Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself
3.5/5
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About this ebook
In Bottom of the Ninth, Michael Shapiro brings to life a watershed moment in baseball history, when the sport was under siege in the late 1950s
"A fascinating look at an almost forgotten era . . . One of the best baseball books of recent seasons." -Cleveland Plain Dealer
Shapiro reveals how the legendary executive Branch Rickey saw the game's salvation in two radical ideas: the creation of a third major league—the Continental League—and the pooling of television revenues for the benefit of all. And Shapiro captures the audacity of Casey Stengel, the manager of the Yankees, who believed that he could remake how baseball was played.
The story of their ingenious schemes—and of the powerful men who tried to thwart them—is interwoven with the on-field drama of pennant races and clutch performances, culminating in the stunning climax of the seventh game of the 1960 World Series, when one swing of the bat heralds baseball's eclipse as America's number-one sport.
Michael Shapiro
Michael Shapiro is the author of Bottom of the Ninth and The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together. A professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, he is the author of several additional books, and his articles have appeared in The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.
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Reviews for Bottom of the Ninth
13 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I recently read Amazin', a history of the New York Mets and that got me interested in the whole Continental League saga that played out from 1958-60. Well, this is the book to read if you're interested in the Continental League. I found the whole period from 1957 when the Dodgers and Giants left New York until 1961-62 when Major League Baseball expanded by four teams (Minnesota Twins, LA Angels, New York Mets, Houston Astros) very intriguing.I've always believed that the Continental League was just a ruse created by Branch Rickey and the baseball interests in New York and Houston to force MLB to expand into their cities. After reading this book, I'm not so sure. I think at heart Mr.Rickey truly wanted to create a new major league just as his hero Ban Johnson had done sixty years earlier. What I find most interesting is that of the eight cities that were originally involved with the Continental League, Major League Baseball eventually expanded/moved to seven of them (New York, Houston, Minneapolis, Dallas, Denver, Toronto, Atlanta). Only Buffalo has been left out. What I'd like to find now is a book about the 1961 AL expansion, specifically about the LA Angels. They sure were a late comer to expansion discussions and how they pulled off fielding a team in such a short time must make an interesting story.