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Mover and Shaker

Walter O'Malley, the Dodgers, and Baseball's Westward Expansion

Andy McCue

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Imprint: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 05/2014
Pages: 480
Subject: Biography and Autobiography
eBook ISBN: 9780803255067

DESCRIPTION

One of the most influential and controversial team owners in professional sports history, Walter O’Malley (1903–79) is best remembered—and still reviled by many—for moving the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. Yet much of the O’Malley story leading up to the Dodgers’ move is unknown or created from myth, and there is substantially more to the man. When he entered the public eye, the self-constructed family background and early life he presented was gilded. Later his personal story was distorted by some New York sportswriters, who hated him for moving the Dodgers.     In Mover and Shaker Andy McCue presents for the first time an objective, complete, and nuanced account of O’Malley’s life. He also departs from the overly sentimentalized accounts of O’Malley as either villain or angel and reveals him first and foremost as a rational, hardheaded businessman, who was a major force in baseball for three decades and whose management and marketing practices radically changed the shape of the game.    

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andy McCue is the author of Baseball by the Books: The Complete History and Bibliography of Baseball Fiction and is a former president of the Society for American Baseball Research.

REVIEWS

http://www.insidesocal.com/tomhoffarth/2014/04/01/day-1-of-30-baseball-books-in-april-2014/#more-28653

http://grantland.com/features/baseball-books-mlb-babe-ruth-mickey-mantle-boys-of-summer-etc/

http://www.laobserved.com/intell/2014/05/newest_omalley_bio_looks_deepe.phpc

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