Each spring I try to read a book about baseball to get me excited for the upcoming season. In the recent past I’ve read Opening Day, Voices of Summer, The Bad Guys Won, Cobb, The Boys of Summer, The Soul of Baseball, Moneyball, Joe DiMaggio, and For The Love of the Game. I decided upon Doris Kearns Goodwin’s memoir after reading an excellent piece by Diana Schaub in National Affairs titled, “America at the Bat” http://www.nationalaffairs.com/public...Full disclosure, I read this book as a "how to" manual, as in how to raise my little girls to be baseball fans and Pulitzer Prize Winning historians.Doris Kearns Goodwin’s childhood memoir Wait Till Next Year details her love affair with baseball, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and growing up on Long Island during the late forties and early nineteen fifties. Goodwin has recreated her childhood, only replacing herself with Harper Lee’s precocious Scout Finch. Goodwin is taught by her father, a bank examiner, to love the Brooklyn Dodgers and how to keep a baseball scorebook at the age of six. Goodwin claims that she kept score of nearly every game for a decade. When her father returned home from work, drained at Manhattan, and found a spot on the couch it was then that Goodwin would retell the day’s game through her detailed scorebook. Goodwin combines a social narrative in her memoir mentioning Red China, the Soviet weapons advancements, Whitaker Chambers, HUAC, McCarthy, the polio threat and, of course, season after season of Dodgers heartbreak. Scout has a running rivalry with the local butchers, both Giants fans, the local nuns, Dodgers fans, and her best friend, a Yankees fan. She writes of summers at Jones Beach, the introduction of the television and subsequent competition to have the largest screen on the block, and, of course, playing their own version of the Army-McCarthy hearings in which everyone was made to cry. Scout, a Catholic, ponders the relevance of the Catholic National Legion of Decency, an early Catholic film ratings board, the first time she saw a game at Ebbets Field, and discusses with the local butchers the best place to hide in case of a nuclear attack, which was estimated to hit Rockville Centre twelve minutes after detonation over Manhattan. Goodwin writes about going to a heathen protestant church to hear Roy Campanella speak. She donates her St. Christopher medal to Gil Hodges at an autograph signing so that he will break out of his slump. She wonders about race relations in the north and de facto segregation. Scout writes about her thoughts on the Rosenbergs, the male/female spheres, and teachers that inspired. At one point her older sister is to give a short speech at her high school graduation and discusses “pulling a Chambers,” as in communist spy and general malcontent Whitaker Chambers that gave a similar introduction thirty years earlier: “Chambers had been selected by his classmates to compose a class prophecy. When he submitted his speech to the principal for required approval, his cynical, vituperative remarks were deemed inappropriate. Unless he changed them, he would not be allowed to speak. He made the required revisions, but on the appointed day, he reverted to his original speech, which, among the unsavory passages, predicted a career in prostitution for one of his classmates.”Wait Till Next Year clearly peaks when the Dodgers, finally, win their first ever World Championship in 1955. Doris, along with her mother and father, race into Brooklyn to celebrate with the rest of the Dodgers fans. Everyone is smiling and hugging and healthy. They eat at Junior’s on Flatbush Ave. and then head down to the official team party with the rest of Brooklyn. As Dodger Carl Furillo later stated, “I’ve never in my life have seen a town go so wild. I have never seen people so goddamned happy.”The Dodgers would move to Los Angeles and the Giants to San Francisco at the end of the 1957 season. