BATTER UP!

belfastboy said:

Helluva sponsorship opportunity!

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Sixty-one years ago today a fine five-hit pitching performance by Sal Maglie in game five of the World Series was overshadowed when fun-loving no-windup Yankee hurler Don Larsen threw a perfect game at the Dodgers. The following morning in the New York World-Telegram, the Bum was not impressed with Larsen's masterpiece.



You will find many to this day who will insist that the final oh-two pitch to Dodger pinch-hitter Dale Mitchell was high and outside and in any legitimate world should and would have been ball one. But plate umpire Babe Pinelli was retiring after the Series and this was his final appearance behind the plate, and he went to his grave insisting that this fact did not influence his judgement in calling the pitch. Mitchell, who is last seen in the game film turning to protest the call, went to his grave insisting otherwise. Don Larsen, who is still with us at the age of 88, knows what he knows.

It's unfortunate that the only thing most people remember about Dale Mitchell is that he watched that ptich go by. He was a solid player with a solid ten-year career, and retired with a lifetime batting average of .312. They used to say he had a pretty good eye at the plate, and you could very rarely get him on a called third strike.

LizzieMaine said:

Sixty-one years ago today a fine five-hit pitching performance by Sal Maglie in game five of the World Series was overshadowed when fun-loving no-windup Yankee hurler Don Larsen threw a perfect game at the Dodgers. The following morning in the New York World-Telegram, the Bum was not impressed with Larsen's masterpiece.

You will find many to this day who will insist that the final oh-two pitch to Dodger pinch-hitter Dale Mitchell was high and outside and in any legitimate world should and would have been ball one. But plate umpire Babe Pinelli was retiring after the Series and this was his final appearance behind the plate, and he went to his grave insisting that this fact did not influence his judgement in calling the pitch. Mitchell, who is last seen in the game film turning to protest the call, went to his grave insisting otherwise. Don Larsen, who is still with us at the age of 88, knows what he knows.

It's unfortunate that the only thing most people remember about Dale Mitchell is that he watched that ptich go by. He was a solid player with a solid ten-year career, and retired with a lifetime batting average of .312. They used to say he had a pretty good eye at the plate, and you could very rarely get him on a called third strike.

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Our catcall to the umpire on a called strike such as this.............."You got a bus to catch? We know it ain't a date waiting for you"........the phrase only got me tossed once, as a manager.

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops."
-- A. B. Giamatti.

Friggin' Red Sox.

⇧ It ends on one final pitch; over 162 games and it ends on one final pitch. It is mental torture. It's Sisyphus strung out over a year.

LizzieMaine said:

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops."
-- A. B. Giamatti.

Friggin' Red Sox.

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My favorite Bart quote.... I have it hanging on my office wall.

Rob

LizzieMaine said:

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops."
-- A. B. Giamatti.

Friggin' Red Sox.

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Could be worse, you could be a BlueJays fan!

Cross post from the "What is the Last TV Show you Watched" thread as it probably belongs here as much as there.

Just saw the "Shot Heard 'Round the World -" a 2001 documentary on the Giants-Dodger's 1951 Pennant Race with a focus on the Bobby Thomson's Pennant winning homer.

Well done / well written / well narrated / wonderful film clips / great interviews / and cool quotes from Thompson, Branca and other key participants

Also, I caught this quote early on when Thomson was asked about being moved from center field - "his" position - to third base to make room for a twenty year old Willie Mays: "When I as told that I was going to be moved out of center field, I accepted it. I was brought up in a responsible way to do what I was told and to follow instruction."

There's something very Golden Era to me about that quote. I'm am sincerely not saying it is the right philosophy or a better one than today's view (we all learned the limits of "just following orders" from the Nazis), nor am I saying that everyone in the Golden Era had that attitude (my God, we have many examples of people from that time who didn't), but I am saying that it was an attitude (or, for our Millennials, a "meme") many in the Era did hold and, as a percentage of the population, one that was held by many more then than today.

That's it, just a Golden Era observation sparked by an enjoyable documentary.

Last thought, how crazy was it to be a New York baseball fan in that day - the Brooklyn Dodgers just lose to the New York Giants in the Pennant to, then, face the New York Yankees in the World Series.

I lied, one more thought: what are people opinions on the sign stealing controversy - did Thompson know what pitch was coming on his "shot heard 'round the world" homer?

Durocher was the classic baseball example of the man who did whatever he felt like doing if it suited his purposes, and hang the consequences, so the sign-stealing gimmick is right in line with what you might expect from him. It's the use of the telescope and the buzzer that made the scheme illegal, not the simple act of sign stealing -- then as now, the use of "devices" to aid in sign stealing was illegal, and had the whole affair been exposed in 1951, you can imagine what might have happened.

It *could* have been exposed, very easily, with a bit of investigation. Dodger coach Cookie Lavagetto went to Chuck Dressen in September, at the height of the pennant race, and asked him point blank if he didn't think it was kind of odd that every time they played at the Polo Grounds it seemed like the Giant batters always knew what was coming. It happens that there was a door connecting the home and visitors' clubhouses at the Polo Grounds, and it would have been easy for the Dodgers to have one of their people do a little investigatory keyhole peeping during a game to see exactly what was going on, but for whatever reason Dressen declined to do this. Had he done so, at the very least Durocher would have drawn a suspension, which would have sent the Giants into a tailspin and would have dropped them out of the race. The best explanation I can think of is that Dressen, a man of immense ego who had spent much of his career in Durocher's shadow, felt that even if the Giants *were* cheating, he could still beat them on the field.

