No steel can enter the human heart as icily as a full stop at the right moment. —Isaac Babel, Guy de Maupassant, 1932 (translated by Gregory Freidin)

October 3, Wednesday John Steinbeck wrote the date in mini, cursive letters. Settled in a blue wing-back chair four flights above East 72nd Street, he started his morning with a note to Pascal Covici, just as he had every workday since beginning his novel East of Eden on February 12. The letters to his editor, Steinbeck said, were a way of “getting my mental arm in shape to pitch a good game.” And so it seemed fitting that on this day, months shy of fifty, Steinbeck began with baseball. “Today,” he wrote, “Giants and Dodgers play off their tie.”

Chadwick, supine on his couch, needed no reminding. Still, when Miriam returned three cents poorer from Sadie’s Candy Store with the Daily Mirror, he took the tabloid and read of the game. “This is it, boys and girls,” wrote Dan Parker. “And it’s about time because a few more days of the nerve-shattering suspense that has the town in a frenzy would fill all the hospitals, booby-hatches and hoosegows, and provoke a civil war.”

Chadwick’s face was wan from months spent indoors. His body was gaunt, dwindled to 130 pounds. His cough lingered and he did not even have the strength to walk to the phone in the foyer when well-wishers called. Still, though butterflies fluttered in his sutured stomach, he was emboldened—the great Newcombe was taking his 20–9 record to the hill. And though Newcombe had shed six pounds pitching in humid Philadelphia on Saturday and Sunday, the Dodger was still 109 pounds more solid than he.

Newcombe left his home in Colonia, New Jersey, just before 10 a.m.

He paid a 50-cent toll, drove through the Holland Tunnel, up the West Side Highway, onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, across 125th Street and north on Seventh Avenue to the Polo Grounds. He parked in the lot behind right field and filed past Collins, the genial, white-haired guard standing sentry at the clubhouse. A bundle of teammates soon followed— they had boarded a bus in front of the St. George Hotel on Clark Street in downtown Brooklyn.

The Giants arrived now too, walking piecemeal into their locker room and changing into uniforms. Sewn to each man’s left sleeve was a patch. White, sky blue and red, it depicted a ball in a glove on a diamond, commemoration of the league’s seventy-fifth anniversary. In all those years, just eight times had a Giant or Dodger regular season gone 157 games as both did now.

Dressen and Durocher spoke to the sportswriters, then posted their lineup cards in the dugouts (a Campanella hamstring again activating Walker). Home team, then away, took batting practice, the park’s loudspeakers serenading each with a carefully chosen song: “It’s the Loveliest Night of the Year” for New York, “Enjoy Yourself. It’s Later Than You Think” for Brooklyn. Then it was back to the clubhouse for a change into dry jerseys, infusions of pep from the managers and a rundown on how to pitch the men powwowing one room over. (Dressen to Newcombe: pitch Mueller inside. Durocher to Maglie: pitch Hodges outside.)

Jackie Gleason and Frank Sinatra threw back a pre-noon nip. The men, both thirty-five, were at Toots Shor’s, Gleason planning to drink in at the midtown saloon a Dodger victory. But Sinatra offered tickets to the game, Shor called a ride, and the trio, feet already light on the oak-plank floor, stepped from 51 West 51st Street into a liquor-stocked limo.

The men were of similar stock. Suckled on the streets of Brooklyn, Philly and Hoboken, the actor had been a barker, restaurateur a bouncer, singer a copy boy arrested at twenty-three for seduction and adultery. Sinatra had since with velvet voice seduced millions, and it was adultery, an affair with Ava Gardner, that would in twenty-six days allow him to legally leave wife Nancy for the actress.

Gleason also set to honeymoon, to up, in forty-eight hours, with a housewife named Alice. For it was this coming Friday, in a live six-minute sketch on his TV show Cavalcade of Stars, that loudmouthed Jackie Gleason would turn loudmouthed Ralph Kramden. Now, though, the bus driver was in a limo. “Jackie guzzled booze all the way to the Polo Grounds,” remembered Sinatra to author James Bacon, “and ate most of the food.”

That Shor, the son of immigrants, found himself rubbing elbows with Sinatra and Gleason was unsurprising. For a circular bar had turned the rotund Toots every bit the celebrity at forty-eight that were his patrons, this very day the connected saloonkeeper lending a Hemingway a hand. Wrote Jack Hemingway, “I took advantage of Papa’s friendship with Toots Shor to get tickets.”

Papa was off in San Francisco de Paula, home at his Finca Vigia, a farm just east of Havana. February had seen completion of a novella titled The Old Man and the Sea, and what would become Islands in the Stream was on this Wednesday well underway. But suddenly was Hemingway halted. For yesterday had come wired word that Pauline Pfeiffer (whom the author had divorced in 1940) was dead of a brain tumor. Still, Hemingway did not set off for the funeral. “I wonder,” says son Pat, “whether he was sufficiently upset to have missed the game.”

Gleason, Sinatra and Shor arrived at the Polo Grounds. Flush with drink, the trio strode through a vomitory into green seats given Sinatra by pal Durocher. Only Gleason would pull for Brooklyn.

At last it was time for ball, and each man went to his station. Yvars sat down beneath the bullpen awning in right. Franks entered Durocher’s office. (Back in Utah, people would wonder where was their hometown boy.) Durocher smiled at his wife and daughter seated beside Danny Kaye in Section 19, then descended into the dugout. Schenz waved to his cousin Robert sitting just behind Laraine Day and then too stepped down from view. And Chadwick lay before his twelve-inch set, Miriam beside him on her favorite Queen Anne chair.

The sky was leaden, the air damp, a stiff wind blowing to right. But the day was mild. As the crowd fanned into waiting seats, the temperature was 71 degrees.

The fans, divided in their loyalties, antagonized each other. Here a Brooklynite with a packet of napkins offered “crying towels” to Giant fans. There a quartet of Giant boosters with another prop, a hose, promised all Dodger fans free gas.

A devout few had huddled outside the park overnight, seen the sun rise over Harlem at 5:35 a.m. and been first on line for tickets—$3 for box seats, $2 for reserve grandstand, $1.25 for general admission, 60 cents for bleachers. There had though been no need to camp out. Strangely, as the crowd finished singing the national anthem, some twenty thousand seats were unoccupied, the green wings of the upper deck empty.

The previous game had not sold out either, the Daily News and the New York Times putting forth the best guess as to why. “assumed sell-out cuts size of crowd,” read a headline. Strangely, this was plausible. On September 28, the Giants had announced that they would accept no more applications for World Series tickets and the next day, a headline in the New York Herald Tribune had screamed: “giants have no tickets! series oversubscribed.” The fans, it seems, assumed the playoff was sold out as well.

And so the crowd numbered just 34,320. The tally pushed Major League Baseball’s 1951 attendance to 16.1 million. That number was down 7.7 percent from the previous season.

Leading up to the playoff, only 986,610 of the more than four million tickets to New York’s seventy-seven home games had sold. And though only Brooklyn and its bandbox had drawn more fans, New York’s attendance was disappointing. (On August 28, for example, just 8,803 folks went to the Polo Grounds to watch the Giants gun for their seventeenth straight win.) The Giants had enjoyed their best season in fourteen years. And yet, hosting two playoff games, they drew just 50,000 more fans to their park than in 1950.

Attendance had stagnated during the war. In 1941, 9.7 million fans attended games, 8.8 million in 1944. After the defeat of Hitler, however, attendance soared, jumping from 10.8 million in 1945 to 20.9 million in 1948. But then, again, attendance cooled. Not until expansion in 1962 would as many people turn out for games.

Some would-be ballpark-goers were likely sidetracked not by waning enthusiasm but by postwar gravitations toward suburbs and television. For in 1951, baseball was king. Herbert Hoover would in November declare the sport second only to religion in influence for good on American life. Fans the year prior had spent 55.4 million dollars on tickets to baseball games—more money than on all other pro sports combined. And including the Negro leagues, there were a total of thirty big league baseball clubs in the United States, two more than all the country’s football, basketball and hockey teams combined, just boxing and horse racing competing at all for public attention. (Heavyweight Joe Louis, in Manhattan this October morning to promote a fight, hustled from press conference to ballpark so as to not miss a pitch.)

