….Dodgers manage Chuck Dressen, when the Giants trailed by 13 ½ in July
“The Giants win the pennant…the Giants win the pennant…the Giants win the pennant.’’
Russ Hodges, Giants broadcaster, saying the words my father longed to hear.
The New York-New Jersey area was the last city in all of baseball to have three major league teams—the Yankees the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers. By 1951 they had divided their constituencies into three different worlds, Since the Yankees almost always won, they were the darlings of stockbrokers who also rooted for General Motors. Dodgers fans were always angry. They had a tinker toy-sized ball park (32,00 seats so tickets were harder to come by) and a fanatical hatred of all the cities other boroughs. And Giants fans had not celebrated a pennant since 1937. They were a collection of Biblical Jobs, praying like him for a miracle that had never come.
In mid-July of 1951 even my dad began to doubt them.
But suddenly it was as though the Giants had heard him and felt his pain. They went out and won 37 of their last 44 games to tie Brooklyn for first place and forced a three-game playoff. It was redemption for the time he had spent in the low leagues pursuing his own major league dream…redemption for hot summer nights on the front porch banging his ancient Phico radio when Buddy Kerr booted a grounder at shortstop… redemption for each time jenny Rucker took a called third strike…Redemption for every time the Giants finished behind the Cardinals ort the Reds or (God forbid) the Dodgers., I remember thinking with Newcombe pitching brilliantly and ahead in the ninthe,4-1 that my dad at home was about to demolish the old Philco radio.
But roughly 15 minutes before my dad’s dream turned into a head-on car cash, the Giants won and a guy born in Scotland and whose last game was played in Japan, was the improbable hero who hit the home run heard in any ball park from Little League to the bigs and this is how Bobby Thomson he remembered it for me years later in a one-on-one interview in his kitchen:
I remember I came in for our last at-bats and I threw my glove at the dugout floor, I felt we just weren’t good enough. The shadows were lengthening. We couldn’t even see what he was throwing.I knew we could not win.’’
But they did
Newk was tiring. The hits came. They sent in Ralph Branca but neither Bobby nor Leo knew it “.I was talking to Leo (Durocher) near home plate. Th crowd was so loud we didn’t hear the p.a. announcement and he told me `Bobby,if you ever hit a home run do it ‘now. And I thought `come on Leo get real.’ We talked and I never even saw Ralph warm up.
The Polo Grounds was a mad house. Branca’s first pitch was right down the middle, a called strike because Thomson stood just stood there“ I could hear our dugout groan in unison. It was a pitch I could have and should have hit.’’
Thomson swung at the second one. Swung? Hell, he nailed it. The ball headed briefly toward the foul line than the wind caught it and it curved further to the right. It dropped into the lower stand seats perhaps 320 feet away. It was neither a cheap home run nor a monster,
It wasn’t a home run trot. It wasn’t a rush of elation. I felt like I was soaring over the bases. I wasn’t even thinking about what I had done. When I turned for home I saw Alvin Dark jump into Leo’ arms. I was numb. It took another day to realize what I had done.’’
When the ball cleared the wall. I thought of my dad, I jumped up so quickly I knocked the table over and spilled beer on everyone, The excitement wasn’t for me . It was for my dad who in that instant retired Job in favor of Bobby Thomson. I ran for the bar’s only payphone. I knew he was elated when he married my mother and when my older sister was born. This was excitement with ruffles and flourishes. For him, this was revenge for years of countless curveballs that hung and rookie hot shots that crashed and burned on top of his dream.
It gave new meaning to the Yogi Berra catchphrase:
On Oct. 3, 1951 — 75 years ago tomorrow — Jerry Austin was in the second grade at P.S. 75 in the South Bronx, counting the minutes until he could run from the classroom. The night before, he had seen a headline about a big game that would air on TV. That “big game” was the Brooklyn Dodgers taking on the New York Giants in the third and final game of a tiebreaker playoff for the National League pennant.
There was only one problem:
“We didn’t have a TV,” Austin told MLB.com. “I didn’t know anybody who had a TV. My mother or father then said, ‘There’s a TV at the five-and-dime on Westchester Avenue.’”
Though he had first been taken on a trip to the Polo Grounds by his father a few years before, Austin was young enough that he didn’t quite understand what this contest was really all about. He just knew it was something important and he wanted to be a part of it.
“When school ends, I run to the five-and-dime, which is in the complete opposite direction from where I lived, because I heard they had a small TV to see this big event,” Austin recalled. “I really had no idea what it was.”
When he arrived at the store, a swarm of adults had already amassed around the small television screen, packed shoulder to shoulder like links in a fence.
“But I’m a little guy,” Austin said with a laugh. “I pushed myself to the front as Bobby Thomson comes to the plate.”
Austin stood on his tiptoes, watching the tiny television. At the Polo Grounds, 34,000 fans were watching, too. Across New York, millions more were following along on the television and radio. By the seventh inning, 90% of the area’s televisions were tuned to the game, while the Armed Forces Radio brought the game to U.S. servicemembers around the globe. So, when Bobby Thomson swung against Ralph Branca’s 0-1 pitch and launched a three-run home run to catapult the Giants into the World Series, the message went far beyond the Polo Grounds.
