Vol. 2, Number 1	Spring 1999 issue

 

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Since baseball's inception, fans and statisticians have used intricate scorebooks to document every pitch, every hit, and every home run. In a sense, they are baseball's historians, giving future generations as precise an account of a baseball game as possible. Short of the Congressional Record, one would be hard-pressed to find a more precise account of anything in America's history than baseball's scorebook.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin remembers when her father taught her how to keep score of a baseball game in her intriguing memoir, Wait Till Next Year.

"I stayed at my post [near the radio], diligently recording each inning so that, when my father returned from his job . . . I could re-create for him the game he had missed . . . . As I became more experienced in my storytelling, I learned to build a dramatic story with a beginning, middle, and end. Through my knowledge, I commanded my father's undivided attention, the sign of his love. It would instill in me an early awareness of the power of narrative, which would introduce a lifetime a storytelling, fueled by the naive confidence that others would find me as entertaining as my father did."

Early in her memoir, Goodwin establishes the parallel between her obsession with the Brooklyn Dodgers and her development as a historian. The book interweaves two stories: the story of her childhood in suburban New York and the story of her obsession with the Dodgers, one of the three teams that divided the loyalty of New York's baseball fans for more than three decades.

Goodwin uses Wait Till Next Year to legitimize sports history as more than just the recollection of figures and records, remembering, for example, her first game at Ebbets Field not for the final outcome or the big hits but instead for the sights and the sounds of the park:

"There, come to earth, were the heroes of my imagination, Snider and Robinson and the powerful-looking Don Newcombe; and there were the villains-the hated 'New York Giants. . .' As opposing teams grew increasingly irate at these fans' antics, a sense of camaraderie grew among Dodger fans that made the experience of going to Ebbets Field unforgettable. . . . I had brought my red scorebook with me, but it wasn't as easy to concentrate on scoring as it was at home. . . Still, I managed to score the entire game . . . But what I remember most is sitting at Ebbets Field for the first time, with my red scorebook on my lap and my father at my side."

Baseball is not just a sport for Goodwin. For her, it epitomizes a sense of community in Brooklyn, a source of childhood heroes and fantasies, her strong bond with her father, the difficulty of enduring a loss, and the bliss of a win. The remainder of her memoir takes place against the backdrop of the baseball story, placing her relatively ordinary life in an extraordinary context.

The Brooklyn Dodgers spent much of their short existence (before their 1957 move to Los Angeles) playing "bridesmaids," as Goodwin puts it, to the other teams in New York and the league. They put together strings of successful seasons, only to come up short each year in the playoffs. Dodger fans, Goodwin writes, sustained themselves with the mantra, "Wait till next year."

The wait finally paid off in 1955, when the Dodgers rid themselves of bridesmaids' blues and won the World Series. Goodwin describes each game in painstaking detail, making the reader feel as if he, too, were attending the game or listening to it on the radio. She almost certainly drew from her own "primary source" material: her old red scorebook, containing a record of every pitch. Goodwin spends additional time describing the postgame celebrations which were a long time coming.

Perhaps the most distinctive and valuable feature of the book is its detail, both in descriptions of old Dodger games and in anecdotes from Goodwin's childhood. Goodwin recounts her childhood fears, her methodical observance of Catholic rites, her family, her neighborhood, placing all of it in the context of baseball:

"Team affiliation was passed on from father to child, with the crucial moments in a team's history repeated like the liturgy of a church service. Over time, each team and its fans had taken on a distinct identity, a kind of stereotype . . . The Dodgers were "dem Bums," the "daffiness boys," the unpretentious clowns, whose fans were seen as scruffy blue-collar workers who spoke with bad diction. . . To me, however, each team was signified by a member of my small community. The Giants were my parents' friends the Goldschmidts . . ."