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s mother would die of a massive stroke and her father would briefly succumb to alcoholism during her teenage years. Wait Till Next Year is what every true fan and eternal optimist tells themselves after a season void of a championship, and would make for an excellent church book club read. Finding a good baseball book is difficult. Sports books, more often than not, fail because of an irrational attachment to our teams. As a Minnesota boy and a Minnesota sports fan, the sports and baseball book market is supersaturated with redundant books on teams from New York, Boston, Chicago, and the overwhelmingly depressing Negro Leagues.What plagues baseball memoirs, and is inevitable, is the same shared great events. Ask a Twins fan about the 1991 World Series. Baseball may no longer be America’s game, but it still remains the American pastime. Baseball, unlike the other professional sports, has a magnificent history dating back well over one hundred years. The names of the pre World War II greats are still on the tips of our tongue: Cobb, Ruth, DiMaggio, Walter Johnson, Cy Young, and Christy Mathewson. Despite the long history very few people could name a single player from the 1997 Marlins team that won it all, yet most could put together half the 1960 Yankees or the 1955 Dodgers starting line-up. What plagues baseball books is the retelling of the same story: Yankees winning championship after championship; the New York Giants winning their last pennant on Bobby Thompson’s walk-off homer and the famous call, “The Giants Win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” And more of the same: the drought of the Red Sox, and White Sox and, of course, the Cubs. The same stories are repeated ad naseum, another book on Mantle, Robinson, Clemente, or Gehrig. I feel like I’ve watched season after season in the Polo Grounds or at Ebbets Field. As the famous retell their youth, baseball takes on a larger and more romantic role. The next oldster that tells you how they remember the last New York Giants or Brooklyn Dodgers win is full of shit. They probably weren’t even born yet. A self imposed sports writer moratorium needs to be placed on the old and storied cash cow of New York, Chicago, and Boston baseball books. A new thread must be started by serious talent.So what did I learn about passing my love of baseball down to my daughters?1)Teach them to score keep. Fact: anyone that doesn't know how to score keep isn't a fan.2)Listen to games on the radio. Learn to visualize the field and what's happening. Visualization and patience are the keys to most problems.3)Baseball is meant to have breaks. It teaches patience. My favorite is when players make an error and then the TV camera focuses on their face as they stand as though waiting for a late bus. If you're really lucky you may even to be able to read their lips if the camera stays on them, before they get the chance to go stone-faced, adjust their cap, and look at their glove. Pitchers are the best - most seem to say a word that rhymes with duck as they quickly demand another ball from the home plate umpire.4)Take them to games if at all possible and teach them that umpires are people trying to earn a living (by conspiring with MLB and the large media markets for favorable postseason match-ups and advertising revenue).5)Declare favorite players and pick a team. The answer, “I like them all” is nonsense: I love the Twins and hate most of the AL and half the NL.6)They play 162 games. Chances are they're playing every evening. Turn on the radio in the car or in the backyard.7)Show them how to read a baseball box score.8)There is always a next year. And it’s okay to remember the past. In Minnesota it’s the 1991 World Series against the Atlanta Braves, a team I still strongly dislike. With that said, shouldn't baseball writers put a moratorium on the same books over and over again?9)Boys (or girls) that like baseball are okay. Any boy (or girl) that doesn’t have the patience for baseball is a fucking idiot and get rid of them. Maybe this should be number one.
