Lost and found: Some classic Dodger memories

There are 19 contributions to the new book, “Game of My Life: Memorable Stories of Dodgers Baseball,” by team historian Mark Langill ($24.95, 256 pages, Sports Publishing LLC), but the two that strike deepest most may be from the media members, Hall of Fame broadcasters Vin Scully and Jamie Jarrin. Scully’s choice would hardly be one anyone could have guessed: May 13, 1952 at Ebbets Field, when the Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 14-8. Larry Miggins homered that day for the Cards. Miggins was Scully’s classmate back in the early 1940s at Fordham Prep school in New York, and the two of them shared a dream one day about both being in the big leagues one day – Scully as a broadcaster and Miggins as a player. And, as Scully said, “miracle upon miracles” happened that day as Miggins homered in one of the two innings that Scully was calling that day. Scully also has a tie-in to Jarrin’s story about the 1990 All-Star Game at Wrigley Field, which came only a few months after he had suffered a bad traffic accident in spring training and nearly lost his life because of internal injuries. He was still having trouble breathing because of the pain in his chest and wasn’t sure how he’d do climbing the stairs at Wrigley Field to do the Spanish-language broadcast. Scully was there also for the CBS Radio. And while Jarrin was only able to do three innings, he took a picture with Scully in the press box and “that picture tells me I was probably reborn on that day … that’s whey my life in baseball started again,” Jarrin said.

On that theme, a new book called “Through A Blue Lens: The Brooklyn Dodgers photographs of Barney Stein, 1937-1957” ($27.95, 162 pages, Triumph Books) by Dennis D’Agostino and Stein’s daughter, Bonnie Crosby, pulls together some 200 rare black-and-white prints that the long-time team photographer took over the years and tell the story of the team up until the franchise moved to Los Angeles 50 years ago. Scully provides some personal remembrances and captions some photos (including some of him) and perhaps the most poignant are those of the final game and then destruction of Ebbets Field, and a public auction of items from the stadium, between Februrary and May of 1960. Crosby started to organize her father’s photos upon his death in 1993 at age 84 and eventually put up a website (www.barneystein-photography.com) to display his prints of that time. “Barney Stein is symbolic of the dedicated photographers whose work formed lasting pictorial histories of their generations,” Crosby wrote in the introduction. “The photographs in this book are his legacy to his family and to all Brooklyn Dodgers fans of many generations. They are also a loving testament to a time, and a team, from the best father any two daughters could ever have.” One of Stein’s top pictures ove the years was in 1951, after the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” when he snapped a shot of Ralph Branca in the Dodgers clubhouse despondent after giving up the game-winning homer to Bobby Thomson. As it turned out, Stein was the official wedding photographer for Branca and his wife just days later.