Why is it Ralph Branca’s fault?
Did Branca spit in the face of caution like Dodgers manager Charlie Dressen, who had famously told the world, “The Giants is dead,” after the Dodgers had built a 13-game lead over second-place New York on August 11 of the 1951 NL pennant race? Did Branca cause the Giants to go on an astonishing 38–8 run, winning 83 percent of their games from August 12 through the end of the season? Did Branca compel Giants reserves Sal Yvars and Hank Schenz to lead an elaborate system of stealing signs that has been determined to have helped the Polo Grounds’ home team get any number of hits? Did Branca, who pitched 204 innings with a 3.26 ERA (120 ERA+) do more harm than good for the cause?
No.
It wasn’t Branca’s fault, after all, that the Dodgers pitching was bone-dry by the end of the season, with Dressen using Branca, Don Newcombe, Preacher Roe, and Carl Erskine for 65 percent of the team’s 1,423 innings. One day after pitching 11/3 innings in relief as the Dodgers rallied from a 6–1 deficit to a 9–8, 14-inning, season-extending victory—a game that required Jackie Robinson to spear a bases-loaded line drive in the 12th inning to preserve the tie and then homer in the 14th to win it—Branca was chosen to start the first game of the three-game playoff with the Giants. Branca pitched eight innings and allowed three runs, but the Dodger offense mustered only one off Jim Hearn and lost.
The next day, Clem Labine got 10 runs of support on a day he didn’t need it, shutting out New York to bring the NL pennant to the final game. Despite pitching 232/3 innings in the previous week including 142/3 in the final two games before the playoff, Newcombe got the start and went 81/3 more. And when he needed relief after allowing three hits and a run in the ninth, it wasn’t a member of the Dodgers bullpen that got the call. It was, once more into the breach, Branca.
Branca would face Bobby Thomson. Thomson was the hero of Game 1, hitting a two-run homer off Branca in the fourth inning to give New York the lead. Thomson was also, potentially, a goat of Game 3. He inadvertently ran into an out on the base paths in the second inning. With the Giants trailing 2–1 in the eighth inning, the third baseman couldn’t handle shots by Andy Pafko and Billy Cox that doubled the Dodger run total.
In recent years, a predominant question has been whether Thomson got a stolen sign for Branca’s pitch. Thomson has denied it. For that matter, research by baseball historian Dave Smith has questioned the value of the entire sign-stealing enterprise because the team’s overall offensive performance at the Polo Grounds declined after the scheme reportedly began. Branca did come to believe that Thomson had a hint of what was coming.
In the end, did Branca throw a fastball that caught too much of the strike zone, a fastball that Thomson surrounded with his bat like a boy bear-hugging his old man? It was the pitch that gave the Giants a 5–4 victory and the NL pennant, and the Dodgers the most infamous defeat in baseball history. Yes. But in a season that probably saw the Dodgers throw about 20,000 pitches, should the fella whose principal crime was simply throwing the last one be forgiven? No doubt about it.