The future of the national pastime was as bright. “Baseball is a thousand leagues,” testified Larry MacPhail earlier in the year to a House subcommittee. Indeed, millions of kids across the country played the game and the many others it had spawned—kickball, stickball, punch-ball, stoopball, wallball. And so on this Wednesday, eight separate broadcasts set to air the Giant–Dodger playoff game to all forty-eight states, baseball to be carried by every last one of the nation’s 96 million radios and 16 million television sets.

In the New York area, those sets were now turning to baseball. While at 1:00 p.m. the pre-game programs on WNBT and WPIX had roughly half the combined viewers of the other four shows on air, by 1:15 they were even.

Maglie warmed up “as nonchalantly as if this were just a World Series,” joked Bill Roeder in the New York World-Telegram and Sun, and Gordon McClendon leaned into his microphone. “Twenty years from now, the fans will be talking about this afternoon’s hero as yet unknown,” McClendon told his audience. “If there is a goat, his name will echo down the corridor of time.”

McClendon’s deep voice echoed over the Liberty Broadcasting Network. Just thirty, the Yale graduate owned the Texas-based network, had launched it in 1947. It aired mainly re-creations of baseball games, broadcasts that lagged ten minutes behind live action and relied on telegraph wire, Morse code and a vivid imagination. New commissioner Ford Frick would in months ban such unauthorized re-creations, forcing McClendon to fold his network. But on October 3, 1951, McClendon was wildly popular. The Oklahoman was on 431 stations.

On this afternoon, McClendon was in very good company. Six of the eventual first thirteen recipients of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Ford Frick Award (given annually to a top broadcaster) peppered the press box beside him.

The press box clung to the curved bottom of the upper deck, a boomerang jutting some ten feet toward play. At one end, above third, sat Dodger announcers Barber and Desmond, sharing today the WMGM moving-coil mike. (Second-year Brooklyn broadcaster Vin Scully was on hand but not working.) In the booth to their right was McClendon and beside him Al Helfer, whose Mutual Broadcasting System was the largest in the land. Buck Canel and Felo Ramirez were next, calling the game in Spanish for all Latin America. Then came the newspapermen, fifty or so reporters straddling home plate. The men—and they were all men—sat behind chicken-wire in a long row, hunched shoulder to shoulder over portable Olivetti typewriters.

Heading toward first, clustered with their equipment, stood the photographers and cameramen unenclosed. They looked like marksmen, the enormous black lenses of their Graflex cameras, painted with the names of New York newspapers, aimed like rifles at the field. The newsreel cameras were ready to shoot too—the handheld spring-loaded Eymos and the gargantuan Mitchells balanced on tripods, their enormous 600-foot magazines elapsing twenty-four frames per second with a steady hum.

Next door was the tin-ceilinged TV booth where Harwell called the action for Channel 11, one of fifty-two NBC stations across the country. A wooden door to his right led to the WMCA radio booth where sat his partner Hodges in a short-sleeved yellow shirt and, a few feet over, behind a hanging blanket, Harry Caray, pipeline to the Midwest. (Bob Prince, announcer for Pittsburgh and Hodges’s guest, sat quietly beside them.) And some 250 miles southwest, in a studio on Tenth Street in Arlington, Virginia, Nat Allbright set to air the game’s eighth broadcast on WEAM 1390. His would be a re-creation of the game fed by Western Union’s ticker and staged roughly two batters behind the live action.

At long last, 1:30 p.m. arrived. The men behind the mikes gave the lineups in dulcet voice, Carl Furillo walked to the plate and, as Westrum flashed Maglie his sign, four umpires readied for a first pitch. They were a formidable crew: Jocko Conlan at first, Bill Stewart at second, Larry Goetz at third, Lou Jorda at home. The quartet had cumulatively called ten All-Star games and nine World Series. And they were famous. Conlan would land in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Stewart would be inducted into hockey’s U.S. Hall of Fame, the Massachusetts native not only a former NHL referee but coach of the 1938 Stanley Cup champion Chicago Blackhawks. And a Norman Rockwell painting of Jorda and Goetz scanning a rainy sky (together with ump Beans Reardon) had graced the April 23, 1949, cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

“First pitch of a historic game,” McClendon told his audience. Jorda was unimpressed with the delivery and this McClendon reported: “Sidearmer raked outside for ball one.” The game was underway.

Furillo took Maglie’s first four pitches. The count was 2–2 when he finally swung, fouling one off. Maglie’s next pitch froze Furillo and Jorda punched him out. It was strikeout number 141 on the year for Maglie, fourth-most in the league.

Salvatore Anthony Maglie was a superstar. He had won a combined 41 games in 1950 and 1951, and his composite 2.84 ERA over those seasons was tops in all baseball. He had beaten Brooklyn five times in 1951, and with him on the hill and the Giants at home, the betting line in Reno had New York 13–10 favorites to take the game and the pennant.

Maglie had not always been an ace. The Niagara Falls native had posted a losing record in the minors and was twenty-eight before he appeared in a big league game. Though in 1945 he had a solid rookie season, 5–4 with a 2.35 ERA, he was overlooked the following spring training and so headed south of the border to pitch 7,100 feet above sea level for the Puebla Angeles of the Mexican League.

Maglie’s curve did not snap in the thin Puebla air. And so his manager, Adolfo Domingo De Guzman Luque (a Cuban-native known as Dolf who won 194 games over twenty seasons in the majors), taught Maglie to tighten the spin on his curve, to throw it harder and to spot his pitches. Maglie flourished. Still, he was blackballed for having played in Mexico and did not return to the majors until 1950. When finally he did pitch again in Manhattan (a city just 265.05 feet above sea level at its highest point), he was dominant, throwing 45 consecutive scoreless innings and a league-high 5 shutouts.

Maglie was not to have a shutout on this day. He walked Reese and Snider—the first time in twenty days he had walked consecutive batters—then gave up to Robinson a single to left. Reese scored, Jansen began to warm in the right-field pen and, within the facing of the upper deck in left, foul of the foul pole, Henry Colletti yanked with his 137 pounds a cable that lifted a twelve-inch number “1”—white paint on black metal filling a scoreboard cavity. At the end of one inning, Brooklyn led 1–0. And tens of millions tuned in on radio and television knew the score, in New York alone, the number of TV sets tuned to ball now outnumbering all others roughly five to one.

Millions more suddenly knew the score too. For it was now that the first of what would be inning-by-inning updates of the game appeared on Dow Jones’s stock ticker, echoed between races at Belmont Park, greeted all who phoned the New York Telephone Company wondering only as to the time of day. Brooklyn led New York one to nothing.

In the second, Maglie retired the Dodgers in order, and with one out in the bottom of the inning, Lockman singled off Newcombe. From his perch in the fourth window of the clubhouse, Franks watched a tiny Thomson walk to the plate. He knew that Thomson was squarely in the wanting-the-signs camp. And as Newcombe peered in for his sign, so did Thomson, looking beyond second baseman Robinson toward the bullpen. Says Thomson, “I don’t know why I wouldn’t have.”

Thomson took ball one, then lashed a single to left. In the press box, an amplifier carried the voice of Willie Goodrich: “Thomson has now hit safely in fifteen consecutive games.” Running hard out of the box, Thomson rounded first head down. Pafko fielded the ball cleanly and Durocher, raising his arms, held Lockman at second. Pafko threw to Reese, who turned to find what 34,320 already saw—Lockman standing on second and Thomson, oblivious, running to join him. The base was already occupied. When Thomson finally looked up, Reese tossed the ball to Hodges, who waited for Thomson to retreat to first, then tagged him out.

Up above, the press box was glutted. And so, higher still, the first rows of the upper deck behind home plate were cordoned off for the overflow, among it Arch Murray of the New York Post, Dodger press agent Irving Rudd, seven members of the International News Service and the great Grantland Rice. Twenty-seven Octobers past, watching the Notre Dame backfield run wild on the very same field before him now, Rice had typed the most famous of all sentences in the history of sports journalism: “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again.” Now, a few seats over, statistician Roth, eager to clarify Thomson’s base-running gaffe, wrote on his yellow graph paper a sentence somewhat more prosaic: “5 went for 2nd on hit evidently thinking 3 went to 3rd and 5 out xtracking to 1st.” The rally quashed, Mays lined to Pafko and the inning ended.

Lying on his living room couch, looking over his feet, Chadwick watched Furillo walk to the plate to lead off the third. It was 2:04 p.m.— Roth noted the time—and Chadwick saw suddenly the 6 on Furillo’s back brighten. Chadwick had known that Schmelzer would soon flip the lights, the gray of an afternoon visible through the two curtained windows behind his television.

