Anderson, who has a well-deserved reputation for fair-mindedness, covered the Dodgers during the team’s final five years in Brooklyn. Rickey was gone by then, exiled to Pittsburgh, where his masterly touch was not yet clearly evident. (A season later, 1958, the Pirates finished second and the Dodgers, disoriented in their new Los Angeles surroundings, finished seventh.) Why didn’t Rickey remain in Brooklyn, where his signing of Jackie Robinson and his creation of the team I called the Boys of Summer became a triumph, glorious to behold? There had never before been such sociological drama and baseball success anywhere from Canarsie to Brooklyn Heights. Surely one huge factor in the exile was the maneuvering of Walter O’Malley, whom Rickey called “the most devious man that I have ever met.” O’Malley’s lust for power and money was extraordinary. But another consideration was Rickey’s own avarice. It left him vulnerable to O’Malley’s ambushes. But finally a major additional element was the relentlessly anti-Rickey prose, much of it written by Young, published in the lurid popular tabloid, the New York Daily News.