As to whether Thomson knew what was coming from Branca, he took that secret to his grave. Branca went to his insisting that Thomson *did* know, and declared to anyone who would listen that it tarnished the entire pennant race. It's interesting that Thomson homered off Branca in the first game of that playoff series on very much the same type of pitch. And there is also the testimony of Sal Yvars, the Giant backup catcher who was responsible for relaying the signals from Herman Franks in the clubhouse to the batter. Yvars insisted that he did, in fact, relay the sign to Thomson during his final at-bat in Game Three, and Thomson knew he did it. The question remains -- and will never be positively answered -- did Thomson *look* at Yvars?

As to Thomson's dedication to duty, one has to take into consideration that under the rule of the Reserve Clause, he had no alternative. He could either do exactly what Durocher told him, or he'd be benched or shipped to Minneapolis. He couldn't quit and get a job with another team because he was owned, body and soul, by Horace Stoneham.

⇧ The documentary argued that the Giants' batters had lower hitting percentages at home than on the road. I don't remember the exact statistics / metrics used, but they argued that the sign stealing wasn't, at least holistically, helping the team.

Thomson, in an interview when he looked to be in his early 60s, explicitly and emphatically said he did not know what pitch was coming on the famous homer. Of course, this doesn't prove anything (I've heard a rumor that, sometimes, people lie), but that was his statement. Also, the film argued that other than Yvars, the rest of the Giants' organization who would have been involved said they weren't stealing signs that day (pretty sure that's what was said in the documentary).

I came away with a similar feeling to you, those who knew died with the knowledge and even if they told us the truth (maybe Thomson did), there was no way for anyone to prove they were telling the truth; hence, barring some new evidence (slim chance of that), we'll never know.

In the end, I don't think any kind of sign-stealing deal can really guarantee anything, because so many other random factors are always at work in baseball. What if Carl Erskine hadn't bounced a couple of pitches while warming up in the bullpen in the 9th? Sukeforth might have recommended him instead of Branca to replace Newcombe. Thomson had hit Branca that season as if he'd owned him -- six homers, yet -- but he had been less successful against Erskine. Would a stolen sign have made any difference with a different pitcher on the mound? And yet there's also the fact that Thomson had been in a bad slump until July 20th -- the day the sign-stealing system went into effect -- and afterward perked up considerable. Cause and effect?

Another interesting tidbit -- Horace Stoneham himself seems to have been in the clubhouse for part of that game, and he couldn't have helped but to see Herman Franks and the telescope. Even if he was half in the bag, which he usually was, he would have had to have been exceedingly, willfully dumb not to figure out what was going on. But like nearly every other man associated with the 1951 Giants he kept the secret till the day he died.

The journalist Joshua Prager, who interviewed as many of the surviving 1951 Giants as he could for a book some years back, concluded that only one Giant consistently refused to use the sign-stealing system, and that man was Monte Irvin.

Fading Fast said:

⇧... it ends on one final pitch. It is mental torture. It's Sisyphus strung out over a year.

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Gotta love Joe Maddon, but Joseph would take the ball away from St Peter and hand it over to Judas...

Cubs must retain Wade Davis at all cost. Jake's gone but all is not lost.

And the torture continues, Yankees forced into a game 7. It is absolutely exhausting. I wonder if the players have any idea what they are putting the fans through .

I don't know who to root for. The Yankees -- you know -- and yet to root for the Astros to win the American League pennant is unnatural. Who wants two National League teams playing in the World Series?

Fading Fast said:

And the torture continues, Yankees forced into a game 7. It is absolutely exhausting. I wonder if the players have any idea what they are putting the fans through .

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I was at the Game 6 last night, and will be there again tonight for Game 7. I'm like a kid the night before his first trip to Disney World, and it's comical to watch me and my friend go to great lengths to do exactly the same thing we did on a day our team won. I don't have Biff Tannen's sports almanac, so I do not know the outcome of the game tonight, but as a baseball fan, life doesn't get much better than this.

LizzieMaine said:

I don't know who to root for. The Yankees -- you know -- and yet to root for the Astros to win the American League pennant is unnatural. Who wants two National League teams playing in the World Series?

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I could make a suggestion, if you're interested!

HudsonHawk said:

I could make a suggestion, if you're interested!

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Best of luck in the Series!

HudsonHawk said:

I could make a suggestion, if you're interested!

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Ditto Lizzie's comment - the best of luck in the Series.

Thank you Lizzie and FF. To be there live to see your team win the pennant is special. Non-baseball fans often say the game is too slow, but it's the pace of the game, and your emotions hanging on every pitch that makes it the greatest game in the world.

HudsonHawk said:

Thank you Lizzie and FF. To be there live to see your team win the pennant is special. Non-baseball fans often say the game is too slow, but it's the pace of the game, and your emotions hanging on every pitch that makes it the greatest game in the world.

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I don’t watch baseball that often, but agree with the commentators.
It was a very enjoyable game to watch!
And not because who won.