The Fall of the 1977 Phillies: How a Baseball Team's Collapse Sank a City's Spirit Review

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The Fall of the 1977 Phillies: How a Baseball Team's Collapse Sank a City's Spirit ReviewI really loved this book. It combines baseball history and social history in a way I've never seen before and shows you just how people's feelings toward their team reflect how they feel about other, larger, things. It also shows just how much a baseball team (at least the Phillies) can affect public perception of these things as well. For instance, I never realized that Philadelphia was not as racist in the 1940's as I'd always heard it was. Instead, as the book points out, it was the Phillies who were responsible for much of this opinion. Also, it shows how the Phillies of the 1950's and '60's pretty much became the personification of all the reasons so many people left the city and migrated towards the suburbs during that time.
As for Black Friday (the 1977 game which forms the focal point of the book -- each chapter begins with a summary of a particular inning), the book shows just how that game contributed to the end of the city's renaissance in the 1970's and how the "negadelphia" image the city is so well-known for returned. I never thought I'd read a book that talks about both Mike Schmidt and Mumia but this one does and ties them together in a way where you really get to see how they both were convenient images for people to use whenever they wanted to either embrace or diss the city. Fascinating.The Fall of the 1977 Phillies: How a Baseball Team's Collapse Sank a City's Spirit OverviewOn October 7, 1977, the Philadelphia Phillies lost a playoff game to the Dodgers, a game that began so hopefully and ended so disastrously that it has become known in Philadelphia simply as "Black Friday." As a season of rare hope and unity crashed to a painful end in a ten-minute sequence of bad plays, so too did the city's urban renaissance falter and an old sense of inferiority return. This ambitious examination of the relationship between the team and city delves deep into Philadelphia's social and baseball history to reveal how the disillusionment of Black Friday affected Philadelphia's self image and fans' relationship to the team they both love and love to hate.

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