Major league baseball has a long, rich history in Brooklyn. From 1883 until their move west to Los Angeles following the 1957 season, the Dodgers were the emotional center of the borough's diverse population. But Brooklyn would be without a professional team until June of 2000 when the Cyclones took the field at Prospect Park, just blocks from Ebbets Field, as part of the New York-Penn League and the Toronto Blue Jays' farm system. This work follows the rookie-level club's first season, bridging the present to the past with comparisons of the Cyclones to the Dodgers of yesteryear. Each day of...

Celebrated film director Frank Capra was a central architect of the feel good movie genre now known as populism, which celebrates people, families, second chances, and other traditional American icons such as small town or pastoral life and baseball. Capra developed his own brand of populism by interweaving traditional values of the genre with a younger, more vulnerable hero starting with Mr. Deeds Goes to Town in 1936. The result, Capraesque populism, has had a significant influence of American pop culture in general and forms a small but important variety of baseball movie. This book...