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The Miracle at Coogan's Bluff (part 2)
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by Mel R. Allen
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| This story originally appear in the Old Farmer's Almanac |
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Durocher called Thomson over to the third-base coaching box. "Boy, if you ever
hit one, hit one now," Durocher said. As he walked to the plate, Thomson
thought, "Leo, you're out of your mind."
Setting himself in the batter's box, Thomson repeated, "Be patient. Wait and watch. Wait and watch." Branca's first pitch, a fastball, cut the heart of the plate for a called strike. Lockman standing at second could not believe that Thomson did not swing. From his coach's box, Durocher yelled, "He'll come back with another fastball, Bobby. Be ready!" On deck was a struggling Willie Mays, who already had struck out and hit into a double play. He began to pray, "Don't make me come to bat now, God. Please don't let it be me." All season pitchers had been getting Thomson out with the high, inside fastball, and Branca's second was a fastball inside, a "waste pitch" designed to move Thomson back off the plate, to set him up for the overhand, sinking curve on the outside corner. There would never be the sinking curve, only this moment, frozen forever as Thomson took a quick step back and swung. The ball sailed on a line to left field. Branca whirled. "Sink, sink, sink!" he cried. Dodger left fielder Andy Pafko ran to the wall and stopped. The ball barely cleared the wall 315 feet away from home plate. The Giants had won the pennant, 5-4. McClendon shouted into his microphone, "Wild pandemonium the likes of which I have never seen... This is baseball's most amazing finish!" Throughout New York City, a wild, frenzied roar erupted from the bowels of office buildings and spilled onto the streets, and for a moment people who had not been listening to the game were frightened, thinking the shouts and cries could only mean atomic war. Thomson leaped and danced around the bases. "Going around those bases, I couldn't believe what was happening to me," Thomson said after the game. "It felt as if I was actually living one of those middle-of-the-night dreams. Everything was hazy. I heard yells, I saw paper flying. I noticed people jumping in the air, but I just kept riding high on that cloud." As Thomson rounded third, Leo Durocher leaped beside him and spoked his hero's foot. Bobby's widowed mother, with whom he lived in Staten Island, could not bear to watch the game in person and had snapped off the radio after the Dodgers' score in the eighth, too heartbroken to listen. Suddenly she heard a clamor as her neighbor, also a Scot, beat on the door shouting, "Bawbby did it!" In her excitement, Mrs. Thomson would later say, she had to do something, so she mopped the basement floor. And what of Ralph Branca? He trudged off the mound, a figure of despair. In the locker room he sat numbly on a staircase. A photograph of Branca crying into his hands would be seen around the world. "You had to crouch before him and put your face just an inch or to away to hear his brief replies," wrote one reporter. Finally Branca dressed. Outside he saw a priest. "Why me, Father?" he asked. The next day as Thomson entered Yankee Stadium to begin the World Series, a man hollered. He had the home run ball, he said. Thomson could have it for a World Series ticket. Thomson cornered the clubhouse man. "There's a guy outside with the ball I hit!" The clubhouse man laughed. "He took me to my locker," said Thomson, "and opened it. 'Look, there's a dozen balls in there,' he told me. 'They all came from the guy who caught the ball!' " The World Series was won by the New York Yankees four games to two, but there was no doubt that the season belonged to the Giants, who taught a country never to quit. Three years later Thomson would be traded from the Giants and soon after, in 1958, the Giants traded the Polo Grounds for San Francisco. Bobby Thomson retired in 1960, and the Polo Grounds, scene of baseball's greatest moment, was demolished in 1964. He goes by Bob Thomson these days and is a businessman living in New Jersey. Now and then someone remarks, "You aren't Bobby Thomson, are you?" and he will say he is, and he knows that once again he will be asked to relive the miracle at Coogan's Bluff. Ralph Branca is an insurance broker, and he still lives close to his boyhood home. The season after he surrendered the home run, the Dodgers tried to make him change his number. Branca refused. But that year he hurt his back and never regained his fastball; in his career he won only 12 more games. It has always hurt him that despite his years of stardom his legacy as the man who threw "The Pitch" is all that endures. "Even a murderer gets pardoned after 25 years," he says. "I've never been pardoned." There was an uneasiness between Branca and Thomson for many years. Forty years has changed all that, and they find that their names, joined indelibly in baseball history, have become a drawing card of sorts. Fans today can find Ralph Branca and Bobby Thomson together again, seated beside each other at baseball card shows. Their autographs will appear side by side: the all-star pitcher who is remembered only for a single fastball he did not get quite far enough inside, and the hitter who hit 264 home runs, but is remembered for only one. And that one he knows was probably a mistake. "If I had been a good hitter," he says, "I never would have swung." |
| For the story of the final game at the Polo Grounds |
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