In Honor of Ralph Branca, and His Place in Time

Ralph Branca was more than the player who threw the pitch "heard 'round the world." (via Anthony22)

Ralph Branca was more than the player who threw the pitch “heard round the world.” (via Anthony22)

Begin with the image: Black-and-white, it comes in contrast to today’s parade of polychrome jerseys and green grass and orange dirt and kaleidoscopic scoreboards, the splash of the modern TV ballpark. It is of a different time entirely, an era drained of its primary colors and unburdened by the formalities of the 21st century: the close-ups, the graphics, the multiple angles of pitcher and batter.

Move to the sound: Tinny, the voice seems a product of an older newsreel, flat, far away and nearly overwhelmed by the monotone thrum of the Polo Grounds crowd: “The last half of the ninth,” it imparts. “The Giants’ chances look grim, almost nil.”

Return to the image: At the center of a single lens, the pitcher enters his wind-up. The batter, closer to the viewer, stands with the bat above his shoulder, prepared for the second pitch of a last-chance at-bat. Tall and lanky, the right-hander delivers the latest of uncountable pitches that comprise his personal history. Tall and graceful, the batter steps toward a different kind of history — the one in front, the one that waits.

Return to the sound: “There’s a long drive…The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

Move to the page: “Now it is done,” the sportswriter Red Smith would write in the New York Herald Tribune the following day, Oct. 4, 1951. “Now the story ends.”

In truth, the story was just beginning.

It was a moment made known in triplicate — in sight, in sound and in the written word — and at the center of it, at the very beginning of it, was the pitcher Ralph Branca. He died in November at age 90. Now the story goes on. There is more than one way to tell it. What Branca left behind, by any means, would always outlive him.

Bridge of Imagery

We have seen it so often, and with such acute recognition of its consequences, that the moment is part of our shared awareness, our collective baseball heritage: Branca, whose day is about to get worse, releases the fastball and enters his off-kilter follow-through. Bobby Thomson, whose life is about to get better, takes a short stride toward the pitch and cocks his hands just slightly above his right shoulder. An instant hence, with one swing of the bat, Thomson has enshrined in baseball’s anthology the significance of the phrase “with one swing of the bat.”

Indeed, Thomson’s three-run homer not only capped an improbable pair of comebacks for the New York Giants — down 13 ½ games in August, and down 4-1 entering the bottom of the ninth, the Giants would indeed “win the pennant!” on Thomson’s drive into the left-field stands — it secured his place in everlasting celebrity and Branca’s in never-ending infamy while inspiring the mythmaking apparatus of the burgeoning American media. Right off the bat, and then across more than half a century of narrative reshaping, it became both a dinger unequaled and a blank slate on which to communicate a range of cultural significations.

But first, before any greater significance could tack itself to Thomson’s lightning-quick round-tripper, before any larger importance could find its way to Branca’s lifetime trudge of heartache, the moment had to become communal. It had to become American. It had to make itself known beyond the parochial confines of a Northeastern city by reaching the contemporary campfire around which the latest stories were shared. In that regard, the light arrived in the nascent form of television.

Simply put, baseball got lucky. Just months prior to the playoff, AT&T had installed communications cable from coast to American coast. The plan had been for the 1951 World Series to serve as the first nationwide baseball telecast, but as fortune would have it, the Dodgers-Giants series took its place. Consequently, the playoff became something greater than a local event, something less provincial than a heated series between Gotham rivals whose supporters would engage the narrative only on city streets and then lean solely on memory to sustain their agony or ecstasy.

From sea to shining sea, millions tuned in to witness a game whose outcome ignored homegrown rooting interests. It was a novelty, but a good one. Long before reality shows grabbed the nation’s free-time attention, Thomson’s dramatic triumph became a nationwide talking point, even if the conversations were scattered. In the wake of World War II, and in the midst of the Korean War, its subject matter centered, beneficially, on figurative life and death. New Yorkers felt it. Americans shared it.

Today, 66 years after the fact, the images still grab us. Thomson’s quick turn on the fastball, and Branca’s head whip of instant recognition, yield a split second of reality no hour-long production of semi-scripted catfights could ever reproduce. In one brief moment, the emotions of two players and countless fans are balanced on the path of a baseball. And we know it. That we are now privy to the outcome, that we already understand that two players will soon perceive the symmetry of agony and ecstasy while experiencing the vast disparity between them, casts its spontaneous inception in an even more poignant arrangement of black and white, light and shadow.

(via Public Domain)

A Hardball Times Update
Goodbye for now.

(via Public Domain)

Many of us are far too young to have seen the 1951 playoff. We grew up on color TV. Our introduction to big league baseball arrived with polychrome jerseys and green grass and orange dirt and kaleidoscopic scoreboards, and as a result, the black-and-white footage of Thomson’s home run provides a kind of vicarious nostalgia, a borrowed sentimentality, for a time we did not experience ourselves.