“The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!” Russ Hodges shouted as Thomson rounded the bases. His legendary call was amplified by simultaneous television and radio broadcasts, cementing the contest as the “then-most widely covered event in each medium’s history.”
“That was the first thing I saw, and people were going crazy,” Austin said. “I didn’t even realize what it was. From that day forward, I became a Giants fan, and I have not missed a World Series game since 1951.”
The stands weren’t even full at the Polo Grounds for baseball’s most famous home run. Only 34,320 fans entered the 55,000-seat stadium — perhaps deterred by a headline in the Herald Tribune on Sept. 28 claiming, “Giants have no tickets! Series oversubscribed.”
Seventy-five years later, with the players gone and most of the fans in the ballpark no longer with us, the memories belong to the fans who were watching and listening from afar. With help from Gary Mintz at the New York Giants Preservation Society, we found people like Bruce Podwal, a then-12-year-old in the Bronx who was getting ready for bar mitzvah lessons when he turned on the radio.
“The radio was on as I’m changing and getting ready,” Podwal said. “I just couldn’t leave, so I heard him hit that home run. Obviously, I was excited.”
Unfortunately for Podwal, while the fans in the park were going wild together, he instead carried the joy alone.
“Nobody was home. My brother hadn’t gotten home from school. My father was at work, my mother might have been shopping,” Podwal said. “I was alone, so I now had to walk the three, four blocks to the rabbi’s house with nobody to share my feelings. And the rabbi didn’t care really.”
Herb Silkowitz was a rare Giants fan in Brooklyn, holding out against his best friend Richie Klayman’s efforts to convert him to the Yankees. The 8-year-old had spent the summer poring over box scores and mirroring his heroes’ batting stances in stickball games, watching as the Giants slowly rose up the standings day by day.
Come Oct. 3, he was ready.
“I went to Cunningham Junior High School, which was right around the corner, so I was home in three minutes,” Silkowitz said. “When he hit the home run, like a lunatic, I ran out, up and down East 16th Street, screaming, ‘The Giants won the pennant! The Giants won the pennant!’ I basically emulated Russ Hodges’ call.”
Charles Sachs was another Giants fan who experienced the same thrill across the river in Bayonne, N.J., surrounded by Dodgers fans who had fallen in love with the team’s stars like Duke Snider, Gil Hodges and Jackie Robinson.
The Giants, meanwhile, “were a patchwork of not very good ballplayers,” Sachs joked.
As he sat watching, seeing the innings click by and the Giants behind, he worried that the team’s late-season sprint would all be for naught.
“It’s terrible to have come so far, to come so close and to not win is a horror,” Sachs said. “I’m sitting there in my folks’ living room, looking at a black-and-white television set, saying ‘I’m going to go outside and these Dodgers fans are going to be all over me like you will never believe.
“Then the miracle happens,” Sachs said. He grabbed a Turkish towel from the bathroom, ran outside and threw it at his neighbor, friend and ardent Dodgers supporter, Howard Adelman.
“Here, it’s a crying towel,” Sachs told him. “Go cry.”
The two remain close friends today — even though Sachs still brings up the moment every chance as he gets.
“He came running out and he was very demonstrative. He threw a towel at me,” Adelman confirmed. “As sad as it was for us, there was a little levity because the Giants deserved to win. They beat [the Dodgers] fair and square. I don’t think I ever considered changing a friendship because of the results of a baseball game.”
In New Haven, Conn., 13-year-old Barry Cutler — nicknamed “Yogi Barry” for his baseball fanaticism as he was always seen carrying a ball and glove with him — became a neighborhood celebrity thanks to Thomson’s blast. After calling his mother in tears, he walked to the local grocery store.
“All of a sudden, they broke out in cheers as I walked in,” Cutler said. “It was like I hit it, like I was rounding third base and they’re cheering for me.”
He then walked down the neighborhood’s main street, receiving applause at the barber shop, the dry cleaners and from commuters on the bus.
“People started waving to me,” Cutler said. “It was like a personal event.”
The contest even helped hook future sportswriting giants, too.
Lyle Spatz, now a Seymour Medal-winning author and longtime SABR chairman, was then a young Dodgers fan who had considered going to the game with a friend, making the long train trip up to the Polo Grounds for the first time.
“I’m thankful I didn’t,” Spatz deadpanned.
Instead, he went to school, getting score updates as he passed friends in the hallways in between classes. Finally, when the bell rang after the last period, Spatz and his friends gathered around a red Emerson portable radio. “We headed to the stairwell to leave school and it happened,” Spatz said. “I was stunned.”
Jerry Izenberg, who wrote for the Newark Star-Ledger for more than 50 years and has penned more than a dozen books, was early in his career on that day in 1951. He had been indoctrinated into Giants fandom thanks to his father, a dye factory worker, and saw just how a baseball team could help change a person.
