Los Angeles, meet Brooklyn. Meet shock, meet despair, meet unremitting bitterness. Meet Murphy’s Law. Meet the return of the Devil himself: “Wait ’til next year.”
In 1962, the year Dodger Stadium opened, the Dodgers found themselves in a heated pennant race from the start. After losing their first game, they won 16 of their next 26, including an 18-strikeout performance by Sandy Koufax, tying his own NL record. Yet they still found themselves five games back of their 21–6 archrival San Francisco Giants. A 13-game winning streak only put Los Angeles in a tie for first place on June 1. It took a 41–18 record (.695) for the Dodgers to move into first place by themselves on June 8.
Los Angeles and San Francisco jockeyed for position over the next month. Koufax, who pitched his first career no-hitter June 30, combined with Don Drysdale on a 2–0 shutout of the Giants on July 8 to put the Dodgers once more in first, where they would stay into October. But nine days later, with a 2.06 ERA and 208 strikeouts in 1742/3 innings, Koufax was knocked out of action by injury. He would pitch only 82/3 dreary innings for the remainder of the year, leaving behind a void that would redouble in the season’s final days.
Even without Koufax, it looked like the Dodgers would edge the Giants without looking back. They led by 51/2 games on August 9 and, after winning their 100th game on September 22, held a four-game advantage with seven left to play. But on the 23rd—the day Maury Wills broke Ty Cobb’s single-season stolen base record—St. Louis hammered the Dodgers 12–2. Two more losses in their next three games followed, trimming the team’s lead over San Francisco to two games with three left.
It still should have been enough, except Dodgers hitters showed their new, warm-weather hometown what a drought really looked like. “They didn’t tail off,” Dodgers vice president Fresco Thompson would later tell Los Angeles Times columnist Sid Ziff. “They just went to the edge of the precipice and jumped off.”
Trailing the Cardinals 2–1 in the bottom of the seventh inning on September 28, the Dodgers tied the game on a Wills RBI single. Los Angeles wouldn’t score again for 35 innings. St. Louis won in the 10th inning, and then on September 29, backed by two unearned runs off Drysdale, the Cardinals’ Ernie Broglio two-hit Los Angeles, helping reduce the Giants’ deficit to a single game heading into the final day of the regular season.
That afternoon, as Johnny Podres and Curt Simmons battled in a scoreless duel at Dodger Stadium, word came from the Bay Area that Willie Mays had homered in the eighth inning to break a 1–1 tie. Minutes later, the Giants sealed that victory. Then, when the same eighth inning rolled into Los Angeles, the Cardinals’ Gene Oliver homered off Podres, dropping the Dodgers into the same three-game playoff series they had in New York with the Giants in 1951—the least awaited rerun in Dodgers history.
Upon the first game in San Francisco, the collapse of the Dodger offense—which despite it all was second in the NL in runs and on-base percentage—was joined by the full impact of Koufax’s ailing digit. Having made three mostly ineffective appearances since returning to action September 21, Koufax tried again but lasted only seven batters, allowing three runs on four hits. Mays (3-for-3, two homers) and the Giants pounded six Dodger pitchers while San Francisco’s Billy Pierce threw an 8–0 shutout. After 163 games, the Dodgers finally faced elimination.
By the time the Dodgers entered the sixth inning of the playoff, which moved to Los Angeles for the second game, they had amassed only 21 base runners in those 35 scoreless innings. Drysdale, who according to Baseball-Reference.com had thrown his 4,500th pitch of the season earlier in the game, ran out of gas and allowed a walk, a double, and two singles, adding to the damage by slipping while fielding a grounder for an error. Four runs came across, giving San Francisco what seemed obviously to be an insurmountable 5–0 lead.
Remarkably, the Dodgers actually scored. Even more remarkably, the Dodgers didn’t stop scoring. Seven runs came across in the inning, with reserve Lee Walls doubling home three and then scoring for a 7–5 lead.
Although the offense had come to life, the Dodgers pitching and defense were still on life support. San Francisco tied the game with two in the eighth, aided by another Dodgers error by Frank Howard. But in the bottom of the ninth, despite manager Alvin Dark’s use of four pitchers, the Dodgers loaded the bases on three walks and then won the longest nine-inning game in major league history to that point on Ron Fairly’s sacrifice fly. As in ’51, one more game would decide it all.
