As a charter member of the Southeastern New England Brooklyn Dodgers Fan Club (SNEBDFC), I wonder why I chose to review this book. Why relive the heartbreak that struck fans of the Dodgers and the New York Giants in 1957, when those two teams announced that they were moving to the West Coast? Must have been a sudden irreversible masochistic impulse.

Diehard Brooklyn fans cling to the “O’Malley Devil” theory — that the Dodgers’ principal owner, Walter O’Malley, uprooted the team from beloved Ebbets Field and replanted it in Los Angeles motivated solely by greed. A few years back one SNEBDFC member expressed the common loathing for O’Malley by flying to Los Angeles for the express purpose of peeing on his grave.

Thus Brooklyn fans were baffled by Neil Sullivan’s 1987 book The Dodgers Move West, which spread blame for the move to New York City’s waffling mayor, Robert Wagner, and the powerful public works czar, Robert Moses. Those two, Sullivan asserted, foiled O’Malley’s attempts to build a new stadium in Brooklyn, thereby forcing him to abandon the borough for greener pastures in Los Angeles’ Chavez Ravine. Simultaneously, the bibulous owner of the Giants, Horace Stoneham, lifted his legendary team from Manhattan’s Polo Grounds and moved them to San Francisco.

All sorts of schemes were floated in the years leading up to the move, including an O’Malley plan for a domed stadium designed by Buckminster Fuller. The machinations in New York and California were wide-ranging and complex. Journalist and Brooklynite Robert Murphy relates them fully, but, unfortunately, not always clearly. Occasionally, his syntax strays in confusion, his chronology stumbles erratically, and he asks his sentences to do way too much, stringing them out well beyond easy comprehension.

Another caveat: After Many a Summer is not a baseball book — it’s a book about business, at its most duplicitous and cutthroat extremes. For many Americans, the abandonment of New York by its two National League teams was a shocking revelation that baseball was a business as much as a sport — a fact that has been sadly reinforced time after time in the decades since by avaricious owners and players.

To the dwindling circle of Brooklyn Dodger fans, Walter O’Malley will forever remain a despised #@%&*. If they can bring themselves to read it, Murphy’s book will reinforce their notion.

NYVI154@aol.com