Goodwin's intricate descriptions of her neighborhood evoke a vision of 1950's America-corner drug stores, butcher shops, soda shops, all owned by people whose names she knows. But baseball curiously gives Goodwin an additional way of telling their story. Max Kropf and Joe Schmitt, the butchers around the corner at the Bryn Mawr Meat Market, live and die by the New York Giants, and they even compel her to keep track of the standings on a board in the store. Goodwin's relationship with Max and Joe extends beyond baseball-Max even takes the young Goodwin to the Bronx Terminal Market early in the morning to pick out the day's meat and vegetables. "For me," Goodwin writes, "each store was a treasure house of lore about the varied lives of the people of my community."

Even Goodwin's friendships become memorable, in part, because of their discussions and celebrations of baseball. Goodwin's close friend Elaine roots for the Yankees, and the Dodgers and the Yankees meet in the 1949 World Series:

"In a moment of joyful truce, before we hardened into our partisan camps, prepared to collide once again in the World Series, Elaine and I hugged each other . . . [The Dodgers'] dreams for a world championship in '49 withered and died. My relationship with Elaine grew strained and suffered for weeks. It was that October that I first understood the pain, bravado, and prayer woven into the simple slogan that served Dodger fans as a recurring anthem: 'Wait till next year.'"

Goodwin's memoir conveys the importance of the Dodgers in her life. We read of her encounter with Dodger Hall of Famer and first African-American baseball player Jackie Robinson, all the way up to his inscription in her autograph book: "Keep your smile a long, long while." We can envision her in class passing and receiving notes containing game updates. We see her frolicking in the neighborhood after a Dodger victory. And we feel her embrace her father warmly when in 1955 the Dodgers finally win the championship and the two of them race downtown to participate in the celebration. We hurt when she hurts, and she hurts when the team hurts.

For the most part, Goodwin manages to link the story of her life apart from the Dodgers with the life of the Dodgers. As she begins to develop a sense of community in Rockville Centre, NY, the Dodgers develop from a team of individual, egotistical overachievers to one of dedicated team players intent on bringing a victory to their steadfast (and perhaps impatient) fans. Goodwin makes the reader nostalgic for an era in American sports when players seemed almost unilaterally concerned not just with winning but with pleasing their fans, people who they knew stuck with them through thick and thin.

At times, Goodwin seems to get a bit bogged down in describing historical events that had more to do with the country than with her-McCarthyism, for example, or America's space race with the Soviets. But her book, undeniably and unabashedly, is history, and placing her story and the Dodgers' story in a larger national context keeps it historical.

After the Dodgers taste victory in 1955, Goodwin watches the team unravel as her own world changes significantly. Jackie Robinson retires, management talks of abandoning the beloved Ebbets Field, and the team eventually leaves New York altogether in search of greater financial success in sunny Los Angeles. During this same era, Goodwin's mother begins to suffer through an illness that eventually takes her life, and Goodwin's circle of friends in the neighborhood begins to shrink as friends move, switch schools, or develop different attitudes.

As the Dodgers rise to new heights, Goodwin does, too, in her understanding of the world around her, in her confidence as a growing woman, in her capacity to enjoy life in new and exciting ways. As the Dodgers fall, so does Goodwin, not just because of the Dodgers loss but in other, unrelated ways. Goodwin uses a bit too much melodrama to describe the departure of the team and the period of mourning that followed in her own home, but the point is clear: the team was her life, as it was for so many other baseball fans in the 1950s.

However, can a reader who has not been, and never will be, a fan of baseball enjoy Goodwin's book? Certainly. A memoir gives the reader a sense of what made the subject's life special. A good memoir, like Wait Till Next Year, makes the reader feel as if the subject's life could just as easily have been his or her own. It makes the reader less an observer of a life and more an active participant in the life as it is recounted. Without the "famous" subject that most memoirs spotlight, Goodwin faces the challenge of almost courting the reader into reliving a life that, in some ways, resembles the lives of many other baby boomers. Goodwin overcomes that challenge in this book.