Duke Snider (left) and Don Newcombe, doused with beer.
The champagne was saved for drinking.
After losing the World Series to Boston in 1916, to Cleveland in 1920, and to the Yankees in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953; blowing Playoffs for the National League Pennant to St. Louis in 1946 and to the New York Giants in 1951; and blowing Pennants on the last weekend of the season to St. Louis in 1942 and Philadelphia in 1950, the Dodgers had finally won their 1st undisputed World Championship in 55 years, since they finished the 1900 season as National League Champions, with no postseason series available.
But in 1955, it all seemed to come together. True, the Dodgers had traded away 2 of the beloved players who would later be known, in the title of the book that Roger Kahn wrote in remembrance of his days covering them for the New York Herald Tribune, as "The Boys of Summer": Pitcher Elwyn "Preacher" Roe and 3rd baseman Billy Cox.
The team was in transition: Jackie Robinson was still a factor, but his replacements had arrived in Jim "Junior" Gilliam and Don Zimmer. Ralph Branca, the goat of the 1951 Playoff, had retired, but the Dodgers still had Don Newcombe and Carl Erskine, and they were joined by a hotshot lefty named Johnny Podres. The Dodgers won their first 13 games of the '55 season, and finished 13 games ahead of the preseason favorites, the Milwaukee Braves.
The Yankees took the first 2 games of the World Series, despite Robinson's steal of home plate in Game 1. But the Dodgers took the next 3 at Ebbets Field. Then the Yankees tied it up by winning Game 6. In fact, the home team won each of the first 6 home games. Bad news for the Dodgers, since Game 7 would be at Yankee Stadium. A team with the kind of luck they'd had over the years didn't need no bad omens.
The Boys of Summer were getting old. The younger Dodgers didn’t quite seem ready. The team was in transition, and it did seem like it had been a seamless one; but for veterans like shortstop Pee Wee Reese, 1st baseman Gil Hodges, center fielder Duke Snider and catcher Roy Campanella -- along with Robinson, all are in the Hall of Fame -- it seemed like it was now or never.
Podres was the choice of manager Walter Alston to start Game 7, having won Game 3. Yankee manager Casey Stengel, with ace Whitey Ford having pitched brilliantly in Game 6, had to go with Tommy Byrne, a lefty who was occasionally wild, but had come up big for Stengel in several big games.
With 1 out in the top of the 4th, Campanella doubled. After a Carl Furillo groundout, Hodges, singled Campy home. 1-0 Brooklyn. Reese led off the top of the 6th with a single. Snider reached on an error. Campy bunted the runners over. Stengel ordered an intentional walk to Furillo, and pulled Byrne for Bob Grim. Grim allowed a sacrifice fly to Hodges, and the Dodgers had a 2-0 lead.
But the Yankees began the bottom of the 6th with Billy Martin drawing a walk and Gil McDougald singling. And Yogi Berra, as much a "Mr. October" as the Yankees have ever had, was coming up. Yogi had delighted in hitting Series homers off the Dodgers, and would again. To hell with the lefty-on-lefty matchup: Yogi had no fear. And, despite usually being a pull hitter, Yogi hooked the ball down the left-field line, into the corner.
Left field had long been a troublesome position for the Dodgers. Gene Hermanski, Cal Abrams, George "Shotgun" Shuba and Andy Pafko had played it well at times, but, for whatever reasons, none of them seemed to stick, although Shuba was still on the roster. Now Zimmer was the usual left fielder, though he was a natural infielder.
But Alston had pinch-hit Gilliam for Zimmer, and put Gilliam in at 2nd, replacing the righty-throwing Zimmer in left with lefty-throwing Sandy Amoros, a Cuban whose English was halting but whose play, on this day, changed baseball history.
A righthanded fielder, like Zimmer, never could have caught this ball, no matter how fast he was. But Amoros was fast and lefthanded, and he stuck out his right hand and caught the ball. Then he wheeled it back to the infield. Reese got it, and relayed it to Hodges, and McDougald was unable to get back to 1st base in time. Double play, end of threat. Just 10 outs to go.
