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Like a few other teams - the Yankees and Red Sox come to mind - the Dodgers are the subject of an entire subgenre of baseball literature and it would be natural to wonder - What could be new in Forever Blue?

The first thing a Dodger die-hard will notice is that I set aside the judgments made by others about Walter O'Malley and other key figures in the Dodger story and followed instead the trail of documents. Internal team memos and private corporate records showed O'Malley began his effort to build a new stadium in Brooklyn in 1946. O'Malley made mistakes, but it's hard to refute his devotion to the borough. Yes, he was responsible for the final decision and cannot escape responsibility for moving the team and breaking a lot of hearts. But the record also shows O'Malley and the public were manipulated by the city's great power broker Robert Moses, who never wanted a stadium in Brooklyn, and failed by Mayor Wagner who let two great teams - the Dodgers and the Giants - leave at once.

Other new material in the book includes the inside story of how an old-fashioned gossip columnist in Los Angeles named Vincent X. Flaherty courted the team for years and helped the city's real leaders bring baseball to the coast. Formally private letters revealed new details on the struggle over the Chavez Ravine, where Dodger Stadium was built, and show how O'Malley risked financial ruin to make his ballpark a reality. Mixed in with all these historic events are fresh takes on players, insights into the arrival of the player's union, and new evidence of O'Malley's influence on the game itself, over thirty years.    

Altogether, Forever Blue does refine and even revise the history of the great Dodger franchise. Readers who are challenged by it will complain that it's "revisionist," using that word as if it's damning. In fact, every worthy work of history revises our view of the past based on new information and perspective. With each honest revision, we get closer to closer to the truth and know our history and ourselves a little better.

Michael D'Antonio, Forever Blue, Riverhead, Penguin Books