Sport: Frantic Finish

Two days after the New York Yankees clinched their third pennant in a row,* the National League race was right back where it started on opening day. In Philadelphia’s Shibe Park. Brooklyn’s stumbling Dodgers looked up at the big scoreboard and read the bad news from Boston. The Giants had actually done it. They had beaten the Boston Braves, 3-2, had whittled the Dodgers’ 13½-game lead down to nothing and hauled themselves into the league lead. For the Dodgers, trailing the Phillies 8 to 5 in the sixth inning, it looked like a hopeless cause.

It was the most frantic finish in the National League since the Dodgers overhauled the Cardinals in 1946 and were beaten out of the pennant in a postseason playoff. The Giants, rated as red-hot contenders in spring training, had bumbled into an eleven-game losing streak at the beginning of the season, could never seem to get going again. But in mid-August, behind the standout pitching of Sal Maglie and Larry Jansen, they had started to move, and won a phenomenal 37 of their last 44 games. With the pressure on, the Dodgers dropped five of their last eight games. Now they needed to beat the Phillies, even to stay in the race.

Brooklyn Manager Charley Dressen shot the works. Starting with his ace lefthander, Preacher Roe, he used up a total of seven pitchers trying to cut the Phillies down. In the eighth the Dodgers scored three runs, tied up the game. Going into the last of the twelfth the Phillies threatened again, loading the bases with one out. Brooklyn’s Don Newcombe zipped a third strike past Outfielder Del Ennis. But then Philly First Baseman Eddie Waitkus lashed a liner toward Second Baseman Jackie Robinson, who had missed a grounder in the second inning that let in two Philadelphia runs.

This time Robinson swerved to his left, dived for the ball and disappeared in a cloud of dust. The umpire’s arm shot up, signaling the putout, as Robinson writhed on the ground, the wind knocked out of his body. Two innings later Robinson was a hero again. In the first half of the 14th, he connected with a fast ball, lifted it into the left field stands for the homer that won the game for Brooklyn, 9 to 8. Said Robinson afterward: “The minute I met it, I knew. I didn’t even have to look at it. I knew it was gone.”

The Brooklyn victory tied up the National League race again, and put the Giants and Dodgers into a two-out-of-three-game playoff this week for the right to meet the Yankees in the series.

*By sweeping a doubleheader against the Red Sox, with the Yankees’ Allie Reynolds pitching his second no-hitter of the year, the first American League pitcher ever to do it twice in a season. In the National League, Johnny Vander Meer of the Cincinnati Reds turned the trick twice in a row in 1938.