Doris Kearns Goodwin is best known for her presidential biographies. However, she is also an inveterate lover of baseball. Kearns Goodwin grew up in Long Island, NY, in a close, lower middle class neighborhood in the 1940’s and 1950’s. At that time there were three baseball teams in NY – the Yankees (it’s hard for me, a Red Sox fan to even write that name) in the Bronx, the Giants in Manhattan, and the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Dodgers were (was?) Jackie Robinson’s team, and during Kearns Goodwin’s childhood the team featured many legendary players in addition to Robinson, including Pee Wee Reese, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges and others. At an early age Kearns Goodwin’s father taught her the elaborate skills of recording each ball game play on scorecards, and baseball became their special bond. Her mother was ill throughout most of her childhood.For me the most enjoyable episodes in the book were those that combined the authors’ love of baseball and Catholicism. When Roy Campanella came to her small Long Island town, he spoke in a local Black church (Protestant). Kearns Goodwin was upset when she realized that Catholics were not allowed to go to Protestant churches. But her father said it was permitted because she wasn’t going to a church service. This reminded me of my mother allowing me when I was about 6 years old to attend a neighborhood ice cream social in the local Presbyterian church because it was in the basement. This was pre-Vatican Council, which relaxed these “rules”. Later, at her first confession, Kearns Goodwin confessed the “sin” of going to see Campanella in a Protestant church. The priest, it turned out, was also a Dodgers fan, and assured her this was not a sin. She also confessed praying that various players on other teams would suffer injuries, but the priest advised her that a victory achieved this way was not a true victory, and the Dodgers would win without wishing harm on others.Kearns Goodwin recounts Dodger games, especially the heartbreaking, late season losses, in great detail. It reveals that she is a true fan, and not a poser. I have met one other young woman, a Red Sox fan, who was as knowledgeable, but this is becoming rare. I have been a baseball games with other female friends where we find ourselves explaining what just happened to the younger men seated near us who barely understand the game.Kearns Goodwin’s childhood gave her a great foundation for her later career as a historian and author. She got her PhD at Harvard in 1968, which brought her to Massachusetts. For years after the Dodgers left Brooklyn, she avoided all things related to baseball. Finally a male friend at Harvard convinced her to go to Boston’s Fenway Park, a subway ride away. Fenway Park felt familiar to her, like “Flatbush North”. Kearns Goodwin adopted the Red Sox as “her” team and raised her three sons in much the same way her first generation Irish American father raised her – to love baseball. This book was written before the Red Sox became World champions in 2004. I can only imagine how thrilled she was. And finally, the title "Wait til Next Year" is a phrase very familiar to Red Sox as well as Brooklyn Dodger fans.
What do You think about Wait Till Next Year (1998)?
If you saw Ken Burns' series Baseball, you caught the good parts, and they were related with a lot more passion than Doris Kearns Goodwin conveys in reading her own audio book. Still, the good parts really were good parts.For her, baseball is a measuring stick of maturity. Her development as a storyteller starts in relating a game's happenings to her father. She learns to avoid skipping to the most exciting parts in order to build the anticipation. She learns about the disappointment and bitterness of life almost as much from the Brooklyn Dodgers leaving town and from her own mother's death. These are powerful and moving events.
—Brian Eshleman
I loved this book. And as much as I love to read, both fiction and non-fiction, this is the first Doris Kearns Goodwin book I have read. I loved her story of growing up close to New York City and Brooklyn. And her love for the Brooklyn Dodgers is so incredible. Writing about her neighborhood, her friends, her family, her schools brought back many memories to me. The first TV to come into the neighborhood, and the joy when her father bought one. Sitting on the porch or roaming the neighborhood with friends, while mothers talked among themselves. But she always came back to her beloved Dodgers. Her father gave her a score book when she was six, and taught her how to use it. I used to watch my husband use a score card, but I never could figure out what he doing. It all looked like chicken scratches. Doris's childhood years, were very close to mine. I think she must be about two or three years younger than I. So I remember many of the news items she talked about - the Rosenberg Trials, McCarthyism, Sputnik, and most tragic, the death of James Dean, my teenage love. Well written and fascinating throughout the book, I couldn't stop reading it, until it ended. Now I will certainly have to get one of her larger tomes and read it.
—Sally Atwell Williams
Goodwin's book Wait Till Next Year is a nostalgic memoir flavored with her love of baseball and her family. Goodwin is known to most people as the Pulitzer Prize winning author and expert on Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. In this book though she is just the girl next door who grew up idolizing her father and Jackie Robinson, and dreaming of the year when the Dodgers would win the pennant. If you don't have some appreciation for baseball, her details on the classic New York falls might grow tedious. I especially liked the historical references alongside some of the greatest moments baseball (the Giants' infamous "shot heard round the world" almost made me cheer out loud - awkward when you're on a train). I think Goodwin could have tightened a couple of her chapters - she was a little too detailed, but any girl who loves baseball this much is wonderful in my eyes. And just in case you were wondering, today is not only Valentine's Day - it's the first day of spring training. All pitchers are reporting to their respective camps - this could be our year. It could happen?!
—Jaclyn
