Dodgerland

A near-great baseball team and the city that loved it The 1977-78 Los Angeles Dodgers came close. Their tough lineup ofyoung and ambitious players squared off with the New York Yankeesin consecutive World Series. The Dodgers' run was a long time inthe making after years of struggle, and featured ma [...]
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A near-great baseball team and the city that loved it The 1977-78 Los Angeles Dodgers came close. Their tough lineup ofyoung and ambitious players squared off with the New York Yankeesin consecutive World Series. The Dodgers' run was a long time inthe making after years of struggle, and featured many homegrownplayers who went on to noteworthy or Hall of Fame careers, includingDon Sutton, Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, and Steve Yeager. Dodgerlandis the story of those memorable teams as Chavez Ravine began tochange, baseball was about to enter a new era, and American cultureexperienced a shift to the "me" era. Part journalism, part social history, and part straight sports writing, Dodgerland is told through the lives of four men, each representing different aspects of this L.A. story.Tom Lasorda, the vocal manager of the Dodgers, gives an up-close view of the team's struggles and triumphs; Tom Fallon, a suburban, small-business owner, witnesses the Dodgers' season and the changes to California's landscape-physical, social, political, and economic; Tom Wolfe, a chronicler of California's ever-changing culture, views the events of 1977-78 from his Manhattan writer's loft; and Tom Bradley, Los Angeles's mayor and the region's most dominant political figure of the time, gives a glimpse of the wider political, demographic, and economic forces that affected the state at the time. The boys in blue drew baseball's focus in those two seasons, but theintertwining narratives tell a larger story about California, late 1970sAmerica, and of great promise unrealized.