To that end, we got lucky again. Less than two months prior to the Dodgers-Giants series, WCBS-TV in New York City provided the first color telecast of a major league baseball game. (It featured the Dodgers versus the Braves.) Four years later, in 1955, NBC televised the first World Series in color. What we are left with today, then, is an interstitial keepsake, a memento from a time between revolutionary applications of the medium. Had the game been broadcast in color, Branca would have sported blue and red while becoming sad and upset. Thomson would have boasted black and orange while bounding joyfully around the bases. The scene would have looked sufficiently similar to a modern game — after all, the uniforms haven’t much changed — that it might not have seemed from an era apart.

As it is, the footage not only stands as a striking demonstration of the game’s inherent drama, it serves as a key piece of a visual timeline. It is a black-and-white bridge between period displays of baseball imagery. The late 19th century gave us sepia-toned studio shots so utterly staged that we can only marvel at the quaintness of the effort. The early 20th century supplied grainy black-and-white stills of men who became modern heroes, men like Wagner and Cobb, and the absence of crisp lines and vivid figures only adds to the mystique we quietly crave on behalf of old legends.

Later — much later — came four-color baseball cards, multi-camera telecasts and, in 2012, a World Series camera generating replays at 20,000 frames per second, enough for viewers to see the slow-motion compression of the same type of baseball Thomson whacked, somewhat hazily, into the lower left-field stands.

It is still the most famous footage of all, and with it, we are tugged back along a lineage we might otherwise ignore, back to visual folklore whose blurry figures and limited POVs leave just enough for imagination, and yanked forward again to a modern game that has its optic referents in moments like Branca’s and Thomson’s.

Sound, Signifying Everything

Listen closely and you’ll hear the crack! — so sudden yet so profoundly enduring — of Thomson’s bat meeting Branca’s pitched ball. In the space of a breath, it splits time into two distinct periods: the one that comes before, and the one that comes after, the Giants winning the pennant! On either edge of impact are the words of WMCA-AM broadcaster Russ Hodges, describing the action in 1951 for Giants fans in New York and today for baseball fans everywhere. Just moments prior to contact, Hodges, speaking into his microphone, utters two words so simple in construction that only posterity would recognize the depth of their content: Branca throws. That’s it.

Branca throws.

An instant later, at the back edge of impact, comes an exclamation as quick as the flight it describes: There’s a long drive! If ever a sentence contained multitudes, this was it. This is it. In its swiftly elevated volume, in its evangelistic hints of great expectation, in its immediate promise of a new age that corrects the ills of the past, it carries a kind of millennial guarantee that no warning track or wall might breach.

The Giants would win the pennant.

Today, the recording of Hodges’ famous call — his homer-ish description of the home-team homer — accompanies the newsreel shot we’ve seen so often and from such a singular perspective that it is now a kind of community property, a piece of our psychic estate. To watch it today is to hear the radio call of yesterday, one of several that afternoon but the one that survives all others. Just after Branca whips his head to watch the inevitable path of the ball — and with it, the inevitable path of his legacy — the broadcaster wedges a pair of sentence fragments between his initial narration and the rapidly developing outcome. They are all he has time for.

It’s gonna be …

They are all he has room for.

I belieeeeeeve …

The moment won’t wait for eloquence to collect itself. There is no script for this.

It unfolds on the fly.

Now as then, the words belong to baseball. So utterly American are they, so distinctly stateside, that no other pastime in no other place could ever lay claim to their constitution. With a contraction to begin the remark and a word slur to advance it, the phrase “it’s gonna be” is a stark departure from the Queen’s English and thus a brassy demonstration of the revolutionary spirit that inspired a rebellion and motivated the seminal Shot Heard ’Round The World, the bullet blast at Concord.

The world, as always, can change in a single blow.

In their delivery, too, is the kind of eager confidence that animates independence, the sense that this is gonna happen, for sure. Manifest Destiny had found its midcentury instrument in the first three words of home run call, words conditioned in battle and expressed in the air of postwar license and wartime unease. The afterglow of the World War, and the grip of the Cold War, had given Americans the right to courage.

It’s gonna be…

Even so, even with audacity thick in the autumn air, certitude would surrender to faith.

…I belieeeeeeve…

Between the courage of conviction and its great reward came an acknowledgment of lingering doubt, a nod to the unknowability of unscripted events and the anxiety that attends this lone piece of intelligence. In the same breath, though, the broadcaster’s concession to earthly mysteries delivered its own remedy: trust without proof. In just one equivocal phrase, faith had become the gospel that matures into bedrock truth.

… I belieeeeeeve…The Giants win the pennant!

