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given hitter’s tendencies, and so on.
    I caught on fast. The “inner game” appealed to me. And I was also impressed by my father’s insider’s knowledge of baseball. He was as much of an aficionado about this game as my grandfather was about the horses.
    Once, he took me to see the Giants play their hated rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers—the same Dodgers that Sherman was so eloquently defending that day in the school yard. I was immediately drawn to them—especially to Jackie Robinson, their Negro second baseman. He was like a lightening rod. He played with such reckless abandon that it seemed to energize the entire ball club. The whole team, in fact, played with a kind of furious intensity—as if they had something urgent to prove.
    I was beginning to understand why these scrappy, spirited Dodgers made the more businesslike Yankee fans and lordly Giant fans feel so uneasy. This was a team I wanted to learn more about.
    My love affair with the Dodgers began in earnest in the spring of 1950, just before I turned ten. As soon as school let out, I started spending my days in the public library reading books about the Dodgers, biographies of Dodger greats, popular coffee table books like Big Time Baseball , and standard reference books like The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball .
    As far back as the ‘20s, the Dodgers—whose nickname was “Dem Bums,” and whose slogan was “Wait till next year”—were characterized, even by their own fans, as perpetual also-rans. The most famous chapter in the team’s mythology would of course become the pennant race of 1951, when they blew a thirteen-and-a-half-game mid-August lead and lost the final playoff game to the Giants on Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ‘round the world.”
    But even before that collapse, the Dodger legacy featured antiheroes like Mickey Owen, whose ninth inning, two-out passed ball against the Yankees was the turning point in the team’s loss of the 1941 World Series. Then there was George “Babe” Herman, who had the ignominious distinction of winding up on third base with two other teammates. The same Babe Herman got hit in the head trying to catch a routine fly ball. These were guys I could identify with.
    The team’s fortunes changed drastically in the late 1940s, when they signed Jackie Robinson, the first Negro to break the major league’s color barrier. Had it not been for the great Yankee teams of the ‘50s, the Dodgers would have been the best team in baseball. The truth is that the Dodgers were a team of highly skilled players that happened to flourish at the same time as the great Yankee teams and fine Giant teams of that era. They were so resilient. No matter how many times they lost the pennant or World Series, they’d be right back in the race the next season.
    The Dodgers’ luckless history and its star player Jackie Robinson’s determination and tenacity were irresistible attractions for a kid who already saw himself as a congenital underdog and outsider—always persevering, always having to prove himself to others.
    It wasn’t long before I became an aficionado. By mid July, I was reading the sports pages religiously each day—a first for me. And for the entire 1950 season, I followed Robinson’s and the Dodgers’ exploits via radio broadcasts of their games.
    Part of the mystery and allure of baseball was learning the language of the game. Understanding the lingo—that hip vernacular—made me feel like I was an insider. At night, I’d listen late through the red plastic Philco’s crackling static to Red Barber and Connie Desmond broadcasting Dodger road games from Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis—the exotic western cities that lie beyond the Hudson. From “the catbird seat” high above the diamond, the Alabama redhead would sigh “ohhh doctor” and inform us in his smooth drawl that