The Dodgers went down quickly—groundout, pop-up, strikeout. And throughout the park, a dig resounded: “Now maybe Thomson can see where he’s going.”

Discussion of Thomson’s blunder carried into the bottom of the inning. “We may have had a famous repetition of the Fred Merkle incident here today,” McClendon told his audience, invoking the goat of 1908 as Newcombe threw ball three to Westrum to run the count full. “It might be this afternoon that Bobby Thomson’s play . . . would be joined alongside that.” Westrum, the leadoff man, walked. But a sacrifice bunt by Maglie failed to advance the catcher and the third inning ended with Brooklyn still ahead 1–0. Durocher left the coaching box off of third and Dressen took his place. (He too often coached afield.)

The lines of the twenty-by-ten-foot coaching box, neatly laid in chalk by Schwab before the game, were long since erased. As was his routine, Durocher had kicked them clean in the bottom of the first so as to be able to creep toward home and more effectively bark at the ump (and, seasons past, peek at catcher signals). Now, after Dark popped out to Robinson to lead off the bottom of the fourth and the count went to 2–2 on Pafko, Dressen also inched down the line. Westrum was alert. As Maglie looked in for the signal, his catcher, noted McClendon, was “shielding his signs from Chuck Dressen, a good sign-stealer at third.”

Pafko struck out swinging, Hodges grounded weakly to Thomson and the inning ended. Maglie had retired eleven in a row.

It was still 1–0Brooklyn in the bottom of the fifth when Thomson hit a one-out double to left, beating Pafko’s throw with a head-first dive. Mays then struck out, and as Newcombe set about walking Westrum intentionally, Robinson called time and notified third-base umpire Goetz that Durocher was straying from his coaching box. Goetz ordered Durocher back to his borderless box, and across the outfield grass, big Branca now rose in the Brooklyn pen.

Five hours earlier, Branca had arrived at the park, his right arm stiff. Trainer Wendler had then rubbed the arm with Capsulin, an oil that he called a counterirritant. “It burned so much,” explains Branca, “you forgot you had pain in your arm.”

Branca’s pain had flared in his right triceps—the muscles had ached ever since his consecutive shutouts in late August. And sure enough, the Capsulin, a hot goo produced from chili peppers, had lessened its hurt. But after batting practice, though Branca was careful to keep his arm in the heavy blue wool sleeve of his sweatshirt, still the muscles felt tight, and now in the fifth inning he rose and lobbed a ball to Clyde Sukeforth. He would toss, just toss, to try and get loose.

Sukeforth, two months shy of fifty, was the bullpen coach. And as a retired catcher, scout and, fleetingly, manager, he knew baseball to its cork core.

Sukey, as the players called him, had caught ten seasons for Cincinnati and Brooklyn, then become a scout. It was he, in 1945, whom Branch Rickey had dispatched to Chicago to vet one Jack Roosevelt Robinson, shortstop of the Negro league Kansas City Monarchs. Robinson was injured but Sukeforth saw in him enough (off the field) to recommend he be hired. He was. And when on April 15, 1947, Robinson made history, so too did Sukeforth, the first in the twentieth century to write the surname of a black man onto a major league lineup card. (Durocher had been suspended four days prior and Sukeforth managed the club for two games.)

Now, four and a half years later, Sukeforth stood on the warning track in left field at the Polo Grounds having a catch with one of his pitchers. With each toss, the lighter felt the five-ounce ball Branca flung to his coach.

Still, it did not appear that Branca would soon be needed. Newcombe got Maglie to ground out to Reese and the fifth inning ended. The Dodgers still led 1–0. And despite two hits, Thomson was still very much the game’s goat.

With four innings left in the season and down a run, Durocher ordered his starters to replace his relievers in the bullpen. If Maglie needed help, he reasoned, he wanted his best on the mound. And so, by the time Maglie struck out Reese to start the sixth, a quintet of pitchers had switched places: Corwin, Kennedy and Koslo to the dugout, Jansen and Hearn to the bullpen, there to sit alongside coach Shellenback and catchers Yvars and Noble.

After a scoreless sixth, announcers Harwell and Hodges switched places too—Harwell to the NBC booth, Hodges to finish calling the game on WMCA radio. Hodges preferred the radio. It allowed for little dead air and, simply put, he liked to talk. Though Hodges had a cold, was up late the night before gargling Listerine, his voice was fine, smoky after six innings of Chesterfield cigarettes. And, just in case, his mike had a cough switch.

Hodges had first sat behind a microphone in 1928 as a sophomore at the University of Kentucky, helping a clueless program director at Louisville’s WHAS radio broadcast the second half of a college football game. Three years later, having enrolled in law school, he earned $20 a week hosting at dawn a hillbilly music program. Hodges soon segued into sports, assisted the great Yankee broadcaster Mel Allen, announced on Wednesday nights the CBS TV Pabst Blue Ribbon bouts and became in 1949 the first-string broadcaster of the Giants. Hodges was a natural, his salary two years later $75,000.

But now, Hodges was disheartened. Newcombe had thrown 22.1 consecutive scoreless innings. And with just three innings left in the game, Brooklyn’s 1–0 lead was safe.

So too, for now, was Newcombe’s money, the $3,600 Bavasi had given him back in August against his inevitable World Series share.

Pennant winners had been pocketing extra money since 1903 when Boston defeated Pittsburgh in eight games in the first World Series. (It was then Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss donated to his players his share of the receipts, for the first and last time the losing player collecting more money than the winner.) After long fluctuating, the calculus of World Series shares had stabilized in 1947 when owners earmarked a minimum of $250,000 for pennant-winning players, roughly $5,000 per man. In 1950, for example, when the Yankees swept the Phillies, $5,737.95 went to each winning player, $4,081.34 to each loser.

Each such check was a windfall. (Labine’s salary, for example, was $5,000 for the whole of 1951.) And so, while the Dodgers and Giants burned during the playoff with a pure will to beat the other, it is not wrong to say that money added incentive.

The Longines clock above center field struck three and at 18 Broad Street, trading on the New York Stock Exchange stopped. It had been a good day. Driven by metals, oils, rails, rubbers and films, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had risen 1.53 points to 275.87, save one session in September its highest close since 1930. Hodges fouled off Maglie’s second pitch in the seventh to even the count at 1–1 and McClendon spoke. “Boy,” he said, “the wondrous terms of endearment that must be going on between these two teams down there on the field with five thousand dollars riding on the line for each player.”

Playoff or not, no barb was off limits when Brooklyn faced New York. Robinson, though a gentleman, cracked about Laraine Day. Durocher, though a friend of integration, screamed racial obscenities. Outfielder Earl Rapp remembered to author Harvey Rosenfeld a talk Durocher gave his black players before facing Brooklyn on August 14. “If the game gets close and tense,” Durocher told them, “I may be shouting ‘nigger’ and ‘watermelon’ at guys on the other side like Jackie Robinson. But I want you guys to understand that you are on my team.”

Newcombe, the second black man ever to pitch in the major leagues, had heard it all before. And as he came to bat with two out and one on in the seventh, he did now. Number 36 swung at a first-pitch strike, grounding to Stanky. As it was time again to pitch, Newcombe did not bother running down the line.

Branca’s arm had begun to loosen, and now so too did the nervous crowd, nodding to tradition with a mid-inning stretch. By the time Brooklyn’s nine walked to their positions in the bottom of the seventh, Branca was throwing in earnest and more than once did Dressen lift the handset of the dugout phone to check up on his reliever. Sukeforth was pleased.

Irvin drove Newcombe’s second pitch solidly to left and slid into second with a double. The bullpen phone rang again. “How’s he throwing?” asked Dressen. Sukeforth reported that Branca was throwing hard.

Lockman was next to face Newcombe. The two men looked up for instruction: Lockman to Durocher doing his St. Vitus’ dance off third, Newcombe to Dressen gesticulating in the dugout. Newcombe fired. Pitchout. Irvin was not running. Ball one. Point Durocher. Lockman bunted on the next pitch and it rolled but a few feet toward the mound. Walker pounced on the ball cleanly and fired to Cox at third. Safe. Runners were on the corners, no one out, and up stepped Thomson, “dangerous,” cautioned McClendon, “as a Great Dane behind a meat counter.” All that was needed to score Irvin, to tie the game (and exonerate Thomson) was a semi-deep fly. After a called strike and three foul balls, he delivered—a drive to center gloved by a retreating Snider. The game was tied and Thomson, the Staten Island Scot, moseyed southwest toward his cheering dugout. Mays grounded into a double play, 6-4-3, and a season was reduced to two innings.

