The Year Was 1951
The Giants were 13 games behind the Dodgers in the Pennant Race in August with 44 games left to play. At the end of the season, because of an extraordinary win streak by the Giants, the Dodgers and Giants (still in NY) had a three game playoff to decide who went to the World Series.
On Oct 3, 1951 Russ Hodges called this ballgame classic: (also known as The Shot Heard 'Round the World) This is the hit that Bobby Thompson made on Ralph Branca's pitch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrI7dVj90zs
Today at 4:10 PM Pacific Daylight Savings Time, today, October 3, 2010 (59 years later), The Giants won the National League Western Division championship over the San Diego Padres.
Stolen from wikipedia:
The game
The tiebreaker was not a playoff in the current postseason sense, but an extension of the regular season – game statistics counted in the season records (several one-game tiebreakers have been played under the same circumstances). It had to be played because the Giants and the crosstown rival Dodgers finished the regular season with identical 96-58 records.
On August 11, Brooklyn had held a 13½-game lead on the Giants, but the Giants turned around and won their next 16 games. While Brooklyn finished the season on a 26–22 clip, the Giants put together a streak almost unequalled in baseball history, winning 37 of the last 44 games, including the last seven in a row. Only a 14-inning victory over the Philadelphia Phillies, the previous year's league champions, on the last day of the regular season enabled the Dodgers to force the best-of-three-games showdown.
Brooklyn won the coin toss to decide home-field advantage in the series. Controversially, manager Charlie Dressen opted to play only the first game at home, rather than the last two; he reasoned that if the Dodgers won their only home game, they would need to win only one out of two on the road.
The Giants won the first game 3–1 at Ebbets Field, with Thomson spearheading the New York offense with a two-run home run off Branca. When the series moved to the Polo Grounds, the Dodgers won the second game 10-0 on a complete-game shutout by the rookie hurler Clem Labine.
For the third game, the Giants' 23-game winner Sal Maglie would face Brooklyn's Don Newcombe in a battle of aces. In the first inning, Jackie Robinson singled home Pee Wee Reese for the first run of the game. In the bottom of the seventh, Thomson tied the game with a sacrifice fly, scoring Monte Irvin. In the eighth, the Dodgers touched the exhausted Maglie for three runs and headed to the bottom of the ninth with an apparently secure 4–1 lead.
Newcombe, however, was showing the effects of overuse in the season's final days. He had pitched a complete game the previous Saturday, then thrown 5⅔ innings in relief the next day in the season finale. Pitching on only two days' rest and tiring badly, he attempted to take himself out of the game, only to have Robinson talk him into trying to finish the inning.
The Giants shortstop Alvin Dark singled to start the rally. As Bud Greenspan pointed out in Play It Again, Bud (p. 78-83), the Dodgers may have made a crucial strategic mistake. First baseman Gil Hodges was playing close to the base. But with a 3-run lead, the normal strategy would have been to position for a possible double play. With a large gap in the right side of the infield, Don Mueller placed a single through that gap, past the diving Gil Hodges, and Dark ran from first to third base. Instead of a possible rally-killing double play, the Dodgers found themselves facing the potential tying run with no outs. But with a chance to drive in a run, Irvin, who led the National League that year with 121 RBI, chased the first pitch and popped out (Greenspan argued that could have been the season-ending third out).
However, Whitey Lockman followed with a double down the left-field line, scoring Dark and advancing Mueller to third. Mueller slid awkwardly into the bag and broke his ankle, forcing the Giants to send in Clint Hartung to pinch-run for him. Dressen, the Brooklyn manager, finally pulled the spent Newcombe and went to the bullpen, where Ralph Branca and Carl Erskine were warming up. Dodger bullpen coach Clyde Sukeforth noticed Erskine bouncing his curve and instructed Dressen to bring Branca into the game. The move has bewildered baseball historians to this day (and, combined with the positioning of Hodges, was possibly at least the second questionable decision by Dressen that inning, and resulted in Sukeforth being fired shortly thereafter). Branca had pitched and lost Game 1 of the tiebreaker on a Thomson home run (something Dodgers' fans were painfully aware of at the time) and had given up several home runs that year to Thomson, who had hit 31 during the season. However, in Dressen's defense, he had few decently rested pitchers available; in the last regular-season game alone the Dodgers had sent seven men to the mound.
Branca's first pitch was a fastball down the middle for a strike. His second pitch was a fastball up and in to Thomson, intended as a setup for his planned next pitch, a breaking ball down and away. But Thomson yanked the fastball down the left-field line and toward the invitingly close outfield fence, with a foul line a mere 279 feet from home plate (unmarked), and a roll-up door in the 17-foot wall with a 315 marker posted, some 30 or 40 feet out from the foul line.
