Book Review

Bottom of the Ninth
Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the daring scheme to save baseball from itself

Michael Shapiro

I've been reading this book off and on for the past few months. Not that it's not a good book, just that I haven't focused terribly hard on finishing the thing.

The book covers the period in baseball from 1958-1960, at a time when a third league tried to form and join the major leagues. This was after the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants left New York. The book is largely about Branch Rickey (the same guy who helped get Jackie Robinson in the majors.) and his efforts to build to new league. This league was called the Continental League, which I had never heard of before.

The New York Yankees had had the most success in the 1950's, one of the reasons was that the owners had all the control over a team. They essentially 'owned' the players, and held all the cards. There was a huge disparity in money between the large market teams and small market teams in the league. (Sound familiar?)

Rickey's idea (with the help of others) was to build a league where all the teams shared equally in profits, allowing for everyone to compete. In the end, the existing owners were able to squash the new league, and in most cases, eventually expanded into the markets that tried to first be a part of the Continental League. All except for (of course) Buffalo, who was firmly in place as one of the cities in that third league, but never got an expansion team.

It was an interesting idea, sharing the wealth to encourage competition. Because the owners were able to kill the league and it's ideas, it never happened. That's why today, you still have teams, like the Yankees, that have tons more money than other teams.

And Casey Stengel? He was the manager of the Yankees during this period of time. He was ousted just about the time the new league was scuttled. (At the end of the 1960's World Series, when the Pirates beat the Yankees. Interestingly enough, a tape of game seven of that series was recently found in Bing Crosby's wine cellar. Coming soon to a TV near you!)

Anyway, Casey Stengel had nothing to do with the Continental League. He just happened to get fired not long after the league was gone. It felt to me like the author didn't quite have enough material for a book, until he started talking about Stengel, and then give his own play-by-play description of the 1960 World Series. Not that it was a bad thing, just that I thought the flow was a bit off...

Anyway, it was an interesting book, talking about something I didn't even know happened in baseball. At it gave another reason as to why Buffalo is a cursed sports city.