Bottom of the 9th. Two out. Podres has pitched a stomach-churning game: Eight hits, but no runs. The last batter is Elston Howard. Six months earlier, Howard had become the 1st black man to play in a regular-season game for the Yankees, and was now the left fielder and Yogi's backup at catcher. In 1959, they would switch positions, and Ellie would become one of the game's best catchers. In 1955, he was a 26-year-old "rookie," having played in the Negro Leagues for a while.
Howard grounded to short. It was so appropriate that it went to Harold Henry Reese, the Dodgers' Captain and senior player. Pee Wee threw it to Gil Hodges, and Hodges, perhaps the best-fielding 1st baseman of his era, had to trap it on the ground to keep it from being an error and bringing the tying run to the plate. But he got it. It was 3:43 PM on October 4, 1955.
Ballgame over. World Series over. With Red Barber having been chased out of Brooklyn by team owner Walter O'Malley after the 1953 season, it was Vin Scully, not quite 28 years old, but already closing his 6th season as a Dodger broadcaster, who got to make the announcement over radio station WMGM, 1050 on the AM dial: "Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the World Champions of baseball."
Simple, and correct, with no embellishments or histrionics. Not exactly how Mel Allen, Phil Rizzuto or John Sterling would have described it if it had been the Yankees.
It had been 55 years — or 52 years if you count only from the 1st World Series forward. All the near-misses, all the heartbreak, all the taunts from fans of the Giants and the Yankees? Those things no longer mattered.
"Please don't interrupt," Shirley Povich wrote for the next day's Washington Post, "because you haven't heard this one before: The Brooklyn Dodgers are World Champions of baseball." (Povich wrote for the Post from 1924, when Walter Johnson finally pitched them to the World Series, until his death in 1998. His son is the TV journalist Maury Povich.)
And they did it at Yankee Stadium, no less. They never clinched a World Championship at Ebbets Field -- although the Yankees had, in 1941, 1949 and 1952, and would again in 1956. Not until 1963 would the Dodger franchise clinch a World Series win on their home field.
The party in Brooklyn was the biggest since V-J Day ended World War II 10 years earlier, and hasn't been matched since. Scully told the story for Ken Burns' Baseball: "When we were riding through Manhattan, it was fall. Football was in the air. We came out the other end of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and it was New Orleans chaos!"
No more "Wait 'Til Next Year," as the Brooklyn Eagle -- which had, sadly, gone out of business a few months too soon to report on the Dodgers' title -- had first blared in a headline after the 1941 Series. This was Next Year. So said the back page of the next day's New York Daily News: "THIS IS NEXT YEAR!". The front page of the next day's Daily News was even more demonstrative: "WHO'S A BUM!" Willard Mullin, who had drawn the original version of the "Dodger Bum" cartoon character, drew him again, a big nearly-toothless smile, for that front page, consisting only of that headline and that drawing.
It would remain the most famous New York headline ever, for 20 years, until the Daily News did "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD" on October 30, 1975. The New York Post tried to top that with "HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR" on on April 15, 1983, but who's kidding who?
Two personnel notes should be made. One is that Mickey Mantle was injured and unable to play in Game 7 for the Yankees. Does that mean the one and only World Series won by the Brooklyn Dodgers should have an asterisk on it? No: There's no guarantee that Mickey would have made the difference, even though he had hit the Dodgers hard in the '52 and '53 Series, and would again in '56. Although he was one of the true Mr. Octobers, he didn't always have a good Series, and in fact went only 2-for-10 in the 3 Series games he did get into in '55, although one of those hits was a homer off Podres in Game 3.
The other personnel note is that Jackie Robinson was not put into the lineup in Game 7. The noblest character in the history of baseball was deemed unworthy of this moment by his manager. Alston was not a Jackie Robinson fan. Neither was owner O'Malley. But on the highlight film, you can see Number 42 running onto the field. After all he'd been through, at 36 he still had enough energy to be one of the first men into the celebratory pile, if not enough energy to persuade his manager to put him into the lineup. But can we really argue with the decision? After all, it worked.
Simple, and correct, with no embellishments or histrionics. Not exactly how Mel Allen, Phil Rizzuto or John Sterling would have described it if it had been the Yankees.
It had been 55 years — or 52 years if you count only from the 1st World Series forward. All the near-misses, all the heartbreak, all the taunts from fans of the Giants and the Yankees? Those things no longer mattered.
