Winner of the 2016 CASEY Award for Best Baseball Book of the Year
Finalist for the 2017 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing
From an award-winning journalist comes the riveting odyssey of seven Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1960s—a chronicle of a team, a game, and a nation in transition during one of the most exciting and unsettled decades in history.
Legendary Dodgers Maury Wills, Sandy Koufax, Wes Parker, Jeff Torborg, Dick Tracewski, Lou Johnson and Tommy Davis encapsulated 1960s America: white and black, Jewish and Christian, wealthy and working class, pro-Vietnam and anti-war, golden boy and seasoned veteran. The Last Innocents is a thoughtful, technicolor portrait of these seven players—friends, mentors, confidants, rivals, and allies—and their storied team that offers an intriguing look at a sport and a nation in transition. Bringing into focus the high drama of their World Series appearances from 1962 to 1972 and their pivotal games, Michael Leahy explores these men’s interpersonal relationships and illuminates the triumphs, agonies, and challenges each faced individually.
Leahy places these men’s lives within the political and social maelstrom that was the era when the conformity of the 1950s gave way to demands for equality and rights. Increasingly frustrated over a lack of real bargaining power and an iron-fisted management who occasionally meddled in their personal affairs, many players shared an uneasy relationship with the team’s front office. This contention mirrored the discord and uncertainty generated by myriad changes rocking the nation: the civil rights movement, political assassinations, and growing hostility to the escalation of the Vietnam War. While the nation around them changed, these players each experienced a personal and professional metamorphosis that would alter public perceptions and their own.
Comprehensive and artfully crafted, The Last Innocents is an evocative and riveting portrait of a pivotal era in baseball and modern America.
It’s rare for a team to encapsulate an era as indelibly as the Los Angeles Dodgers did the 1960s. White, black, Jewish, Christian, wealthy, working class, conservative, liberal—the Dodgers embodied the disparate cultural forces at play in an America riven by race and war.
In The Last Innocents, Michael Leahy tells the story of this mesmerizing time and extraordinary team through seven players—Maury Wills, Sandy Koufax, Wes Parker, Jeff Torborg, Tommy Davis, Dick Tracewski, and Lou Johnson—taking readers through the high drama of their World Series appearances, pivotal triumphs, and individual setbacks while the Dodgers reigned and baseball was king.
It is a story about what it was like to be a major leaguer when the country was turned upside down by the tumult of the civil rights movement, a series of wrenching political assassinations, and the shock waves of the Vietnam War. Outside the public eye, these seven Dodgers—friends, mentors, and confidants—struggled to understand their place in society and in a sport controlled by owners whose wishes were fiat. Even as they starred in games watched by millions, they coped with anxieties and indignities their fans knew nothing about—some of their wounds deeply personal, others more common to the times, though no less painful. In their dissatisfaction, they helped plant the seeds of a rebellion that would change their sport.
Revelatory, artfully crafted, and sweeping in its scope, The Last Innocents is a unique portrait of a watershed era in baseball and in America.
Advance Praise for The Last Innocents
“The Last Innocents is a great American story. Baseball in the southern California sun, Maury Wills stealing, Vin Scully narrating, life spinning and sweeping like a Koufax curveball toward the future—the tableau could not be richer for a writer as evocative as Michael Leahy.”—David Maraniss, author of Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball’s Last Hero
“In an excavation as deep and as probing as his splendid book on Michael Jordan, the prodigiously talented Michael Leahy sheds a revealing light on what now seems like an ancient era in baseball, when white Cy Young winners such as Sandy Koufax were looked upon by owners as hired help and black MVPs such as Maury Wills were treated even worse. And along the way, he answers the eternal question: ‘Who moved Burright?’ Who is Burright? Well, you’ll just have to pick up this absorbing book and see.”—Mark Kram Jr., author of the PEN Literary Award—winning Like Any Normal Day
Praise for When Nothing Else Matters
“The best sports book of the year . . . easily the most fully formed portrait of Michael Jordan ever written.”—GQ
“Riveting, myth shattering.”—Chicago Tribune
