had a great idea for a column. How do I know it was a great idea? Someone beat me to it.
Half a century after the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series, Thomas Oliphant, a national political reporter, penned a memoir with the subtitle: A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family’s Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
In the book, Oliphant alternates between life in post-war Brooklyn, with an inning-by-inning account of the Dodgers’ game 7 win over the New York Yankees to take the series, which he watched with his father on TV. One of the connections to the series he wrote about is something I wanted to write about: how that game, and the winning pitcher, Johnny Podres, have achieved a mythic status, a game that has been embraced by baseball fans perhaps more than any other series game seven (with apologies to Bill Mazeroski and his walk-off homerun to win the 1960 series, also against the Yankees).
“The peculiar resonance with this one, it surprised me when I did the project, and it still surprises me,” said Oliphant. “It’s not like the Yankees winning five world series in a row or Babe Ruth calling his shot, pick your poison. This was a team that was gone in four years, but whether you think it’s (the) unique magic of the Dodgers, it just keeps resonating.”