Andy Pafko, the Dodgers' left fielder, rushed toward the fence, thinking the rapidly sinking line drive might bounce off the wall. Instead, the ball disappeared into the stands for a game-ending three-run homer, just above the 315 marker. With one swing of Thomson's bat, the Giants had turned near-certain defeat into sudden victory and a pennant.
Seeing the ball disappear over the fence, Thomson hopped crazily around the bases, then disappeared into the mob of jubilant teammates who had gathered at home plate. The stunned Dodger players trudged off the field - all except Robinson. No doubt knowing of "the Merkle boner" 43 years earlier, he watched to be sure Thomson touched every base before he, too, headed for the clubhouse.
As has often been pointed out, waiting on deck to bat behind Thomson was a young man who would hit many home runs of his own: 20-year-old rookie Willie Mays.
[edit]The broadcasts
Several television and radio[2] broadcasters captured the moment for baseball fans in the New York City area and nationwide.[3] Excerpts from three radio accounts were played during the second hour of the October 6, 1991 installment of the Costas Coast to Coast syndicated radio show. Russ Hodges' call, which was the most famous of the three, was played last, but only to the extent of Thomson's climactic at bat. The segment of Red Barber's version started with the final out of the Dodgers' ninth and continued through both the live Schaefer Beer commercial read by his broadcast partner Connie Desmond and the entire bottom half of the inning. The portions from Gordon McLendon's broadcast included his buildup to the first pitch, Maglie's strikeout of Carl Furillo to start the game, Thomson's baserunning blunder in the bottom of the second and the decisive homer. Copies of the audio and/or visual of the telecast are currently not known to exist.
Some sources claim additional radio broadcasts were done by Al Helfer for the Mutual network, by Harry Caray for a network of Midwestern stations, by Buck Canel and Felo Ramírez for a Spanish language network, and by Nat Allbright in a studio re-creation for the Dodgers' secondary network in the South.[4][5][6]
[edit]Ernie Harwell
Ernie Harwell called the game for Giants television flagship WPIX—the independent station's broadcast was carried nationally on the NBC network, the first coast-to-coast live telecast of a Major League Baseball game—and his description of the home run was a simple shout of "It's gone!" almost at the moment Thomson's bat struck Branca's pitch. Harwell later admitted he had probably called it "too soon", but fortunately for him, the call proved to be correct. "And then," Harwell recalled, "the pictures took over."[7]
[edit]Red Barber
Meanwhile, Dodgers announcer Red Barber, calling the game for WMGM-AM, straightforwardly said, "Branca pumps, delivers - a curve, swung on and belted, deep shot to left field -- it is -- a HOME RUN! And the New York Giants win the National League pennant and the Polo Grounds goes wild!" This was followed by about a minute of amplified crowd noise. Barber, who was known for a relatively low-key play-by-play approach, later criticized the famous Hodges rendition as being questionable journalism.
[edit]Russ Hodges
Russ Hodges, broadcasting the game on WMCA-AM radio for Giants fans, seemed perhaps the least likely man to immortalize the play; the broadcast was not national and Hodges was considered calm-voiced rather than excitable. Nonetheless, it was his call that captured the suddenness and exultation of the home run:
“ Bobby Thomson... up there swingin'... He's had two out of three, a single and a double, and Billy Cox is playing him right on the third-base line... One out, last of the ninth... Branca pitches... Bobby Thomson takes a strike called on the inside corner... Bobby hitting at .292... He's had a single and a double and he drove in the Giants' first run with a long fly to center... Brooklyn leads it 4-2...Hartung down the line at third not taking any chances... Lockman with not too big of a lead at second, but he'll be runnin' like the wind if Thomson hits one... Branca throws... [audible sound of bat meeting ball]
There's a long drive... it's gonna be, I believe...THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT!! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! THE GIANTS WIN THE PENNANT! Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left-field stands! The Giants win the pennant and they're goin' crazy, they're goin' crazy! HEEEY-OH!!!'' [ten-second pause for crowd noise]
I don't believe it! I don't believe it! I do not believe it! Bobby Thomson... hit a line drive... into the lower deck... of the left-field stands... and this blame place is goin' crazy! The Giants! Horace Stoneham has got a winner! The Giants won it... by a score of 5 to 4... and they're pickin' Bobby Thomson up... and carryin' him off the field!
”
Ironically, the main reason the WMCA call was recorded and saved for posterity was because a Brooklyn-based fan asked his mother to record the end of game.[8] Urban legend says that Lawrence Goldberg was a Dodger fan who sought to torture a friend who was a Giants fan by capturing and replaying Russ Hodges' heartbreak from a Giants' loss. In reality, Goldberg himself had been a Giant fan since childhood.[8][9]
Ain't history great!
. Now did this guy dig any
