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STAN ISAACS Out of Left Field |
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How absurd! Now they're saying the '51 Giants stole the pennant!
By
STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
There
were two happenings in sports the past weeks which wake up the
echoes of H.L. Mencken's view of America expressed in these lines:
"Life in America interests me not as a moral phenomenon
but simply as a gaudy spectacle. I enjoy it most when it is most
uproarious, preposterous, inordinate and melodramatic...Gorgeous
mountebanks take my mind off my gallstones, my war wounds, my
public duties and my unfortunate love affairs, and so make existence
agreeable."
We had the furor over the Wall Street Journal report that alleged
the New York Giants stole the 1951 pennant. This dominated the
New York tabloids but, sensibly, was ignored by most of the rest
of the nation.
And we had the debut of another World Wrestling Federation monument
to incivility, the XFL--the new football attraction on NBC, the
loser network in the last round of National Football League bidding.
The Wall Street Journal exclusive attributed the Giants' 1951
"miracle" run coming from 13 ½ games behind
in August to win the pennant on Bobby Thomson's "shot heard
'round the world" to the fact that the Giants stole the
Dodgers' signs.
The Journal said the Giants had a player or coach with a telescope
in center field which picked up the Dodger catcher's signals;
he relayed that the next pitch was a fast ball or curve with
a buzzer sounding in the Giants' bullpen in right-center field;
from there a Giant player would relay by a pre-arranged signal
to the batter whether the pitch was a fast ball or curve. The
inference was that Thomson, like many of the Giants through that
"miracle" run, had benefitted from knowing what kind
of pitch was coming.
The Journal reporter, Joshua Prager, detailed in some two-thousand
words, which Newsday picked up in its entirety, a lovely spy
tale. Most significantly, he interviewed the 21 suriving 1951
Giants and a coach who corroborated that the Giants had stolen
signs that season. That kind of legwork deserves some appreciation.
He acknowledged sign-stealing was a tradition in baseball, but
gave this situation a sinister twist because of the use of the
telescope and the buzzer.
The intrigue was right up the alley of editors faced with the
doldrums of the post-Super Bowl first week in February. It wasn't
hard to round up Dodger fans to say, in time-honored Brooklyn
tradition, "We wuz robbed."
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I covered the Giants' rush to the 1951 pennant. I loved it because I was just starting out in the sports-writing dodge and I had been a Giants fan who suffered all the years since the Giants had last won a pennant, in 1937. I paused on my way to the Giants' dressing room to watch the last inning from a spot on the right field ramp in the Polo Grounds and delighted in the three-run home run by Thomson that settled into the lower left field stands and gave the Giants a 5-4 victory and the pennant.
Did the Giants--horrors!--cheat? Was the Giants' victory ersatz? And should the Giants heed the suggestion of Newsday reader Carole Fishman who wrote, "take the pennant back from San Francisco and give it back to the borough of Brooklyn?"
Pardon the chuckle. And a few points of interest here.
The day before Thomson's homer the Dodgers beat the Giants in the second game of the playoffs in the Polo Grounds, 10-0. What happened to the Giants' ability to hit the pitches they knew were coming? Or was the telescope broken?
The Giants went on to play the Yankees in the World Series. They won the first game played in the Polo Grounds, 6-2, then scored only two runs and then one run in losing the next two games at the Polo Grounds. Did the Yankees' Gil McDougald steal a Giants' sign when he hit a bases-loaded home run in game five? The Giants eventually lost the World Series in six games.
Over the 40 some years I have covered baseball, I often watch batting practice before the games. I stand behind the netting of the batting cage and watch batting practice pitchers throw medium-speed fast balls down the middle of the plate. Do the batters always hit home runs off the fat pitches they know are coming? No. Half the time they don't even hit what would be regarded as safe hits.
In the old "Home Run Derby" televised series featuring the game's best sluggers hitting against their own selected pitchers, the big boys usually hit fewer than five of the 10 offerings for homers.
Ralph Branca, who threw the fatal pitch to Thomson, admitted that "It was a good pitch and he still had to hit the pitch."
Indeed.
The New York Daily News, Post and Newsday played the story so big, it behooved the local television stations to do the obligatory follow-up. A WPIX reporter came out with a cameraman to my house to get my slant on things. He had a set agenda: "The-Dodgers-wuz-robbed angle." So, he didn't particularly care what I had to say about batting practice homers; the shutout the Dogers laid on the Giants the day before; or the fact that Thomson, whether he knew what pitch was coming, still had to hit the ball.
The TV guy used all of 15 seconds of my comment, allowing only my admiration for the Giants' use of high tech long before it was fashionable. My wife, though, liked that the segment showed a brief look of the quilt she had fashioned which was in the background of the "Shot-heard-'round-the-world memorablia' on my office wall.
The much ballyhooed XFL debuted last weekend at primetime on NBC with smashing ratings over and beyond what was projected and much better numbers than the movies that otherwise would have occupied the slot. Its Sunday afternoon game ratings on UPN network were modest but acceptable. Critics ridiculed the football and the boorish commentary; and any English teacher suckered into watching could only wince at the assaults upon grammar by the grimy athletes and mountebank pitchmen who passed as announcers.
No matter, the XFL reached the yoots in the 18 to 34 class who are the target audience for wrestling. Now, NBC, which used to be regarded as a major network, can laugh all the way to the bank.
As that old churl Mencken also wrote, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
© 2001 by Stan Isaacs. The "catcher" drawing is from the IMSI Master/Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506.
You can contact Stan Isaacs with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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