“My father’s five years younger all of a sudden,” Izenberg remembered. “I’m rooting for my father.”
Even still, Izenberg couldn’t bear to watch with his father that night, the stress would be too much. Instead, he headed to a local college bar he frequented to watch the contest.
“They’re losing, and I’m saying, ‘Well, that’s destiny,’” Izenberg said. “I want to explain to my father that there are three kinds of fans in New York, which was the only three-team city in America. Yankees fans who are all stockbrokers; Dodger fans, who are all crazy; and Giant fans who were the rebirth of Job.’”
But when Adam Pafko looked up at the wall and watched as Thomson’s fly soared into the stands, “Dodger fans were crying, I was jumping around, and my father was ecstatic,” Izenberg recalled.
While Thomson’s home run is the most iconic moment from 1951, that wasn’t the actual end of the baseball season. The victory meant that the Giants then had to face the Yankees in the World Series. In a sign of the baseball gods’ sick sense of humor, Thomson even came up in the ninth inning of the deciding Game 6, with two runners on and the Giants trailing 4-2 — just as they were when he sent Branca’s pitch into the stands and his name into eternity.
This time, however, his fly ball didn’t create pandemonium, it was only a sacrifice fly. One batter later, and the series was over: The Yankees were champions, a fact that is almost forgotten today.
“The World Series almost felt anticlimactic,” Cutler said. “After Thomson’s home run, I ran out of adrenaline.”
As the years go on, fewer and fewer people are left who witnessed the most famous home run in baseball history. For them, though, the memory can catapult them directly to another time and place.
“I remember it like I was 14 years old,” Sachs said. “It was a fantastic moment. In my opinion, the greatest baseball moment ever.”
On Saturday, Silkowitz will do what he has for so many decades: He’ll listen to the game once again. The stadium is gone, the players have passed, but as long as there are people left to remember it, the moment will never end.
“I have the three calls on audio tape,” Silkowitz said. “Les Keiter, Red Barber and I have the entire game from Gordon McLendon. The whole day is dedicated just to Bobby Thomson.”
OCTOBER 4, 1951 In the opening game of the World Series‚ the first all-black outfield in major league history makes its appearance when Monte Irvin, Willie Mays and Hank Thompson take the field for the Giants at Yankee Stadium. Leo Durocher, in a curious move, replaces the previously injured outfielder Don Mueller in right field with Hank Thompson, a third baseman by trade, and uses veteran outfielder Bobby Thomson at the hot corner. (Nationalpastime.com)
OCTOBER 3, 1951 At 3:58PM, our world as Giants fans will forever change!! In Game 3 of National League play-off series at the Polo Grounds, Bobby Thompson’s ‘Shot Heard Around the World’ beats the Dodgers in the bottom of the ninth and the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant. (Nationalpastime.com)
OCTOBER 2, 1954 The NY Giants will their final championship in NY as they defeated the Cleveland Indians 4 games to none. The Giants complete the World Series sweep of the Indians when Don Liddle beats Bob Lemon, 7-4. The Tribe, who had not lost four consecutive games this year, completed the regular season with a 111-43 record, establishing an American League mark for victories. (Nationalpastime.com)
SEPTEMBER 29, 1954 Willie Mays makes ‘The Catch’, an amazing over-the-shoulder grab, robbing Vic Wertz of an extra hit. Almost forgotten by fans, other than Giants fans, is later Dusty Rhodes becomes the second player in World Series player to end a game with a homer. The Giants pinch-hitter’s walk-off three-run home run off Bob Lemon beats the Indians 5-2 in Game 1 of the Fall Classic. (Nationalpastime.com)
SEPTEMBER 29, 1957 The Giants play their last ever home game as the NY Giants in the Polo Grounds. They lose to the Pirates before 11,000 hearty fans. Truly the End of an Era in NY Baseball lore.
SEPTEMBER 28, 1919 In the first game of a twin bill on the last day of the season, the Giants need only 51 minutes to defeat the Phillies, 6-1. The Polo Grounds contest is the shortest nine-inning game ever played in the major leagues. (Nationalpastime.com)
SEPTEMBER 27, 1928 At the Polo Grounds, the Giants unveil bronze tablets in memory of two former players Christy Mathewson and Ross Youngs. The future Hall of Famers were much beloved and respected by their manager John McGraw, a tyrant in the dugout who was known to berate his ballplayers.(Nationalpastime.com)
SEPTEMBER 23, 1908 Fred Merkle’s failure to touch second after an apparent game-winning hit by Bridwell scoring McCormick from third costs the Giants a 2-1 win over the Cubs as the ump calls him out and rules the game a tie. Merkle’s ‘boner’ will eventually cost the Giants the flag. (Nationalpastime.com)
SEPTEMBER 23, 1956 Ozzie Virgil becomes the first Dominican to reach the majors. The 23-year old Monte Cristi native, who will also see his son catch in the big leagues, plays third base for the Giants.(Nationalpastime.com)
