war.
“Jonathan”?”The likes of”?Unironic nostalgia for wartime propaganda?You know, if Marzano wants to show his wrinkled ass with a Grandpa Greatest Generation rant about kids today only caring about the texting and the Emily Cyrus, he can get a blog like everybody else.I don’t care to submit to a lecture about my crappy priorities at all, much less while reading a book that is not about that subject in the first place.
It undermines his narrative authority for anyone who disagrees with either his politics or his decision to take a sidebar on them.It’s possible that his editor looked at that clattering claptrap and thought, “Well, who’s the target demo?Old dudes, who probably agree with Marzano’s simplistic generalizations anyway.”I hope that isn’t what happened, because it does a disservice to old dudes — starting with Marzano, who did seem to know a buttload about the Dodgers and to have a good grasp of narrative organization until the copy desk took a Pasadena on cutting that sanctimonious blatherskite.
Can’t tell you what happened after page 10; broke up with the book right then.On Memorial Day, no less, which no doubt makes me a godless Communist.
…”The likes of George Clooney.”I mean, really.
Tags: bad baseball writing Book Break-Up books Carl Erskine Rudy Marzano
wow. Seems to be an odd ranty tangent for a book about baseball Thanks for the tip – that’s one book I won’t be picking up.
good lord, it’s like King in EW all over again. IT’S AN ENTERTAINMENT PUBLICATION. GOD.
Poor Hollywood, they really are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Had “the likes of George Clooney” actually talked about the war, I wonder if Marzano would have instead been ranting about the disrespect shown to the men and women in uniform and what do a bunch of Hollywood liberals know and actors should stick to acting and leave the politics out of it and so on.
And “Jonathan Stewart”? Sweet Mary.
I can’t actually think of anyone I would throw into the same category as George Clooney. He’s in a class all his own (and I do mean class). But then I really likes George Clooney, so put me down for godless Communist too.
Yeah! I miss the Hollywood of the 1950s too! You know who had some good ideas? That Joey McCarthy! High five!
Thanks for the heads up because I saw this book online and seriously considered buying it. Of course, he doesn’t seem to mention WHY we’re at war in Iraq in his book or address any of the assery surrounding that decision. Exactly how do “Jonathan” and his Academy Awards presentation show disrespect for the troops? I really get steamed when I’m primed to enjoy a topic from someone who might actually have something interesting to offer, but instead hits me on the side of the head with this kind of nonsense. Yet another disappointing baseball book, I guess. “…Hollywood sluts and their male counterpart.” Who talks like that?
I am new to baseball – as in I was all about football and hockey and nothing else until very recently, not that I’m new to planet earth or anything – and I would have read this as part of my education. Guess not.
Please don’t talk about the outside world in front of Uncle Rudy. We don’t want his blood all angried up, now do we? I can imagine Clooney hooting with laughter at “the likes of George Clooney.”
BLATHERSKITE!!!!!
“Hollywood sluts”? Yeah, that’s where I would throw the book across the room.
@Jenn – off-topic, but: another hater of “the pop of King”? Please join my club! I made jackets!
Marzano uses to indict America’s fascination with baseball during a time of war as frivolous and unseemly
This made me laugh out loud. Because obviously, for the entire four and a bit years that the US was fighting in WW2 the entire population would be focused only, solely, intently on their soldiers and not seeking some mental relief and normality away from the stress of the situation at all.
It’s like those English, who had a football league going the entire time of WW2. Frivolous and unseemly, obviously. And they went to the pictures and theatre too! During the Blitz even! Flibbertigibberts!
“…”The likes of George Clooney.” I mean, really.”
hee. I love that you sound like my liberal 70s grandmother.
Also blatherskite and Jonathan Stewart have now been added to my vocabulary. :)
It’s a little known fact that the Hollywood Sluts were a short-lived Pacific Coast League team that predated the Hollywood Stars.
Ohhhhh, okay. And their male counterparts were actually the Mail Counterparts, a post-office semi-pro team. Heh.
Rudy Marzano and the Hollywood Sluts; sounds like a good name for a ska band.
My grandfather lived on the West Coast during the period in question, and he had no patience for those wishy-washy people who claimed to like both the Hollywood Sluts *and* the Mail Counterparts. You had to pick a side, and he was a Sluts man through and through. He loved to tell the story of the time the Counterparts’ mascot, Postman Pete, was clowning around directly in his line of sight during a tense pitchers’ duel, and he yelled, “I don’t think you’re all that swell, you fathead!” Just minutes later, with one out, the top of the Sluts’ batting order broke the 1-1 tie and won the game on a triple and a sac fly. Of course, this led to the predictable puns about the Mail Counterparts’ ace, Seamus Proctor, being “licked” and so on.
What a rivalry it was. I wish someone would write a book about *that*.
(Sorry. It has been nearly two months, and I still can’t get the phrase “Hollywood sluts and their male counterparts” out of my head. And I didn’t even read the book. I’m afraid I’m going to tell my brother about this, thereby ensuring it will be shoehorned into every other conversation we have until one of us is dead.)
I wish you all knew your facts before stating them…