Newcombe returned to the dugout. He had thrown 9 innings on September 26, 9 more three days later, the next day another 5.2, and thus far on this day 7 more. Says Newcombe, “He worked the shit out of me, Dressen did.” The pitcher was spent and he turned to his manager. “Don told Dressen, in front of the entire ball club,” Robinson shared three days later on a WNBC broadcast, “that his arm was dead.” Dressen left it to Newcombe to decide whether he would stay in the game.

Above the dugout in the press box, the newspapermen split into two camps—those who wrote for morning papers like the Daily News and so had to recount the narrative of the game, and those who wrote for afternoon papers like the New York World-Telegram and Sun and so instead crafted articles that did not hinge on a score. Some twenty-five reporters in the latter camp rose with the start of the eighth and set off for the clubhouse. There they would file their features by phone after the game.

Two hundred miles southwest, in another press room, Frank Bourgholtzer turned on a television set in the West Wing of the White House. He flipped to the game. The set was mounted above the desk of Robert Nixon of the International News Service, but Bourgholtzer, NBC’s White House correspondent, did not consult Nixon or any of his colleagues. Instead, he says, “I insisted that we watch it because the guy who inherited my electric trains was playing in the game.”

That guy was Bobby Thomson.

Weeks shy of thirty-two, Bourgholtzer had, from the age of six months, grown up in Thomson’s hometown of New Dorp. His father Crawford had taught Sunday school alongside Thomson’s sister Jean at St. Andrews Episcopal Church. And when Bourgholtzer outgrew his Lionel trains they found their way to young Bobby. Ever since, Bourgholtzer, otherwise a Yankee fan, had rooted for his beneficiary.

But no sooner did Truman’s press corps glue to the 1–1 game than Genevieve Zeren appeared at their doorway. “Press!” she yelled. Zeren was secretary to press secretary Joseph Short, and her call meant that Short was set to hold a press conference. It was, however, a familiar gag to bid the men come when their attentions were elsewhere and, transfixed by a game, they ignored her shout. But Zeren insisted. “I’m serious,” she said. “You’d better come.” And so at 3:20 p.m. they did. The television stayed on.

Even as the men scurried out, government bowed to ball. It was in the Capitol just southeast that as Washington Republican Harry Cain held forth on the Korean War, a majority of senators took to televisions and radios in four chambers abutting the Senate floor. And it was in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, that the forty-six of forty-eight U.S. governors come south to hammer out social security and law enforcement hung now instead on an eighth inning. “Compared with that,” wrote Newsweek, “even the big question of November ’52, Who will be the next President of the United States? for the moment seemed inconsequential.”

Facing the north lawn of the White House, seated behind his large wooden desk, press secretary Short began: “This won’t take long.” White House official reporter Jack Romagna recorded the four words in Gregg shorthand and the press—Bourgholtzer, Nixon, John Adams of CBS, Ernest Vaccaro of the Associated Press, Edwin Darby of Time magazine, Merriman Smith of the United Press Association and some others—readied their notepads. Short turned to Zeren. “What about the rest of the people?” he asked. “Is this all we have got? Is this the works, Genny?” It was and he continued.

“This is a statement by me: Another atomic bomb has recently been—”

“Wait!” interrupted a reporter. “Wait a second!”

“—exploded,” Short continued.

“Wait a second!”

“. . . within the Soviet Union.”

The reporter called out: “Just a minute, Charlie!” Frazzled, he had called Short by the wrong name.

Months earlier, on December 5, 1950, Short’s predecessor, Charlie Ross, had sat behind that same desk and collapsed a few feet from Bourgholtzer, dead of a heart attack. Three days later, Short, a White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, took over—a photograph of Ross hung on a pale green wall of his office. Unfazed, Short now continued. “In spite of Soviet pretensions that their—”

“Just a minute, Joe. Please!”

Another interruption: “ ‘Their,’ possessive?”

“Right,” answered Short.

“—atomic energy program is being directed exclusively toward peaceful purposes, this event confirms again that the Soviet Union is continuing to make atomic weapons. In accordance with the policy of the president to keep the American people informed—”

“Just a minute!”

“—to the fullest extent consistent with our national security, the president has directed me to make this statement and to stress again the necessity—”

“Wait a second!”

“—for that effective, enforceable international control of atomic energy which the United States and the large majority of the members of the United Nations support. Further details cannot be given without adversely affecting our national security interests.”

The whole conference had taken little more than one minute, President Truman, three rooms over in the Oval Office, readying now to discuss meat control with J. Edgar Hoover and five others. Bourgholtzer and his colleagues darted back to their desks and in suit and tie composed their reports, the AP first on the wire at 3:27 p.m. And as whispers of Russia’s second atomic explosion mushroomed about the country— the bomb six kilotons of plutonium—Furillo sauntered to bat, the television above Robert Nixon’s desk humming all the while, a national pastime ambient in the West Wing of the White House.

Back north, it enveloped a city. Literally near all New York took in the game, the share of its TV broadcast well above 90 when Maglie let fly a baseball to start the eighth. He held it a second later—Furillo lining back to the box—and in the Giant pen, Yvars crouched and began to warm Jansen. Reese and then Snider followed with singles to right, where the line of newspapermen now made their way. Having reached Section One at the far end of the upper grandstand, the men half descended the stone ramp that opened onto Eighth Avenue, stopping at the iron gate that led to the clubhouse. With a flash of credentials, they were in.

Robinson walked to the plate. Durocher figured that with a man on third, Dressen might have Snider steal—daring Westrum to throw to second—and so he had Maglie pitchout. But Dressen held his runners. Ball one. Point Dressen. Maglie’s next pitch, a curve, broke in the dirt short of home and skittered through Westrum’s wickets. Reese scored and Snider raced to third. Brooklyn led 2–1. With Pafko due to bat next, Durocher ordered Robinson intentionally walked to set up the double play.

Pafko was incredibly slow. He had been thrown out in four of his season’s five attempted steals and dubbed “Pruschka” by Charlie Grimm, his manager in Chicago—from hrus˘ka, Slovakian for “pear.” (Pafko was Czech, his parents born in the foothills of the Tatra mountains.) Pafko also had hypertension and his blood pressure, as always when he gripped his bat, now rose.

Maglie walked Robinson and Pruschka hit on cue a sharp grounder to third. But Thomson missed the ball—it kicked off his glove into foul territory—and Snider scored to make it 3–1. After Hodges popped out, another ball found Thomson, a smash by Cox that buzzed on one bounce past his ear. Robinson scored and Brooklyn led 4–1. Walker grounded out to end the rally and Thomson again was the goat.

In the bottom of the eighth, Newcombe mowed down New York on ten pitches: strikeout, groundout, pop-up. One inning remained and Adrienne Dark, Bernice Koslo, Antoinette Yvars and other Giant wives left their seats in Section 19 for the ladies lounge beneath the stands. Says Yvars, “The Brooklyn fans were heckling us.”

High above home, Yogi Berra and four Yankee teammates rose disappointed from upper-deck seats. The Polo Grounds held nearly twice as many fans as did Ebbets Field and so a Giant win meant larger World Series shares. New York, though, was down 4–1, and so, resigned to a Brooklyn win, the men headed for the parking lot. “We wanted to beat the crowd,” says Berra. “Newcombe was pitching good. I thought it was over.”

So did the two dozen writers now in the clubhouse. And so the men squeezed into the Dodger lounge in wait for the winning team. A few jostled for position by the lone window but there was little room— Brooklyn clubhouse man John Griffin was not budging. “He was sitting there on a chair in front of the window and we couldn’t see,” says Jack Lang, a reporter for the Long Island Press. “He was three hundred pounds.”

As the ninth inning set to begin, Maglie was done. He had thrown 109 pitches on the afternoon, 298 innings on the season. In all the league, only Spahn and Roberts had pitched more. His last inning had been costly. Just three outs from the pennant, Brooklyn led by three. Durocher summoned Jansen, and Lang and his colleagues set to content themselves with Red Barber’s radio broadcast.

As Jansen walked to the pitcher’s mound, Labine left Brooklyn’s pen for the clubhouse. He was off to smoke a cigarette.