"Please don't interrupt," Shirley Povich wrote for the next day's Washington Post, "because you haven't heard this one before: The Brooklyn Dodgers are World Champions of baseball." (Povich wrote for the Post from 1924, when Walter Johnson finally pitched them to the World Series, until his death in 1998. His son is the TV journalist Maury Povich.)
And they did it at Yankee Stadium, no less. They never clinched a World Championship at Ebbets Field -- although the Yankees had, in 1941, 1949 and 1952, and would again in 1956. Not until 1963 would the Dodger franchise clinch a World Series win on their home field.
The party in Brooklyn was the biggest since V-J Day ended World War II 10 years earlier, and hasn't been matched since. Scully told the story for Ken Burns' Baseball: "When we were riding through Manhattan, it was fall. Football was in the air. We came out the other end of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and it was New Orleans chaos!"
No more "Wait 'Til Next Year," as the Brooklyn Eagle -- which had, sadly, gone out of business a few months too soon to report on the Dodgers' title -- had first blared in a headline after the 1941 Series. This was Next Year. So said the back page of the next day's New York Daily News: "THIS IS NEXT YEAR!". The front page of the next day's Daily News was even more demonstrative: "WHO'S A BUM!" Willard Mullin, who had drawn the original version of the "Dodger Bum" cartoon character, drew him again, a big nearly-toothless smile, for that front page, consisting only of that headline and that drawing.
Two personnel notes should be made. One is that Mickey Mantle was injured and unable to play in Game 7 for the Yankees. Does that mean the one and only World Series won by the Brooklyn Dodgers should have an asterisk on it? No: There's no guarantee that Mickey would have made the difference, even though he had hit the Dodgers hard in the '52 and '53 Series, and would again in '56. Although he was one of the true Mr. Octobers, he didn't always have a good Series, and in fact went only 2-for-10 in the 3 Series games he did get into in '55, although one of those hits was a homer off Podres in Game 3.
The other personnel note is that Jackie Robinson was not put into the lineup in Game 7. The noblest character in the history of baseball was deemed unworthy of this moment by his manager. Alston was not a Jackie Robinson fan. Neither was owner O'Malley. But on the highlight film, you can see Number 42 running onto the field. After all he'd been through, at 36 he still had enough energy to be one of the first men into the celebratory pile, if not enough energy to persuade his manager to put him into the lineup. But can we really argue with the decision? After all, it worked.
October 4, 1955, 3:43 PM Brooklyn Standard Time. Dem Bums had finally dooed it. Two years later, it would all be over. And only one man had imagined such a blasphemy. Unfortunately, the blasphemer was the caretaker of the faith, Walter Francis O'Malley.
A magazine founded the year before, Sports Illustrated, named Podres its Sportsman of the Year.
In 1962, the Metropolitan Baseball Club of New York -- that was the original corporate name of the team we know as the Mets -- did something that had previously been done only by hatred of the Yankees: They united the fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the fans of the New York Giants. Until 1996, including even the Yankees' quasi-dynasty of 1976-81, the Mets were New York's most popular team.
That is no longer the case, and a person would have to be at least 72 years old to have any memory of the previous National League teams of New York; more like 75 to remember such events as the '55 win and Willie Mays' catch in '54; over 80 to accurately remember Bobby Thomson's homer in '51; about 85 to remember Jackie Robinson’s debut season in '47; close to 90 to remember the '41 season that began the Dodgers' renaissance; and nearly 100 to remember the Giant teams that won 3 Pennants in the 1930s.
Long time passing.
Long time passing.
As of October 4, 2022, there are still 3 living members of the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers, all pitchers: Carl Erskine, Roger Craig, and a rookie who didn't throw a pitch in that World Series, but would go on to become synonymous with the World Series in the 1960s: Sandy Koufax.
UPDATE: Craig died in 2023, Erskine in 2024, leaving Koufax as the last surviving '55 Dodger.
*
October 4, 1955 was a Tuesday. Obviously, this was the only game in Major League Baseball on this day. It was midweek, so no NFL games were played that day. The 1955-56 NHL season did not begin for another 2 days. And the NBA season did not open until November 5. So there were no other scores on this historic day.
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