Ah, ‘dem lovable bums
I’d wager a sawbuck or even a tenner and give 4-1 odds that if you were a baseball fan growing up in NY during the years between 1935 and 1957, you were either a Yankees fan or a Dodgers fan. The Giants? The Lost Tribe. People love a perennial winner – ergo, the Yankees. The decided preference for the Dodgers over the Giants is not so easy to explain.
The Giants appeared in 15 World Series, winning 5, whereas the Dodgers played in 9 Series and won only in 1955. In short, the Giants were nearly always better. Still, the Giants do not command the nostalgia the Dodgers do. Nor did they ever win the hearts and minds of fans in the glory days. Manhattan, unlike the Bronx and Brooklyn, is not a community. Players for the Dodgers actually made their homes in Brooklyn and fans rode the trolleys to get to the games. (The Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, as they used to be.) In the 30s, the Dodgers were the good-natured butts of jokes. Babe Herman caught balls on his head instead of in his glove. (In truth, it may have happened once but it is the stuff of legends.) Everyone laughed with and at the Dodgers. Hilda Chester showed up for all the games and rang a cowbell and the Brooklyn Sym-Phony pep band played on. It was an age of “peanuts and crackerjacks and take me out to the ballgame.” 60 cents got you in and, if you had the cash, $1.25 got you a damn good seat.
In truth, there was nothing wrong with the Giants. But who were these guys? We knew where Gil Hodges lived but does anybody know where Willie Mays lived in the off-season? Jackie Robinson and Duke Snider made their careers in Brooklyn but Willie Mays played twice as long in San Francisco than in the Polo Grounds. Love him, if you want, but he is first and foremost a San Francisco Giant.
The Giants had one supreme moment, I will grant you – the celebrated shot heard round the world – that brought them from the brink of disaster to the most incredible rally in baseball history. That was the home run Bobby Thomson hit off Ralph Branca in 1953 that permitted the Dodgers to do what they so often did – snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory. The Giants won the pennant and prepared the Dodgers for their exit to Los Angeles.
You can make that moment one of the legendary incidents in baseball history but it is not enough to make legends out of the NY Giants. Where did they play anyway? Where was the Polo Grounds? My guess is that not one in ten NY baseball fans could have found his way to that stadium without stopping to get traffic instructions three times.
The Giants were the Odd Man Out. I know Brooklyn Dodgers fans who regard Walter O’Malley, the evil architect of the Dodgers relocation to the west coast, as worse than Hitler. They mean it. But who among Giants fans feels that the Giants betrayed them by going westward? Go! Good riddance.
BROOKLYN!
Let it ring out loud and clear. When Susan Hayward toured with the USO during World War II, she would begin her act with a scream: Is anybody here from Brooklyn? Thousands of soldiers would go wild with delight, including many who never came close to the spot. What kind of greeting would Susan have gotten had she screamed out, “Is anybody here from the Amsterdam Avenue neighborhood in Manhattan”?
So, it’s the good times we will remember whenever we remember the way it was.
For a wonderful trip down Memory Lane, CLICK HERE,
Sid:
Yes, to everything you say, but on the shot heard around the world, what happened to the ball? I am one of the very few people on earth who knows–or cares.
Ed
The Lovable Bums were okay for the hometown crowd. The Yankees were always an institution, so as a Bronx boy I couldn’t really get too excited. But when I arrived in Detroit in 1965 I lived in the shadow of Briggs Stadium–and I’m an old-time union guy (UAW, Local #212). I was there in ’68 and again in ’84. I adopted Detroit, and I adopted the Tigers…and they adopted me.
I was with the old crowd that grew up in Corktown (remember Sheila Cockrel on the Detroit Common Council? She was originally Sheila Murphy–a real red-header heartbreaker–in high school she had a gang called the stilettos, and it wasn’t named after their heels. It was more or less a girl youth gang of the aging Purple Gang).
When I was in prison at FCI McKean, PA, so was Denny McClain (in the camp).