The rookie had not smoked before coming to the majors. But when he had arrived in April, he heard that there was money in endorsing cigarettes and was soon pitching, along with his cunnythumb curve, Old Gold cigarettes. In exchange for his endorsement—“Not a Cough in a Carload”—Lorillard Company of Greensboro, North Carolina, sent Labine not only $500, a tenth his salary, but hundreds of cartons of the unfiltered cigarettes each month. Labine dutifully passed them to friends until the afternoon he opened one of the cream-and-wine-colored cases himself and lit his first smoke.

Below the Chesterfield sign in center, Labine now climbed the clubhouse stairs, entered the locker room, took a match and cigarette from his locker, sat on a wooden step and, safely from view, took a drag. “You didn’t smoke in uniform,” he says. The nicotine and Turkish tobacco calmed Labine even as he caught sight of the champagne cases and TV cameras now before him.

Newcombe was Brooklyn’s leadoff batter in the ninth, and he watched Jansen warm up. Jansen had impeccable control, had averaged all season just 1.8 walks per nine innings. “You could catch him in a rocking chair,” says Yvars. True to form, Jansen threw nine pitches in the ninth, eight of them strikes. Brooklyn went down in order.

Three outs remained in the season and Labine hurried back to Brooklyn’s pen. There in left field he found Erskine up and throwing alongside Branca. The routine was synchronized: after catching each pitch from Branca, Sukeforth threw it back, then watched Erskine’s pitch snap into the glove of Steve Lembo squatted beside him. Having spent the season in Mobile in the Southern Association, Lembo had joined the parent club on September 5. He was delighted. For Brooklyn was home, the catcher born there, living there and due to marry there on October 20, the very same day as Branca.

With both rubbers occupied, Labine sat on the wooden bullpen bench and waited for Newk to close out the game.

Dark walked to the batter’s box and Robinson walked to the mound. Robinson, pride of Cairo, Georgia, extended his arm to Newcombe. Their handshake seemed to Schenz, watching from the dugout, an affront, and he screamed at them: “Don’t shake yet! It isn’t over!” A few seats over, Lohrke disagreed. “Piss on the fire and I’ll call the dogs,” he mumbled to fellow infielder Williams. “I think the hunt’s over.”

Indeed, it at all but was. Not once in baseball’s 278 preceding playoff and World Series games had a team overcome a three-run deficit in a ninth inning. (Nor, at this writing, has any team in the 879 subsequent such games.)

Still, the fan defers not to logic, and Giant rooters, desperate, disconsolate, turned now to last resorts. Thomas Fitzgibbon, thirteen and listening to Russ Hodges in a living room in St. Albans, Queens, beseeched his mother for help. Mary Fitzgibbon went to her bedroom, returned with Catholicism’s patron saint of hopeless causes resplendent in a green robe, set the plaster statue on their large console radio and spoke to her son: “You must have faith in St. Jude.” In the Holbert home on St. John’s Avenue in Staten Island, brothers Chick and Roy—a retired cop and a retired butcher—decided it might help the home team if they ran counterclockwise about the dining room table. And so together with friends they did. And at the Polo Grounds, midway between third base and home, Morty Rothschild rose from his box seat, hurried to his Buick sedan parked behind home, turned the key in the ignition and headed north on the Speedway. Since driving in August to visit his daughter Diane at Camp Navajo in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, he had noticed that his beloved Giants never lost with him behind the wheel and so now, though it meant leaving his friend and the ninth inning of a deciding playoff game, that is where he sat.

Back at the Polo Grounds, Yvars sat too, set off from his teammates on the center-field end of the right-field bullpen bench, a human signpost. As Newcombe went into his windup, Yvars sat still. A fastball was upcoming. Dark took it for strike one. The captain then fouled off two pitches before slapping with his black bat Newcombe’s fourth delivery along the ground toward right. Hodges and Robinson converged on the ball. It glanced off Hodges’s glove, trickling along the infield dirt toward second for a single.

Dressen again phoned Sukeforth. “Who’s ready?” he asked.

Branca surely was. His right arm, rubbed with oil, swaddled in wool, tenderized with four innings of activity, was loose and strong. It occurred to Sukeforth that, this game in hand, Branca was auditioning for the World Series. “Branca was showing off,” Sukeforth told reporter Paul Green years later. “He wanted to pitch tomorrow in Yankee Stadium. He was really humming.” Erskine too looked good. This Sukeforth told his boss.

Dark stepped off the canvas bag and Newcombe shortened his delivery. The pitcher would forego the windup for the stretch, sacrifice a few miles-per-hour on his fastball for the shortening of Dark’s lead off first.

Up three runs, the adjustment sufficed. It stood to reason that Dressen would not order the extra step of holding the runner, of having Hodges guard the bag. Dark’s run, after all, meant nothing and so reason dictated that Hodges would play some ten paces behind the runner to better guard against a hit. But Dressen gave Hodges the order to hold Dark close. And so as Newcombe pitched to Mueller from the stretch, the first baseman planted his black left cleat some five feet diagonally from the bag.

Mueller, of all his team best at directing a pitched ball into the gaps afield, did so now, Mandrake the Magician sending a fastball on the ground toward right. Hodges dove to his right but the Spalding shot under his glove. Runners were on first and second, none was out and Dressen called for time.

Watching his little Emerson, Chadwick saw Dressen walk to the mound. So did Art Suskind, assistant director of the NBC broadcast, and he told the production booth downstairs to cut to the Dodger bullpen. It did. The image on Chadwick’s set changed and Harwell, eyeing his monitor, spoke into his Western Electric microphone, model 632C. “That’s Carl Erskine on the outside,” he said, “and Ralph Branca, Monday’s starter and loser, on the inside.”

NBC had just two cameras working the game. They were large and mounted on turrets, an NBC lightning-bolt logo on either side. One camera sat just behind home plate, a second high above. The cameras, RCA model TK11, boasted three lenses—a wide-angle, telephoto and normal view—that the cameramen rotated with a large metal handle. While one man racked, the other filmed. Still, filming play was tricky. “Of course you don’t get everything,” noted Stan Musial that morning in the New York World-Telegram and Sun. “There were four home runs yesterday but Robinson’s was the only one I saw all the way.”

Filling in the blanks for the national television audience was Harwell. The native Georgian had in 1948 been the voice of the Atlanta Crackers when Brooklyn’s Red Barber collapsed from ulcers. Barber would miss six weeks behind the mike and so Brooklyn contacted Atlanta owner Earl Mann about obtaining Harwell. Mann demanded compensation. And so it was that he traded Harwell, twenty-seven, a 5′9″, 155-pound right-handed announcer, for Cliff Dapper, twenty-eight, a 6′2″, 190pound catcher. Brooklyn got the better deal. Dapper lasted in the major leagues one 1942 month, Harwell fifty-five years.

Harwell had since left Brooklyn to share the broadcast booth with Hodges in New York. And he now watched, together with his audience, Dressen and the Brooklyn infield—Walker, Hodges, Robinson, Reese and Cox—confer with Newcombe on the mound. Newcombe wanted to remain in the game. “I’m okay,” he told his manager. Dressen acquiesced and the uniformed klatch dispersed. Newcombe set to face Irvin, the league’s top run-producer.

Durocher turned to umpire Goetz at third. “Now, a belt,” he said. “A home run right now.” Irvin popped out to Hodges in foul territory and Dressen looked like a genius.

Lockman stepped up and Billy Leonard approached the bat rack. After 156 home games, the batboy was but two outs from retiring, set to leave the Giants for an unencumbered senior year at Manhattan Prep. Girlfriend Pat Kannar, fifteen and seated with the Giant wives, watched Leonard hand Thomson his stick, Adirondack model 302. The bat weighed thirty-four ounces. Northern white ash, it was lacquered Giant orange, the top of its barrel branded with a Bob Thomson signature. Farther down the bat, just below its sweet spot, was carved flexible whip action, script letters filled with black paint.

Thomson gripped his bat and left the dugout for the on-deck circle.

The pennant was two outs away and an announcement echoed through the press box: “Attention, press: World Series credentials for Ebbets Field can be picked up at six o’clock tonight at the Biltmore Hotel.”

The Hotel Towers was also abuzz with baseball. For there on Clark Street in Brooklyn the Dodger team would bunk through the World Series, and manager John Webber had arranged a four-day fête, chef Walter Misbach cooking now a battalion of turkeys. The cost: $20,000.

It was 3:50 p.m. and minutes earlier, in the Polo Grounds clubhouse, Stoneham had left nephew Chub Feeney, scout Tom Sheehan, farm director Carl Hubbell and others in his office, and headed downstairs to console Maglie. He found the pitcher drinking a beer on his way into the shower. The owner smiled.

