The Daily News
Tuesday, August 17th 2010, 4:22 PM
http://www.nydailynews.com/
New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thomson, left, and Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca fool around on Oct. 10, 1951. The two are forever linked because of Thomson's memorable home run.(File Photo)
It was always so much more than other baseball moments, whether the moment involved a famous home run or not; more than Mookie and Bill Buckner, more than Mike Torrez and Bucky Dent and their own October home run one day at Fenway Park in 1978. It was always different with Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca, because what they had was a unique and unforgettable moment in baseball time, Oct. 3, 1951, the Dodgers vs. the Giants at the Polo Grounds and what became known, forever, as The Shot Heard 'Round the World.
There was Branca, the Brooklyn Dodger who threw the pitch, and Thomson, the New York Giant who hit it and won the pennant, won the pennant, won the pennant, as Russ Hodges kept yelling that day. One moment, the two of them, joined forever until Thomson finally died Monday night in Savannah, Ga., at the age of 86.
The two of them had made it through all the anniversaries of the three-run shot that Thomson hit that afternoon, all of the pictures preserved in black and white for history, everything preserved except the ball, the one truly great missing piece of baseball memorabilia. Somehow that made the moment even better, somehow made it more epic, as if the ball went over the wall and disappeared into memory and imagination and lore forever.
Thomson and Branca. Branca and Thomson. Now just Branca.
All the anniversaries of that home run. Somehow, incredibly, the next one, in October of next year, will be 60.
"I've been saying the same thing over and over for years," Thomson told me once, with Branca sitting at the table with us at Westchester Country Club. "All it meant at the time was that we beat the Dodgers."
He thought so in the moment. At the time. Until he understood how his home run had become frozen in time. One pitch and one swing and two New York teams and only one of them going to the World Series. The Dodgers were ahead in the last inning of the last game of a best-of-three series for the National League pennant, that close to going to the Series to play the Yankees. Because the whole baseball world was New York in those days, in the '50s. Then Thomson jumped on a high pitch and hit that three-run shot and then was skipping around the bases, bounding around the bases, and Hodges was yelling and nothing would ever be the same, for either of them.
There would be a moment years later, when I had taken my friend Pete Hamill to Vero Beach on the day before pitchers and catchers would report to Dodgertown for spring training. Hamill is from Brooklyn, of course, and would never root for the Los Angeles Dodgers because they weren't the Brooklyn Dodgers, and I joked that spring that it was time for him to drive up to Vero with me from West Palm Beach and just finally give it up.
We were talking to Tommy Lasorda at little Holman Stadium that day and Hamill looked down and saw Roy Campanella sitting in his wheelchair, in the shade down the right field line, excused himself and went down to talk to him. When Hamill got out to right field, Campanella said, "You're from Brooklyn, right?"
Pete said he was, and how did Campanella know?
"Because guys your age, they're always from Brooklyn," Campanella said.
And one thing Brooklyn guys never got over was The Shot Heard 'Round the World. By the time of the 35th anniversary, when I got Thomson and Branca together for a piece in the Daily News Sunday magazine, Thomson understood that he'd done a bit more than beat the Dodgers that day in '51.Said he really began to understand better when he got home to Staten Island that day.
Thomson said, "My brother Jim said, 'Do you realize what you've done?' I laughed and said, 'Don't ask me such a silly question. I was there.' But Jim wouldn't let me go. He said, 'No, no, Bob. Don't you see that something like what you did might never happen again?'"
In so many ways, it never did. Oh, there have been home runs since then, famous ones, even before the steroid years. There was Bill Mazeroski to end the '60 World Series and Joe Carter to hit another walk-off more than 30 years later to win a Series for the Blue Jays against the Phillies. There was Dent's home run and Kirk Gibson's to beat the A's in Game 1 of the '88 World Series and Roger Maris' 61st and the one Ted Williams hit in his last at-bat and the one the great Henry Aaron hit to pass Babe Ruth.
None was as mythic and romantic as Thomson's shot.
The one heard 'round the world.
That day at Westchester Country Club in 1986, home turf for a wonderful man named Ralph Branca because he and his wife Ann lived there, I knew what everyone had known about them since the ball went over the left field wall at the Polo Grounds and disappeared: That it had always been a lot better, in this two-man act of theirs, the dance they had danced for so long, to be Thomson, not Branca.
The guy who hit it instead of the guy who threw the pitch.
"You must be awfully sick of it," I said to Ralph Branca.
"I take it as it comes," Branca said in a quiet voice. "If I feel like getting into it, I do. If I don't, I don't. You find out a lot about people by who brings it up and who doesn't."
I asked Branca, who became my friend that day, what he remembered best about Oct. 3, 1951. Even Don DeLillo wrote about the moment, so elegantly later, in a brilliant piece originally published in Harper's, called "Pafko at the Wall."
"I remember the parking lot," Branca said. "I remember going out to the parking lot. Ann was in the car with a friend of ours, Father Paul Rowley from Fordham. And I said to Father Rowley, 'Why me? Why did this have to happen to me?' And Father Rowley said, 'God gave you this cross to bear because you're strong enough to bear it.'"
