It's unlikely there are many Bauxites old enough to remember the moment -- if you're out there, do share!

Dewey?

Warning:  A Codger's Reminiscence.

Yes, I remember the moment.  We had moved back to Canada that summer of 1951, after five years in Illinois.  In June, days before we moved,  I had gone to Wrigley Field to see the Giants play the Cubs--filled with sentiment and boyhood grief at my “last-ever” visit to Wrigley Field, the Elysium where I had first seen and became infatuated with ML baseball.  I took with me a brand new, long-saved-up-for, baseball to get some autographs;  saw Willie Mays hit his first Wrigley homer (apologies for repeating this incident, from the homers thread today), and  saw Bobby Thomson play, too;  even got his autograph on the ball!  A great sendoff.  So, though I was still a Cubs fan, they of course were nowhere near any playoff games come October.   It didn’t seem that I had much invested in the matter of who won this playoff;  but I sort of wanted the Giants to win after their valiant come-back from 13 ½ games behind the Dodgers to catch them at the wire.  (Hence the best-of-three playoff games to decide the NL pennant winner.)  My father, who was a less-than-fully-dedicated Dodgers fan (he liked Robinson and Reese mostly; later Hodges and Campy)  was nonetheless properly contemptuous of this reasoning.  He sat watching the TV from a corner of the room, as if ready to flee whenever that might be necessary, saying little.  He had seen so many Dodgers’ near-misses already that he was reluctant to watch this final game.

I had just started high-school.  Few if any of my new classmates cared or knew much about baseball.  So I had biked home early to catch the end of the game (Game Three).  TV was still quite new to Toronto at the time;  and our ugly-as-sin home-made set was one of the few around.  The broadcast must have been from Buffalo,  but I suppose it *could* have been CBC--not sure.  Anyway I was rewarded by being able to peer at the miracle of a grainy black-and-white image for the last two or three innings.  Only two (maybe three) cameras were used, so sight-lines were limited.  But I can still see the afternoon shadows at the Polo Grounds, and Thomson’s shot slicing into the stands under the overhang in left field.  And the place going absolutely wild.  (Andy Pafko, one of my ex-Cubs heroes was the left-fielder, staring helplessly at the ball's flight.)  It was one of those moments that at first you don’t quite believe.  A fairy-tale that did come true.  My father’s worst fears were realized.  Even then, I did feel sorry for him.

I was in the stands at SkyDome for Joe’s magical homer in 1993, which was a similar moment.  But of course I was older then--not the boy I had been in 1951.  Nothing is ever quite the same as when you were a boy.

Brilliant.

Nothing is ever quite the same as when you were a boy.

Now that's some solid wisdom for everyone..

'scuse me while I get back to work to support my family :-)

That was great; thanks Dewey.

I'd read your remembrance of Willie Mays' home run earlier today, but it was a bit of a long shot whether you'd have a personal recollection of Thomson's. So your story was great, especially the local angle.

I was in the stands at SkyDome for Joe’s magical homer in 1993, which was a similar moment.  But of course I was older then--not the boy I had been in 1951.  Nothing is ever quite the same as when you were a boy.

I was there for Joe's home run too (and Alomar's off Eckersley in Oakland the year before), and recognize the connection. And while my parents had an early TV in Toronto too, I'm afraid my earliest TV memory is just the Cisco Kid, not Bobby Thomson :-(

Good call-out JohnL, great, great story Dewey. I have added a tease to your comment to the feature area -- between my New York uncle and your Canada-local angle, I think we've covered the best of possible comments. Now who's next? :-)

Of course, in the book Brooklyn which I referred to yesterday and takes place mostly in 1952, there are multiple references to the "tragedy" of the prior year.  There have been Subway Series and the like since then, but I imagine that nothing quite compares to baseball in New York in the 1950s.

Thanks for that story, Dewey. Great stuff.

The Colm Toibin book sounds interesting, Mike.  My daughter has it:  I must borrow it.  (I have read Dan Delillo’s *Underworld*, whose long first section is centred upon the game,  and on what he imagines happens to Thomson’s  home-run ball. That section of the book has also been published separately as *Pafko At the Wall*.)  And  Mick’s story of the stairwell-passers reminded me of the historian,  Doris Kearns Goodwin’s reminiscence in Ken Burns’s TV series,  about the consequences for the local butcher of being discovered to be a clandestine Giants fan in her very Dodgers neighborhood.

The intense rivalry between the Giants and Dodgers was further heightened in 1951 by the fact that Giant’s manager, Leo Durocher, had only three years earlier been manager of the Dodgers.  Mike is right,  it’s almost impossible to imagine the ferocity of that old rivalry.  These two teams were in the same city, the same league, only a subway ride away!   Great stuff.

Let me add my props to Dewey, as well.