Newcombe checked the runners and fired. Lockman fouled off the pitch and the announcement for Ebbets Field credentials repeated. Since homering on July 5, 1945, in his first-ever major league at-bat, Lockman had strolled 2,477 official times to the plate and not one at-bat had been as big as this. The lefty made it count, lashing Newcombe’s next pitch to the green left-field wall on two bounces. Pafko ran after it, Dark raced home, Mueller headed for third and Lockman for second. A double. The score was 4–2, the crowd erupting in paroxysms of fear and hope.

Mueller had not slid. Turning as he ran to watch Pafko throw the ball to Robinson, the right fielder had stepped awkwardly on third, twisting his left ankle. Tendons tore and he lay now in pain at Durocher’s feet. The Lip knelt and touched the swelling ankle, then waved his arms hurriedly for help. Schenz, Rigney, team doctor Palermo and trainer Doc Bowman hustled to third. Batboy Leonard fetched a stretcher from the First-Aid station behind home and Schenz and Rigney carried Mueller to the clubhouse, his backside bowing canvas.

Durocher needed a pinch-runner. He had all season pinch-run five men—Davey Williams ten times, Schenz eight, Jack Maguire seven, Rigney three, Clint Hartung once. With Schenz now halfway to center field, Rigney ineligible (having struck out in the eighth) and Maguire off the team, Durocher curiously forwent Williams for Hartung.

Once upon a time, Hartung had made scouts drool. No one could pitch like him. No one could hit like him. Clinton Clarence Hartung was the young Babe Ruth reincarnate, only at 6′5″and 210 pounds better sculpted. In 1939, the freshman pitched and hit his Hondo Owls to a high school state championship and Hondo, Texas, all corn, cotton and cattle, onto the map. Three years later, Hartung, the “Hondo Hurricane,” set off to play for the Minneapolis Millers.

Hartung transferred to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and, after a lusty season, joined the army. On December 17, 1945, during his fifty-threemonth military stint, New York snapped him up. He had cost $25,000 and four players, but hey, the blond, blue-eyed son of a German carpenter was an übermensch. A team “could get $100,000 for him easy as falling off a log,” baseball scout Ted McGrew told newspaper PM. “He has a chance to become one of the all-time greats of baseball.”

Poor control on the mound and strikeouts at the plate had by 1951 reduced the Hurricane to a zephyr, to a part-timer with all of eight singles and a double in this his fifth big league season. The weight of failed expectation saddled Hartung and as public-address announcer Jim Gorey announced now his number 26, he jogged to third an almost apologetic sub.

Dressen lifted the handset beside him and asked yet again who in the bullpen was ready. “He sounded frantic,” remembered Sukeforth years later. Labine heard Sukeforth’s reply: “Erskine just bounced a curve but Branca’s fast and loose.”

Erskine’s seeming wildness was not necessarily a bad thing. His best pitch was an overhand curve, a pitch he held across the seams and threw, much like the great Spahn, with a straight downward motion. When effective, the bottom fell out of the ball, just as it had now before Sukeforth. “I never had a problem burying that curveball in the dirt with Campy,” says Erskine. “I bet Dressen thought ‘This is no place for a wild pitch.’ ”

A wild pitch would indeed be catastrophic, would score a run and move the tying run to third with but one out. And though catcher Walker had a good glove, he was painfully slow, the prospect of him chasing a ball in the seventy-four feet behind home terrifying. Dressen walked to the mound.

As he did, Schenz and Rigney, jackets covering their numbered jerseys, disappeared into the clubhouse carrying the lame Mueller. Coach Freddie Fitzsimmons counseled Lockman at second, who removed and then put on a shoe. And the entire Brooklyn infield again gathered about Newcombe.

Newcombe had been economical—it was his hundredth pitch that Lockman drove to the wall. But he was utterly exhausted. Over eight days, he had thrown an incredible 32 innings. No Major League Baseball pitcher would ever again throw so much in so little time.

Newcombe turned to his manager. “This is too important a game,” Robinson would in three days remember Newcombe saying, “to take a chance on my arm.” Announcer Hodges relayed the scene. “The Dodgers have another conference out there,” he reported. “And Chuck Dressen is making up his mind whether to bring in powerhouse Ralph Branca, Carl Erskine or Clem Labine.”

Of the two pitchers now warmed, it was obvious whom Dressen should call. Off Branca, Thomson had in 49 at-bats hit .265 with nine singles, a double, triple, two home runs, four walks and five strikeouts. Off Erskine, Thomson had in 22 at-bats hit .545 with seven singles, two doubles, a triple, two home runs, two walks and two strikeouts. Erskine could scarcely have fared worse.

There were, however, six other pitchers Dressen could now have warmed in his stead. Thomson had faced each. He had a home run in three at-bats against Phil Haugstad, a double in five at-bats against Labine, a single in six at-bats against Clyde King, two singles in eight at-bats against Bud Podbielan, five singles and two doubles in twelve at-bats against Johnny Schmitz and in fifty at-bats against Preacher Roe, seven singles, a double, triple and two home runs, his average just .220. That Roe was well rested, having thrown just 1.2 innings in five days, begged further to question why he was not now up in the pen.

First-base umpire Conlan walked to the mound. “Who are you bringing in?” he asked. Dressen answered Branca and the bow-tied ump barked a last name, summoning Branca with a wave.

Off in left field, Sukeforth patted Branca on his back. The pitcher slipped on his wool jacket, took his Rawlings glove in his right hand and headed for the mound. And as Rigney settled in center to watch play from the Giant lounge, “Hank Schenz returns to the bench,” Hodges told his radio audience, “and Ralph Branca makes the long walk from the bullpen.” The announcer recapped the Newcombe ninth, then continued: “So don’t go anywhere. Light up that Chesterfield. Stay right with us and we’ll see how Ralph Branca will fare against Bobby Thomson and then Willie Mays to follow.”

Harold Burr, seated in the press box, had a pretty good notion of how Branca might fare. Awaiting the pitcher, the Brooklyn Eagle reporter turned to writer Tom Meany. “I don’t want to see this,” he said. And so as Branca left the pen, Burr left the press box.

Allan Roth was no less skeptical. And it was now, just above Burr in the supplemental press box, that the statistician manifestly shook his head. Sure, Branca’s 3.22 ERA was ninth in the league. And yes, he was fourth in both fewest hits allowed and strikeouts per nine innings. But Roth’s notes also told of those such as Roe with superior numbers against Thomson. They told that Thomson, long average versus Branca, was this year 4-for-12 against him with two walks, a triple, two home runs, four runs batted in and just one strikeout. And they told that Branca simply pitched poorly against New York. He had in 1951 given up 10 home runs to the club, three more than he had surrendered to the rest of the league combined. New York had handed him five of his 11 losses.

As always, Roth had compiled a sheaf of notes on New York. And as always, “Dressen didn’t want to see it,” Roth told author Lee Heiman. “He made little or no use of the information I provided. The man didn’t want help from anybody. He thought he could do it all by himself. It’s always been that way with the big ego managers. They couldn’t believe a statistician sitting in the stands could give them information they didn’t know themselves. So Charlie ignored me.”

Branca walked farther and farther from the bench in left field between the 447-and 455-foot markers. Seven years earlier, those tin plates had lodged in his memory. For on June 12, 1944, Durocher, then managing Brooklyn, had phoned his bullpen and called upon Branca to mop up the third inning of an 11–5 debacle. Branca, eighteen, had grabbed his jacket from that same bench and headed to the mound for the very first time a major leaguer. It was a trek he would never forget. “It took ten days to walk it,” he told the Long Island Press.

Branca now walked in his own footsteps. He reached Pafko and the gentle slugger slapped him on his back. “Go get ’em, Ralph,” he said.

Branca was happy to get the call, eager to end a personal five-game schneid. Sure, he had struggled of late, had surrendered since the first of September nine home runs, the same number he had allowed in all April, May, June, July and August combined. And, since the first of September, his ERA was 5.71. But while he had been overworked in August and September, he was now finally rested having thrown just 9.1 innings all the previous week.

Branca continued on, walking down then up the “turtleback” slope of Schwab’s outfield grass. “Go get ’em,” said Robinson. “Go get ’em,” said Reese.