The father’s of several of those kids worked at Tiger Stadium. We’d go thru the line with fake paper in our hand… I saw the big winning series. I saw Willie Horton throw an unbelieveable against-the-wall catch from left field for the catcher to tag the runner from third. I saw–unfortunately–when some bozo hit Rocky Colavito off the head with a Stroh’s beer bottle in right field. And I got there just in time to watch the last of Tiget Stadium get torn down. NICK.
First, I thought a sawbuck was a ten dollar bill. A five dollar bill was a fin, at least in Dee-troit.
I think you his the nail on the head in your analysis. The Cubs and the Dodgers were viewed as neighborhood teams, not so the Giants and White Sox. If you’re going to pull for a team you identify with Manhattan, you are going to pick a winner like the Yanks (even if they do play in the Bronx). I think it hurt the Giants that they played in the Polo Grounds, a field hardly conducive to the intimate appreciation of baseball, unlike Fenway, Wrigley, Briggs Stadium and Ebbets Field. Baseball is meant to be fan-friendly, and the ump and opponents should be able to hear your insults.
Interestingly, probably the second most remembered Giants moment was created by the very nature of the Polo Grounds: Mays’ basket catch against Wertz and the Indians. I won a buck (unsawed) from my father when I bet the Giants would beat Cleveland’s great pitching. The Giants won in four. I was nine years old. My father was pissed.
I was and am a Yankee fan. I picked them up during their 19-game winning streak in 1947. I always root for the likely winner. Vicarious success is my style.
Sid: How embarrassing! Thomson hit the HR off Branca in 1951, not 1953. (For that faux pas, Abe Stark is going to expel you from the Brownsville Boys’ Club.) Ed: You know what happened to the ball? Will you tell us if it exists? It’s the freaking Holy Grail! Anyway, the Yankees then treated the Giants as equal opportunity victims, beating them in six games. It was the last year for DiMag and the first for Mantle and Mays. I spent the summer working as a shipping clerk in a windowless warehouse for the minimum wage (75 cents an hour, which still counts toward my Social Security payments), but I spent weekends in the 60-cent seats at the Stadium and Ebbetts Field. I went to the Polo Grounds once in my life. I knew one Giant fan in Brownsville. He was brilliant, but eccentric. Might have been Nozick. He knew the stats for Giant pitchers like Clint Hartung and Larry Jansen. We tried not to look him in the eye because it might have encouraged him to tell us Dave Koslo’s E.R.A.. Pete Hamill says O’Malley was (and maybe still is) the most hated man in New York history.
Steve, it isn’t aural dyslexia at work when Sid distinguishes between a sawbuck and a tenner. He’s kidding. He knows they’re the same. The catch Mays made on the Wertz drive was an over-the-head one, not one of his trademark basket catches. Then he spun around and got the ball back to the infield. Nice play, but the pre-war oldtimers remember DiMag racing behind the three monuments and the flagpole in center field at Yankee Stadium to haul in, at the wall, over-the-head, at a dead run, a 460-foot shot by Hank Greenberg.
Al, I see the distinction you’re trying to draw on the basket catch, since the ball wasn’t in front of Mays. When I Googled “Mays basket catch,” however, it showed “The Catch.” I’m willing to compromise and call the famous catch a hybrid. After all, his hands were together and in front of him below his chest–as if he were holding, well, a basket.
Nick, I knew Bridget and Sheila Murphy when Ken Cockrel was one of my partners at Sommers Schwartz in Southfield and Bridget worked there. Ken and I tried a case together and relieved the City of Detroit of 4-plus million dollars in a case involving gross negligence by the police, although we didn’t collect the $$ until after Ken’s death.
Wow, am I pleased with myself for being the catalyst for so many great memories. Thanks to all.
Inspired by Ed’s question, I looked up the answer which can be found in a book titled, “Miracle Ball: My Hunt for the Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” by Brian Biegel with Peter Thomas Fornatale (Crown, $25).
I neglected to mention the home run occurred in the Polo Grounds.
As for my colossal blunder concerning the year, no pleading mea culpa is good enough. If someone wants to put me up against a wall and shoot me, I deserve it.
As for my ignorance about a sawbuck, another stupendous error. What can I say? No, Al, thanks for trying, but I wasn’t kidding.