Roger Kahn and The Boys of Summer: “He turned his book into a meditation on fathers and sons, the passage of time, teamwork, civil rights and the nature of men.”

From a look back at the life of sportswriter and author Roger Kahn by Bruce Weber in the New York Times:

Roger Kahn, whose 1972 book about the Brooklyn Dodgers of the early 1950s, “The Boys of Summer,” melded reportage, sentiment and sociology in a way that stamped baseball as a subject fit for serious writers and serious readers, died on Thursday in Mamaroneck, N.Y. He was 92. . . .

Mr. Kahn’s 20 or so books, many about baseball, include a couple of novels, a portrait of the volatile but winning 1978 Yankees, a biography of Jack Dempsey and a collaboration with Pete Rose on Rose’s own story, published in 1989, just months after he was banished from baseball. . . .

In the spring of 1952, he was a 24-year-old reporter for The New York Herald Tribune when he was assigned to travel with the Dodgers. It was a rich time in the game’s history, especially in New York, the undisputed center of the baseball universe, home to three teams and three perfervid fan bases. . . .

It is this fecund territory that Mr. Kahn, looking back from a distance of decades, harvested in several books, often entwining memories from his own Brooklyn boyhood and his coming-of-age as a journalist with tales from the clubhouse and the barroom and the diamond.

“The Boys of Summer,” for which he revisited many of the old Dodgers years after their playing days, was the first and, by most estimates, the best of these—as influential a baseball book as has been written in the last 50 years. . . .

A handful of previous books—among them “The Long Season” (1960), by Jim Brosnan, and “Ball Four” (1970), by Jim Bouton, both written by active ballplayers—had sought to illuminate the game in close-up, without a mythologizing sheen.

Fiction by the likes of Ring Lardner, Bernard Malamud and Mark Harris had set characters redolent of America against the backdrop of the ballpark. Arnold Hano’s undersung “A Day in the Bleachers” (1955) described one game of the 1954 World Series from the point of view of the man in the stands.

But “The Boys of Summer”—along with “The Summer Game,” the first collection of Roger Angell’s revelatory New Yorker pieces about baseball, also published in 1972—more or less created a new literary category: long-form narrative baseball reporting.

While Mr. Angell’s elegant essays were contemporaneous reports on the game, Mr. Kahn seized on techniques of the so-called new journalism; for one thing, he became a character in his own narrative. And with a title taken from a Dylan Thomas poem, he turned his book into a meditation on fathers and sons, the passage of time, teamwork, civil rights and the nature of men—themes so seductive and enduring that in connection with baseball they ring as clichés today. . . .

In 2002, Sports Illustrated placed it second on its list of the best 100 sports books of all time, behind only A.J. Liebling’s revered collection of boxing pieces, “The Sweet Science.”

“A baseball book the same way ‘Moby-Dick’ is a fishing book,” the magazine wrote of “The Boys of Summer.” . . .

In the opening pages of “The Boys of Summer,” one passage expressed the purpose of much of Mr. Kahn’s writing: the nostalgic yearning that baseball, and Brooklyn, evoked in so many people. Far fewer readers today would recognize the details, but the longing for something gone will always be familiar.