Stepping onto the topsoil that was shortstop, Branca slipped his left hand into his glove and greeted Newcombe with a half embrace, slapping three times his back, his number 36. Newcombe patted Branca too and the pitchers’ leather gloves touched between their stomachs. “Don’t worry about it, big fella,” Branca told Newcombe. “I’ll take care of everything.” Newcombe had reason to believe he would. Three times Branca had relieved Newcombe. Three times Newcombe had won.

Newcombe walked slowly off to center field, happy Giant fans waving at him handkerchiefs. Branca removed his jacket. Stitched to his back, that which Branca had claimed on D-Day—a royal-blue 13—faced the clubhouse.

Dodger batboy Stanley Strull ran to the mound and took now Branca’s jacket. “Let’s go get ’em,” the boy said. He ran off, leaving on the mound Dressen and Walker and Branca.

Dressen had a decision to make. He could have Branca pitch to Thomson. Or he could walk Thomson and pitch to Mays. As Roth’s files attested, in 19 at-bats against Branca, Mays had just one single and a double, his .105 average coupled with two walks, four strikeouts and zero runs batted in. That was a matchup a manager craved. What’s more, Mays had wilted down the stretch, hitting two home runs in August and one in September. The rookie had batted .266 since August 1, .250 since August 15, .233 since September 1, .222 since September 15, and .100 in the playoff, a single in 10 at-bats.

But walking Thomson would violate the baseball axiom “never put the potential winning run on base.” Four years earlier, Dressen had as Yankee coach watched manager Bucky Harris intentionally walk Pete Reiser in the ninth inning of Game Four of the 1947 World Series only to be burned. And all this season, Dressen had done so in the ninth inning of a game only once. (It had worked. On July 28, Brooklyn led St. Louis 3–2 with two out and Red Schoendienst on second when Dressen had Erskine walk Musial. Hal Rice fouled out to Hodges to end the game.) Dressen decided now to pitch to Thomson.

Dressen normally chatted up his newly summoned pitcher, reviewed strategy. But now, looking up at Branca ten inches taller than himself, manager offered reliever but the simplest of instruction. Said Dressen: “Get him out.” The skipper turned and walked back to the dugout, in his pocket jangling 18 cents of Korean won. The coins were given Dressen in spring for luck by the mother of a soldier abroad.

Some sixty feet away, Durocher had little more instruction for Thomson. When Mueller’s ankle turned, Thomson had run from the on-deck circle toward third. While his friend lay waiting for a stretcher, he had stood beside the bag quietly, bat in hand. The injury distracted Thomson and as Branca took the mound and Hartung did knee-bends at third, Thomson walked slowly back toward home. “During that ninety feet, I was talking to myself, psyching myself up,” says Thomson. “I called myself a son of a bitch. I’d never done that before.”

Now, some ten feet from home plate, Durocher walked up to Thomson. “Boy,” he told his leading home-run hitter, “if you ever hit one, hit one now.” With that, Durocher slapped with his right hand Thomson’s rear and retreated to his coaching box alongside Hartung.

Hodges watched Thomson walk to the plate. His voice was hoarse and his throat hurt but still he leaned into the white call letters on his metal microphone. “He’ll be up there against big Ralph Branca swinging,” the announcer told his WMCA audience. “A home run would win it for the Giants and win the championship. A single to the outfield would more than likely tie up the ballgame and keep the inning going.”

On the mound, Branca and Walker prepped for Thomson, reviewing that which Dressen and his coaches had laid out before the game. “We had said,” remembers Erskine, “keep the ball up. Thomson was a low fastball hitter. His power was low.” Now Walker told Branca to try and get ahead of Thomson with a fastball. If he did so, they would then bust him up and in, thus setting up the curve low and away. Branca, who had overruled Walker thirty-eight days before only to see a no-hitter broken up, agreed. Then he asked, “What signs are we using?”

Walker was partial to the “count system.” The number of signals flashed would determine the pitch to be thrown. Such was the system Branca normally used with Walker. The pitcher nodded.

Walker trotted back to home and squatted in front of umpire Jorda. The catcher was for Branca not an unfamiliar target. He had pitched to him already six times this season and with great success. In 36.1 innings, the battery had yielded just six earned runs, its ERA 1.49. Branca reared and fired his first warm-up pitch, a BB. “Probably the best I felt since the second shutout in August,” he says.

Branca was comfortable coming out of the pen. Over the previous two seasons, he had relieved in 42 games, exactly the number of games he had started. And out of the bullpen he had fared fairly well. Over that two-season span, Branca was 17–15 as a starter with a 3.92 ERA and 375 base runners allowed in 270.2 innings. As a reliever, he was 3–5 with a 3.35 ERA and 96 runners allowed in 75.1 innings.

Branca hurled another warm-up pitch. And as St. Christopher danced about his neck, the pitcher was eager for redemption. For in the history of the major leagues, just five playoff games had been waged and he had lost two of them. The baseball gods had been unfair. “Why is it,” Branca’s brother John had asked him the night before, “the team scores ten runs for Labine and one for you?”

A dozen rows behind the Brooklyn dugout, Al Branca rose in his seat. The youngest of seventeen, he was off to the army in just days, set to begin basic training in Fort Lee, Virginia. Unfettered, he was on this weekday the only Branca at the park, the only with a rectangular ticket— section, row and seat printed in red—to cheer on his relation. Brother Ralph set to pitch and Al walked toward him, kneeling now in the stone aisle beside Ann Mulvey, an orange “NY” figural prettying her armrest.

Seated with her parents in a box just behind the Brooklyn dugout, Mulvey watched her fiancé finish his eight practice throws. She turned to owner O’Malley. “Isn’t it nice of Dressen,” she said, “to call in Ralphie to nail down the pennant?”

Thomson positioned his 10¹⁄2-D black shoes in the inner half of the batter’s box. “My cleats fit like a glove,” he remembered years later. Branca stepped to the third-base side of the rubber, his 11-D black shoes two sizes too small. The pitcher liked his spikes tight. Branca wiped his brow, and pitcher and batter, both nicknamed Hawk, eyed each other. Mueller’s injury had distracted Thomson and only now did he notice Newcombe’s relief. “Branca!” thought Thomson. “Where did he come from?”

Pitcher and hitter had both awakened that morning at 7:30 in the home of parents. Both had eaten eggs prepared by his mother, Thomson with a side of bacon, Branca a side of ham. Both had left a New York suburb for the Polo Grounds minutes before 10, Thomson in his blue Mercury, Branca his blue Oldsmobile. Six hours later—it was now

3:57 p.m.—one held a bat and one a ball. And a batter faced the pitcher Durocher had once sought to swap him for.

Unseen in the overhang in left, Colletti, thirty-nine, kept up by pulley his scoreboard: A.B. 23, OUTS 1, BKLYN 100000030, N.Y. 00000010. Another run already in, Colletti would wait for the end of the inning to fill the ninth New York slat.

It was now that Durocher had infielder Lohrke run toward the Giant pen in right to warm up. In the event the game went extra innings, Thomson would replace Mueller in right and Lohrke would move to third. Brooklyn’s infield inched back and, as planned, Walker called for a fastball. Lockman, lurking off second, saw the catcher’s fingers move. They were bare, not taped like Campy’s. “I didn’t recognize the sequence,” says Lockman. The first baseman touched his belt buckle to let Thomson know he could not read the sign.

But Franks could. Through the season, the Giants had played Brooklyn two outs short of 25 games—just the sixth time teams had in one season squared off so much. The coach knew Brooklyn and its signals inside-out. Walker had called for a fastball. Of this Franks was certain and he pressed his push-button once. The current coursed along Chad-wick’s yellow and slate wires and the ringer on the green phone in the bullpen buzzed.

The previous inning, Yvars had warmed up pitcher Larry Jansen. But the catcher was now in the hot seat, now at the far end of the right-field bullpen bench set off under cover of shadow from coach Shellenback, pitcher Hearn, catcher Noble and third baseman Lohrke. When the metal buzzer sounded just once, the former test dummy knew what to do. “If I did nothing, it was a fastball,” he says. “I did nothing.”

Off in center field, Newcombe stepped into a shower. And as big Ralph went into his windup—five ounces in the grip of 220 pounds—the posse of writers squinched into the Brooklyn players lounge listened to Red Barber’s call: “Branca pitches and Thomson takes a strike.”

Franks was right. Branca had thrown a fastball.

The pitch, a little low and a little inside but squarely over the pentagonal plate, seemed an eminently hittable one for Thomson. And far off in the Brooklyn pen, Erskine and Labine, the latter now warming up too, paused momentarily from their tossing to holler at their brother-in-arm. “Oh, no!” shouted Erskine. “Ralph, not down there! Good-night! Not down there!”