No, I wasn't there, for the same reason I wasn't at the great 1912 finale either. But I do have something planned on the 1951 season - I only review seasons that happened before I was born - and, as you can imagine, this game will feature. So I've been thinking about this game quite a bit.

I've been working on the 1951 project so long now that play-by-play data for the Thomson game has become available at retrosheet and baseball-reference. When I started work on it, I actually had to go to the library and look up microfilm of the New York Times.

Thomson was looking for redemption that last at bat. He'd had an interesting afternoon. With one out and a runner aboard in the second, he'd hit what he thought was a double into the LF corner and went charging into second - only to discover Whitey Lockman had stopped at second rather than go to third base (it was only about 280 feet down the LF line). Thomson was put out on the basepath, and Mays lined out to end the threat, Dodgers still ahead 1-0. Thomson's sac fly in the bottom of the seventh finally tied the game (Mays then hit into a DP to end the inning) - but in the top of the eighth, with one run on and baserunners on the corners, Pafko singled off Thomson's glove at third base to give the Brooklyns an insurance run (they'd get yet another in the inning as well. Thomson, of course, was an outfielder, who'd only been moved to third base in late July of that season.)

And Willie Mays was on deck when Thomson faced Branca, and he'd had a bad game (0-3) and a bad playoff (1-10). Mays would later reveal that he was desperately hoping that Thomson would end the game, one way or another, just so Mays would not have to come up to hit. He was terrified of the moment, and shocked and humilated by the knowledge that he was terrified of the moment. He spent a long time thinking about it afterwards, and swore to himself that it would never happen to him again.

Sorry for the repeated posts:  the old memory is ticking away now.

Ages ago, when giants walked the earth, there was no internet.  But for baseball fans in the 1950’s there was *The Sporting News* (TSN).   A weekly tabloid publication (by which I mean it was shaped like the Toronto Sun, and sometimes had almost as many pages) that covered baseball--major leagues, all minor leagues, sometimes Mexican leagues.  With box-scores,  and stats, stats, stats.  And stories.  In those days it was called The Bible of Baseball, and it ignored other sports.  You could see just how Smokey Burgess was tearing things up down in Nashville; and Clarence Maddern and Chuck Connors out in the PCL.  Bob Borkowski (Des Moines, Nashville) was going to be the next Ted Williams.  Or maybe Carl Sawatski (Nashville)--a name to be reckoned with.   And, maybe best of all, TSN had Willard Mullin, a truly great cartoonist/caricaturist whose images of “Dem Bums” (the Dodgers) helped make the Giants/Dodgers rivalry so widely celebrated.  TSN has passed through several owners in recent times, and I’ve lost touch with its current version.  But I used to keep all my copies:  drove my mother batty (appropriately,  I suppose).  When we moved I insisted that if my TSNs didn’t move with us, then I didn’t either.  Somewhere I still have a few dried out, yellow-papered copies from the late 1940’s early 1950’s. 

All this got started by Magpie’s excellent news that he’s still at work on 1951.  If old copies of TSN are available for view anywhere online, they would be a great help (or maybe, hindrance).

Charlie Dressen was in a bit of a pickle in that fateful ninth inning.

First of all, Don Newcombe was completely gassed. The previous Wednesday, he'd pitched a CG victory against the Braves. On Saturday (two days rest), he'd thrown a shutout against the Phillies. The very next day, he pitched 5.2 innings out of the bullpen in the 14 inning season finale. He'd had two days rest since that performance for this playoff game.

Pitchers were men back then, weren't they? (Newcombe would get the next two years off, as it happened - the Army came calling.)

Anyway, Branca and Clem Labine were up in the Brooklyn pen, but Labine couldn't get loose. Which left Branca, of course, who had already lost 5 games to the Giants in 1951. Two days earlier, Thomson himself had homered off Branca in the first playoff game.

One out, runners on second and third, a 4-2 lead. Walk Thomson, set up the force, pitch to the struggling rookie (he wasn't quite Willie Mays back then, not yet anyway.)

Well, pitching to Thomson couldn't have turned out any worse than it did. But very few managers will choose to put the go-ahead run on base, and for good reason.

I'm not as old as Dewey, but I'm old enough to remember when the Sporting News was absolutely essential. Required reading, the only thing going. It functioned almost like a weekly, print version of ESPN. There would be news on every team - I believe they would be contributed by one of the local beat writers (memory, shaky). And mountains of numbers.

Nothing so irrelevant as the number of times a batter had walked, of course.

Well, if you're a batter vs. pitcher guy, you might have wanted to stay away from Branca at all costs.  Prior to the fateful blast, Thomson had 22 PAs against Branca, had 6 hits, including a double, a triple and two homers, three walks, an HBP, a sacrifice and two strikeouts.