Podres, whose 1–0 loss in the regular season finale had come three days earlier, started the finale. He allowed two runs in the third inning including yet another unearned run, but Los Angeles came back with one in the fourth, two in the sixth on a Tommy Davis homer, and one in the seventh when Wills singled, stole second and third, and scored on a throwing error for a 4–2 lead.
In the bottom of the eighth, after Davis reached third base with two out, Alvin Dark dared the Dodgers to go for broke. He had reliever Don Larsen (of 1956 World Series perfect game fame) walk Johnny Roseboro and Willie Davis intentionally to get to the pitcher’s spot. Rather than pinch-hit, Dodgers manager Walter Alston let bat Ed Roebuck, who had given him a much-needed three shutout innings.
“We had a two-run lead, and I’d rather have Roebuck pitching for us with a two-run lead than anybody I’ve got,” Alston told John Hall of the Times.
Later, Jim Murray would write that “another baseball official couldn’t believe his eyes, all four of them, when he wandered into the locker room in the late innings of the game where the wirephotos had rigged up machines and found Drysdale idly standing there watching the transmissions of pictures. ‘Why the hell aren’t you out there heating up?’ he exploded. Drysdale shrugged. No one had asked him to.” But considering how overworked his staff was, no option that Alston faced offered refuge once he committed to leaving Roebuck in.
Not only did Roebuck ground out to end the eighth, but needing only three outs for the pennant in the ninth, he ran into immediate trouble. Matty Alou singled, and after he was forced at second on a hard smash by Harvey Kuenn, Willie McCovey walked on four pitches. Then Alou’s brother Felipe walked on a 3–2 pitch. Then Mays came up, and hit a ball that went off Roebuck’s glove for an infield single and an RBI. Bases loaded, Dodger lead cut to one run, and Alston’s gamble on Roebuck had busted. He called in Williams, the winning pitcher from the previous day.
“It had to be Williams,” said Alston. “The only right-handers left in the bullpen were Stan and Larry Sherry. And Sherry couldn’t get loose. His shoulder’s been stiff. Williams was well warmed up.”
Orlando Cepeda hit a sacrifice fly to tie the game, but at least it gave Williams and the Dodgers a second out. However, with catcher Ed Bailey up, Williams threw a wild pitch to move runners to second and third. That meant Williams would walk Bailey intentionally to load the bases again. And lacking any margin for error, Williams followed up by walking Jim Davenport on five pitches to force in the go-ahead run.
Appropriately, after Ron Perranoski relieved Williams, the Giants added another run on a bobble by Dodgers rookie reserve second baseman Larry Burright—the team’s fourth error of the game. Though Perranoski got a strikeout to end the inning, the Dodgers were back in a hole. Game 1 winner Pierce came in to close the pennant out, and did so on 12 pitches, Walls flying to center to end it.
Reporters were held out of the Dodgers locker room for nearly an hour after the game. Eavesdroppers heard only silence punctuated by fierce cursing. When the doors finally opened, Hall observed, “There were several empty whisky bottles. Ripped uniforms were scattered on the floor.” Said Duke Snider, the lone Dodgers remaining from the ’51 defeat: “They’re all still in a daze.”
Though Los Angeles would find relief the following year, the collapse gave the team’s new supporters their initiation. Truly, they were Dodgers fans now.
Fall of ’42
Trailing the St. Louis Cardinals by 21⁄2 games with a week to go in the 1942 NL pennant race, Brooklyn roared to the finish line by winning its final eight games.
The problem was that in the final third of the season, St. Louis was hotter than a Missouri summer’s day, winning their final six games, capping a run that saw them lose only eight of their final 51 contests. The Dodgers had a 10-game lead over the Cardinals on August 5 and won 60 percent of their remaining games, and still it wasn’t enough.
The pivotal swing came in a two-game series between the teams September 11–12 in Brooklyn. St. Louis held the Dodgers to one run in 18 innings, winning 3–0 and 2–1. That would be the difference between making and missing the World Series in 1942.