The Boys of Summer

The Boys of Summer (1972) is a non-fiction baseball book by American sports reporter Roger Kahn. In part a memoir of Kahn’s childhood as a fanatical baseball fan and his career as a sports reporter, the book focuses on the history of the Brooklyn Dodgers team of 1952-1953. The book’s final third becomes a meditation on time and aging as Kahn investigates the subsequent lives of the Dodgers’ star players: Clem Labine, George Shuba, Carl Erskine, Andy Pafko, Joe Black, Preacher Roe, Pee Wee Reese, Carl Furillo, Gil Hodges, Roy Campanella, Duke Snider, Billy Cox, and the legendary Jackie Robinson.

Kahn begins his story with his own childhood in Brooklyn. His obsession with baseball—and with the Dodgers in particular—was fuelled by his sports-loving father, to the despair of his mother, a classicist. The great crisis of Kahn’s childhood, the “summer of tragedy” in his eleventh year, was the realization that he would “never be good enough for the Dodgers.”

Rather than baseball, Kahn’s talents lay in writing, and in 1948, he took a job as a copy boy with the New York Herald Tribune. Slowly, Kahn worked his way up through the paper’s ranks, honing his craft as a writer and learning from the senior sports reporters. The hours were long, the headlines tight, and the traveling constant, but Kahn recognized that talent would take him only so far without dedication to his craft. Kahn does not labor the point, but during the same years, the young players who would eventually comprise the 1952-1953 Dodgers team were each undergoing a similar unheralded apprenticeship, rising through the ranks of the sport.



By 1952, Kahn—still a Dodgers fanatic—landed his dream gig, as a beat reporter for the Tribune on his favorite team. In the Dodgers’ clubhouse, he sat and watched the players, observing their characters and moods close up. Kahn had reached the Major League of his profession. In The Boys of Summer, he describes those years in glowing nostalgic detail, painting intimate portraits of the Dodgers stars both on field and in the clubhouse.

While the Dodgers would go on to win the World Series in 1955, during the years of Kahn’s tenure as a beat reporter, the team twice lost the World Series to the Yankees. For Kahn, this only binds him more closely to the team he reported on: “You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat.” On the field and off, the most important story to emerge from the ’52-’53 Dodgers was that of Jackie Robinson—and Robinson’s story is certainly the most enduring aspect of the team’s legacy.

In 1947, Robinson “broke the color barrier,” becoming the first African-American player to debut in an MLB game, previously segregated by unofficial “gentleman’s agreement.” Kahn exposes every detail of the prejudice faced by Robinson and the other black players who followed in his footsteps. Robinson was frequently prevented from staying in the same hotel or traveling on the same bus as his white teammates. He endured a daily litany of abuse from opposition fans and players and, more stingingly, from the Dodgers’ own “fans,” and sometimes even from teammates.



Kahn is also frank about his own failures as a reporter. When Robinson accused the St. Louis Cardinals’ players of racial abuse, Kahn accepted Cardinals manager Ed Stankey’s denial. Kahn’s subsequent article presented a balanced account, on the fence about whether the abuse happened or not. Later he realized that he had been “played…for a fool,” and he attempted to make amends through more accurate reporting on the abuse Robinson faced. This time he was thwarted by his own editor: “to Kahn: Herald Tribune will not be a sounding board for Jackie Robinson. Write baseball, not race relations. Story killed.”

The last third of the book considers the ongoing story of the Dodgers. Only a few years after their eventual World Series triumph in ’55, the Dodgers decamped to the West Coast, and the Giants went with them. Ebbets Field—the altar of Kahn’s holiest boyhood memories—was replaced by blank, redbrick buildings.

Twenty years after the end of the ’53 season, Kahn travels to meet the surviving members of the team. One—Gil Hodges—is the manager of the Mets. Robinson is ill (he would die later the same year). The rest of the team has returned to civilian life. Kahn finds them unwilling to indulge in nostalgia or self-importance. On the contrary, Clem Labine chiefly recalls how much he missed his family while he was on the road. George Shuba stresses that it was grueling discipline and hard work—not talent—that made him and his teammates what they were. Andy Pafko is still hurt by the memory of being traded, while Carl Furillo sued the “lousy bastards” who owned the Dodgers and ended up blackballed by the baseball fraternity. The men are getting old and suffering the ravages of time. Gil Hodges has a heart condition. Clem Labine’s son has been wounded in the Vietnam War.



The Boys of Summer is not only a baseball book, but also a reflection on heroism and mortality. A 2011 list of the most important baseball books ever written, published in the L.A. Times, called it “perhaps the most celebrated baseball book of the last 50 years.” Other critics have accused it of excessive sentimentality. The book’s title refers to a line by poet Dylan Thomas: “the boys of summer in their ruin.”