He always was, over all the years, all the times when the two men were together at card shows and golf tournaments and dinners, and it was much more fun to answer the questions about the moment if you were the guy who hit the ball over the wall. Even when it came out much later that the Giants had been stealing Dodger signs, or so the story went, a story that tried to drive one more wedge between two old men.
"It's fun for me to talk about," Thomson said. "Not him."
One home run, hit nearly 60 years ago. One moment, shared by these two remarkable men. Only one of them left standing now. One left to tell the story of the most famous home run in baseball history.
‘Shot Heard Round the World’ Was Just a Homer to Thomson
By DAVE ANDERSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
August 17, 2010
Bobby Thomson, center with hand raised, after his home run against the Dodgers sent the Giants to the World Series.(AP)
Bobby Thomson always seemed more embarrassed than proud of what he did on Oct. 3, 1951, at the Polo Grounds.
“It was just a home run,” he would often say in his shy, soft voice.
Just a home run that won the National League pennant for the New York Giants in the ninth inning of the decisive third game of their playoff with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the “shot heard round the world.”
Just a home run that has endured for more than half a century as a reminder of the teams’ rivalry, six years before both franchises skipped town for California.
Just a home run for a 5-4 victory off an up-and-in fastball on a 0-1 count that the Dodgers right-hander Ralph Branca wishes he had thrown low and outside.
Just a home run that will continue to be part of his name long after his death on Monday at age 86 in Savannah, Ga.
Just a home run that the Staten Island Scot never gloated about, never used to embarrass Branca. When the San Francisco Giants planned to commemorate its 50th anniversary, he declined to attend the festivities.
“They were going to have Ralph and me ride around in a cart,” he said at the time. “Ralph doesn’t need that.”
Just a home run that for decades displayed Thomson and Branca as genuine friends signing countless baseballs and photos at countless memorabilia shows.
But until that three-run home run disappeared into the lower left-field stands for a 5-4 victory, coincidentally at about five minutes to 4 that afternoon, Thomson and Branca never had a word for each other. In that era, when Leo Durocher, the Giants manager, and Jackie Robinson traded dugout insults, when Sal Maglie, the Giants ace known as the Barber, shaved the chins of Dodgers hitters, the teams simply did not like each other.
“I never spoke to any of the Dodgers,” Thomson once told me, “except for an occasional hello to Gil Hodges.”
Not many know that the Dodgers had only themselves to blame for Thomson’s wearing a Giants uniform. When Thomson, born in Glasgow, was growing up on Staten Island, he played for the Dodger Rookies, a sandlot team sponsored by the Dodgers organization, with the stipulation that he not sign with any other major league club without allowing the Dodgers to match the offer.When the Giants offered Thomson $100 a month to join their minor league system, the Dodgers weren’t interested in matching it. After serving in World War II as an Army Air Forces bombardier, Thomson moved quickly through the Giants’ farm system. As a rookie center fielder in 1947, he hit 29 homers. Two seasons later, he hit 27 homers with 109 runs batted in and a .309 average.
But when the struggling Giants promoted a young center fielder, Willie Mays, from their Minneapolis farm team early in the 1951 season, Durocher transferred Thomson to third base, a move that on Sept. 9 at Ebbets Field would affect the Giants’ chase of the Dodgers in that pennant race.
With the Giants leading, 2-1, in the bottom of the eighth inning and Robinson taking a long lead off third base, Thomson snatched Andy Pafko’s hot grounder near the third-base line, tagged Robinson and whipped the ball to Whitey Lockman at first. Double play, inning over. When the Giants completed that 2-1 victory, they were five and a half games behind instead of seven and a half games out.
“That’s the greatest play that I’ve ever seen a third baseman make,” Durocher said later.
Thomson hit 32 homers and drove in 101 runs that season, but without that double play that he started as a third baseman, the Giants might not have forced a pennant playoff with their 37-7 finish. And without a playoff, Thomson would not have hit the home run that many historians and fans still consider the most memorable moment in baseball history.
That moment soured somewhat about a decade ago when The Wall Street Journal reported that several ’51 Giants confirmed published reports in earlier years that they had used a club employee with a high-powered telescope in Durocher’s center-field office at the Polo Grounds to steal signs from opposing catchers.
The signs were relayed by a buzzer system to the bullpen — no buzz for a fastball, one buzz for a breaking ball — where a third-string catcher, Sal Yvars, held up a ball for a fastball or tossed a ball in the air for a breaking ball. When I asked Thomson in 2001 at his home in Watchung, N.J., if he had watched Yvars for a sign when he faced Branca in the ninth inning on Oct. 3, 1951, he said:
“I was in no mind-set to think about Sal Yvars. Durocher had asked us, I think in July, ‘Who wants the sign?’ I used the signs off and on,” meaning during the season, “but not when I hit the home run. Like I say, I was in no mind-set to think about Sal Yvars.”
