YMMV / The Man Who Brought the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn

• Genius Bonus: In this universe, the LA Stars are incorporated as a National League team to fill the gap left in LA by the departing Dodgers. In reality, there was a Pacific Coast League team called the Hollywood Stars who were one of two teams displaced from LA when the Dodgers moved to the city in 1958.^note A bit of baseball history: the Pacific Coast League was poised to become the third major league in the late 1950s, until the Dodgers and Giants moved to the West Coast and established a National League presence.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Squat opines that "...we don't allow no movie stars in Brooklyn." Nowadays, many portions of Brooklyn are very trendy, and many celebrities keep homes there.
  • It's also mentioned that Bobby wants to ride the wrecking ball that tears down Ebbets Field Apartments, for the publicity.
  • The book also makes note of people's fondness of the idea of building a retro-style ballpark, rather than a stadium, when it comes time to build New Ebbets Field. At the time the book was written, stadium-style ballparks (like Shea Stadium and the Astrodome) were all the rage, but nowadays retro-style ballparks have superceded that particular style.
  • At one point, Bobby flies to Cuba and manages to sweet-talk Fidel Castro himself into allowing the Cuban national team's star slugger to play for the Dodgers. Unheard of in 1981 and 1987, but it did predict the Cuban thaw of the 2010s, leading to pro baseball's interest in drafting players directly from Cuba.
  • In the book, the Tucson Sunbelters are incorporated as a National League expansion team in Arizona during the late Eighties. Ritz was off by a decade; the Real Life Arizona Diamondbacks became an NL team in 1998.
  • Completely coincidentally, as in the book, the Dodgers did lose their 1988 home opener against the San Francisco Giants.
  • The 1988 World Series, of course. The Dodgers won it in real life, but lost it in the book. This creates the accidental implication that if they'd moved back to Brooklyn in '88, they would have lost it.
  • The book features a Jackie Robinson Story about the first female pitcher in the major leagues, who is a stellar talent but has trouble refining her game at the beginning of her career. This idea would later be explored in-depth by the short-lived show Pitch, which features the MLB's first female pitcher playing for the Dodgers' rivals, the San Diego Padres.
  • Squat and Ruth get married at the end, becoming the first married couple on the roster of a professional baseball team. This happened for real in 2003, when Jake and Kendall Burnham both signed with the semipro San Angelo Colts.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The book celebrates Bobby's immense wealth and ability to acquire any property that he wants. It was in line with the values of the consumerist 1980s, but didn't age well in the 2020's, when billionaires and "One Percenters" — particularly those who come from generational wealth — are looked down upon by the general public for using their wealth to get their own way.
  • Speaking of, the fact that Bobby uses strippers and booze to schmooze the other National League owners would be considered wildly inappropriate today.
• Values Resonance: The book is progressive with its stances on female sportscasters, something far more commonplace today than when the book was written. It's also progressive with its treatment of allowing women into professional baseball, although that still hasn't happened in MLB as of 2023.