Lying beneath a naked lightbulb on a trainer’s table in the clubhouse, Mueller missed the pitch. He was in pain but at the moment ignored. “Nobody was tending to me,” he says. Logan did share his room. But he was far away. The bespectacled clubhouse man had learned mid-game that his sister Marie had died of cancer, had had her last rites. So as to be able to hurry after ball to her home across the river on Merriam Avenue, he had packed the team trunks and stood now by a wire-mesh window, his back to the injured right fielder.

Walker tossed the ball back to Branca. And as Colletti inserted at the far left of the left-field scoreboard a “1” in white paint, statistician Roth noted the called strike too, a capital letter “C” drawn in pencil in the first-pitch column on his blue score sheet. Branca was pleased. He had gotten ahead of Thomson.

A season hung in the balance and everywhere did people turn to God. Jews observing an annual fast for a governor of Judea murdered 2,537 years before recited this afternoon a silent Hebrew prayer: “Answer us, God, answer us, on this day of our fast, for we are in great distress.” This Nota Schiller would, in his Brownsville tenement, read in minutes. But his current distress had less to do with a fast than a fastball just thrown, the yarmulke’d boy of thirteen, home early from yeshiva, hanging now on the every word of Red Barber. Just below Barber, a girl of twenty wearing the blue-white diamond ring the pitcher had given her in November began to move her lips in prayer, to ask that above all Ralph Theodore Joseph Branca emerge unscathed from this contest seventeen days before his wedding: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” General manager Bavasi invoked the virgin mother too, mumbling in the ear of gossipmonger Walter Winchell seated one row ahead. So did Carl Bayuk, a sandy-haired boy of thirteen beseeching intervention not on behalf of Brooklyn but New York. Middle son of gentile and Jew, Bayuk balanced now on hands and knees on a Persian carpet in New Jersey. And having communicated with Mary, he spoke now to Thomson, the player tiny in his living room RCA television: “If you hit a home run, I will do anything the good Lord wants me to do.” Bayuk’s idol Willie Mays, a boy of twenty genuflecting in the on-deck circle at the Polo Grounds, prayed too. “Please don’t let it be me,” mouthed Mays. “Don’t make me come to bat now, God.”

As much as anyone, the rookie had Jack Carter to thank he was not in Thomson’s spikes.

Carter, twenty-four, loved statistics. Born Jack Cohen in the Bronx, he was a statistician at Standard Oil, his first job since graduating City College in 1948. But less keen on barrels of oil than bats, the Giant fan had from his apartment on Walton Avenue devised in 1950 two baseball statistics: “Equivalent Batting Average” and “Equivalent Batting Average Allowed.” These weighted the effectiveness of hitter and pitcher (a single advancing a runner to third, for example, more valuable than one hit with no one on base). And in the spring of 1951, having for months foisted voluminous tables of EBA and EBAA upon his Phi Delta Pi fraternity brothers, Carter had shopped his analysis to baseball.

Giant vice president Feeney had been interested. For stats were the future. (While the just published Official Encyclopedia of Baseball took a first statistical stab at baseball history, the U.S. Census Bureau had in June put to use the brand-new UNIVAC, the world’s first commercial computer.) Feeney had pitched Carter to Durocher. The manager was game and so off to the clubhouse went Carter, tall, fair and giddy. “He was very excited to meet Durocher in the nude,” remembers Estelle Kraysler, then his wife. “He didn’t know whether to extend his hand.” Carter did and New York offered him a job, $2,000 for a season of stats.

Carter was diligent, once sending in his stead to a game his wife with grids at the ready. “He had to teach me what his system was,” remembers Kraysler. “I went to the game pregnant.” By May, Carter had set for Durocher what he called a “Most Productive Batting Order.”

What Carter gave New York was not quite what Allan Roth gave Brooklyn. But unlike Dressen, Durocher welcomed the input, altering his lineup at Carter’s behest, the statistician later wrote, “when the Giants started their stretch drive.” Remembers Kraysler, “Durocher changed the batting order many times because of some of the things my husband told him.”

Though the press would never learn of Carter, Durocher had indeed endlessly shuffled his lineup through the season, using Thomson, for example, in every slot in the batting order save leadoff and second. Now, for the fourth game in a row, Thomson was batting sixth.

That morning, driving in his Mercury, zipping alone along the West Side Highway, Thomson had decided that if he could somehow collect three hits in the game, the team would likely win. Three hits. As he now crouched and cocked his orange bat above his right shoulder, two hits already claimed, this thought came to mind.

Another thought, another memory of morning, wafted now to Branca. Robinson had in the clubhouse before the game declared that anyone who did not feel butterflies in his gut was not human. Branca then confessed to Robinson and Reese that he did feel butterflies. The men had laughed. And now, as Branca adjusted his belt, cap and sleeve, rubbed a ball and flipped a white cotton bag holding three ounces of yellow rosin, he thought of butterflies.

Walker’s fingers wigwagged. He wanted a fastball and Branca agreed to throw one. Perched in the press box above first base, Hodges painted the scene: “Hartung down the line at third not taking any chances. Lock-man without too big of a lead at second but he’ll be running like the wind if Thomson hits one.”

The wind was blowing southward, the American flag high in center field riffling to right. Some ninety feet below, Franks sat behind the fourth window in the clubhouse, brown eye held to a telescope. About him were pictures framed: a team portrait, actor George Raft, Franklin Roosevelt smoking a cigar, beautiful Laraine and the kids. The room was dark, sunlight glinting off the silver ridges of a radiator peeking up and over the sill before him. The window was open some six inches, the shade drawn even with the lowered wooden frame. And it was through the aperture cut months ago in the wire grid beneath that frame that Franks, all but hidden in Durocher’s locked office, now peered. Again, the coach pressed the push-button once. Again, Yvars was still, unaware that he sat within the eye of a newsreel camera off in the press box.

Thomson crouched, in his mouth half a stick of gum. He knew Franks was off spying in center field. “Of course!” says Thomson. And he knew Walker’s sign was there to be gotten in the person of Yvars far beyond Robinson. From the batter’s box, says Thomson, “you could almost just do it with your eyes.”

Branca withdrew with his large right hand a baseball from his mitt. It was a hand befitting his surname, Branca Latin for “paw.” As the starting center at New York University, he had palmed a basketball with ease and so now, a baseball, nine inches in circumference, all but disappeared in his fingers. Branca raised the ball above his head together with his gloved hand, leaned back on his right leg, kicked his left and brought down his arms, elbows bent inward to his chest. Ball in hand, he reached his right arm far behind his head, elbow pointing toward first, then took with his left leg a giant step toward home, his right leg leaving the ground. Branca whipped his right arm forward and, twenty-three seconds after a first pitch, again let go of the ball. Hodges spoke: “Branca throws.”

Thomson watched Branca and like all good hitters slowed his rival’s delivery. He saw the pitch unfurl, saw the momentum of a windup thrust Branca’s right side past his left, saw the ball leave his right hand, rolling off at last touch his long middle finger. It was all very clear: a buttery sun had in the sixth inning joined Chadwick’s eighteen-inch lights to illuminate play.

Atop the concrete outfield wall, astride both staircases that led to the clubhouse, five canvas panels stood side by side, each 17 feet high and 20 feet wide. Batters appreciatively referred to them as “the eyes”; dark green, they helped the hitter pick up a pitched ball homeward bound. This they now did Thomson, Branca’s second pitch a white ball with red stitching whooshing brightly through the air against a green backdrop.

The ball was fast moving, traveling some ninety-three miles per hour. As it approached, Thomson slightly lifted then returned to earth his left foot. Walker raised his glove to receive the pitch: it was high, at the level of Thomson’s triceps, and set to pass over the inner portion of the plate. The approaching ball some ten feet away, Thomson began his swing, an uppercut, his torso coiling, his right shoulder moving toward first, his arms struggling to extend yet still direct his clenched bat into the path of the inside pitch. Thomson’s bat struck the ball before it reached home plate.

Branca’s right leg landed, his body following his pitching arm down. Thomson’s right wrist turned over, his body following his swinging bat up. The men were moving in opposite directions.

The ball shot toward third base and Branca whipped his head right to watch its flight.

Adapted from the forthcoming The Echoing Green by Joshua Prager, excerpted with permission by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. On sale September 19th.  Preorder now