Over the years, I often played in Bobby Thomson’s annual charity golf outing at Plainfield Country Club in New Jersey to benefit arthritis research. After the last tournament, in 2007, before he moved to Savannah, I received a thank-you letter from him, as many others did. Next to his signature, he wrote: “Dave, you were with us from the start. Thank you so much. In case you’re interested, I did not get a sign. Bobby T.”
Miracle of Coogan's Bluff
by Red Smith
New York Herald Tribune
October 4, 1951
http://deadspin.com/
Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.Down on the green and white and earth-brown geometry of the playing field, a drunk tries to break through the ranks of ushers marshalled along the foul lines to keep profane feet off the diamond. The ushers thrust him back and he lunges at them, struggling in the clutch of two or three men. He breaks free and four or five tackle him. He shakes them off, bursts through the line, runs head on into a special park cop who brings him down with a flying tackle.
Here comes a whole platoon of ushers. They lift the man and haul him, twisting and kicking, back across the first-base line. Again he shakes loose and crashes the line. He is away, weaving out toward center field where cheering thousands are jammed beneath the windows of the Giants' clubhouse.
At heart, our man is a Giant, too. He never gave up.
From center field comes burst upon burst of cheering. Pennants are waving, uplifted fists are brandished, hats are flying. Again and again, the dark clubhouse windows blaze with the light of photographers' flash bulbs. Here comes that same drunk out of the mob, back across the green turf to the infield. Coat tails flying, he runs the bases, slides into third. Nobody bothers him now.
And the story remains to be told, the story of how the Giants won the 1951 pennant in the National League....The tale of their barreling run through August and September and into October....On the final day of the season when they won the championship and started home with it from Boston, to hear on the train how the dead, defeated Dodgers had risen from the ashes in the Philadelphia twilight....Of the three-game playoff in which they won, and lost and were losing again with one out in the ninth inning yesterday when — Oh, why bother?
Maybe this is the way to tell it: Bobby Thomson, a young Scot from Staten Island, delivered a timely hit yesterday in the ninth inning of an enjoyable game of baseball before 34,320 witnesses in the Polo Grounds....Or perhaps this is better:
"Well," said Whitey Lockman, standing on second base in the second inning of yesterday's playoff game between the Giants and Dodgers.
"Ah, there," said Bobby Thomson, pulling into the same station after hitting a ball to left field. "How've you been?"
"Fancy," Lockman said, "meeting you here!"
"Ooops!" Thomson said. "Sorry."
And the Giants' first chance for a big inning against Don Newcombe disappeared as they tagged him out. Up in the press section, the voices of Willie Goodrich came over the amplifiers announcing a macabre statistic: "Thomson has now hit safely in fifteen consecutive games." Just then the floodlights were turned on, enabling the Giants to see and count their runners on each base.It wasn't funny, though, because it seemed for so long that the Giants weren't going to get another chance like the one Thomson squandered by trying to take second base with a playmate already there. They couldn't hit Newcombe and the Dodgers couldn't do anything wrong. Sal Maglie's most splendorous pitching would avail nothing unless New York could match the run Brooklyn had scored in the first inning.
The story was winding up, and it wasn't the happy ending which such a tale demands. Poetic justice was a phrase without meaning.
Now it was the seventh inning and Thomson was up with runners on first and third, none out. Pitching a shutout in Philadelphia last Saturday night, pitching again in Philadelphia on Sunday, holding the Giants scoreless this far, Newcombe had now gone twenty-one innings without allowing a run.
He threw four strikes to Thomson. Two were fouled off out of play. Then he threw a fifth. Thomson's fly scored Monte Irvin. The score was tied. It was a new ball game.
Wait a moment, though. Here's Pee Wee Reese hitting safely in the eighth. Here's Duke Snider singling Reese to third. Here's Maglie, wild — pitching a run home. Here's Andy Pafko slashing a hit through Thomson for another score. Here's Billy Cox batting still another home. Where does his hit go? Where else? Through Thomson at third.
So it was the Dodgers ball game, 4 to 1, and the Dodgers' pennant. So all right. Better get started and beat the crowd home. That stuff in the ninth inning? That didn't mean anything.
A single by Al Dark. A single by Don Mueller. Irvin's pop-up. Lockerman's one-run double. Now the corniest possible sort of Hollywood schmaltz — stretcher bearers plodding away with an injured Mueller between them, symbolic of the Giants themselves.
There went Newcombe and here came Ralph Branca. Who's at bat? Thomson again? He beat Branca with a home run the other day. would Charlie Dressen order him walked, putting the winning run on base, to pitch to the dead-end kids at the bottom of the batting order? No, Branca's first pitch was called a strike.
The second pitch — well, when Thomson reached first base he turned and looked toward the left-field stands. Then he started jumping straight up in the air, again and again. Then he trotted around the bases, taking his time.
Ralph Branca turned and started for the clubhouse. The number on his uniform looked huge. Thirteen.
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