He would multiply by four, of course, perhaps conceding that no other narration could bless this event but also that a lone pronouncement just wouldn’t do it justice. He had to repeat himself, and repeat himself, and repeat himself in an unblushing effort to square description with the indescribable, the episode ultimately described.

The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!

Today, the quadruplicate call still resonates as if carried on endless echoes. Its unchecked exuberance makes it the standard by which every subsequent call is measured. But none — not even Vin Scully’s “she … is … gone!” — can ever satisfy the comparison. Hodges’ call is too imperfect, too amateurish, to invite fair balance. Broadcaster Red Barber would call it “unprofessional.” He was right. It is. And for that reason it remains the game’s greatest call. It is the bootleg recording of Sinatra in a smoky lounge, a track whose failings are redeemed by the spontaneity and power of the performance itself, and a track that no studio session could ever match.

The feeling, that freedom, is one still with us. It’s in the air.

Fit to Print

Headline writers were the first to move air — or what had used air as a transmission medium — into solid material, the first to convert a moment’s passage into the permanence of black-and-white print. “The Shot Heard ’Round The World,” they called it in those New York newspapers. And it was, without the hyperbole the message implied. Not only had Giants fans heard Hodges’ call — a call as quick as it was everlasting, though a call they couldn’t imagine they would ever hear again — but listeners from coast to coast had heard it on the Liberty Broadcasting Network while military personnel throughout the world had heard it on Armed Forces Radio.

It seems fitting now, as it should have seemed then, that U.S. soldiers gave ears to Game Three and its decisive blast. Regardless of their rooting interests — interests grounded in a place, the United States, where divided loyalties were the sporting product of wartime solidarity — they heard the sounds of the American Pastime. They heard the acoustics of a game made possible in theaters of war. They heard their fellow Americans, far from the battlefield, voicing reactions to a comparatively trivial shot. Only a game had ended, not a life. The meaning was in its meaninglessness.

The blast had bridged the wars, linking the Korean Peninsula and Guadalcanal to a stretch of old farmland in revolutionary Massachusetts, and the print media’s effort to add a martial dimension to Thomson’s shot had rightly acknowledged U.S. soldiers as both an inspiration and an audience by referencing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn,” a poem penned in honor of the American Revolution’s first shot.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard round the world.

The blast had also bridged the words.

In writing whatever the heck they wanted, in framing the story in whichever terms their freedom allowed, the press made a greater festival of the First Amendment by describing Thomson’s blast not only in the language of war but also of religion. The Times said Thomson “blasted the Dodgers.” The Herald Tribune ranked it as Brooklyn’s “sudden death.” But in the headline above Red Smith’s soon-to-be-famous column, the Herald Tribune also cited the partisan hand of providence by labeling it, without fear of sacrilege, “The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff.”

Only the influence of divinity, it implied, could yield an outcome so heavenly for one congregation and so hellish for another. Only a deity that had introduced divine judgment in the Old Testament could deliver the salvation, and the punishment, promised in the New — a divide perfectly embodied in Thomson’s joyous gallop and in Branca’s sullen march. Smith’s subsequent prose, however, would retrieve the theme from the sacred and return it, if briefly, to the profane: “Down on the green and white and earth-brown geometry of the playing field,” he wrote in the paragraph that followed his far more famous first passage, “a drunk tries to break through the ranks of ushers marshaled along the foul lines to keep profane feet off the diamond.”

The affair had been an earthly one, Smith acknowledged, waged on land owned by developer James J. Coogan and yet on grounds where human endeavor had produced a spiritual journey that only alcohol and elation could properly author. It was a secular sort of eucharist, one that a mortal had arranged in efforts to be at one with the newly divine. In just his second paragraph, Smith had expressed the “inexpressibly fantastic,” quote unquote, by portraying a man driven to rapture on the strength of the spirits that had found him. Indeed, the plastered fan had tried to cross the threshold dividing the mundane from the mythic, and Smith had found in the man’s failed effort an ideal illustration for the event he had just witnessed. The lines were strictly rendered. Only those rare few moments could briefly redraw them. Thomson, with a pitch from Branca, had turned the diamond into sacred geometry, and here the mortals were reconciling their positions relative to its space in time.

The effort would continue as the years moved on. For starters, latter-day scribes would cite The Shot as a pivotal moment in racial integration. New York fans in particular had become less segregated, drawing lines of inclusion not on the basis of black and white but of Dodger blue and Giant orange, and the presence of Jackie Robinson on the Dodgers and Willie Mays on the Giants had made the fan bases even more diverse. Per the historian Jules Tygiel in Past Time: Baseball as History, the result was that “witnesses included untold numbers of African Americans drawn to a contest pitting the National League’s two most racially integrated teams.” The greater result was that celebration and commiseration recognized no pigmentation.

Others acknowledged the suddenness of Thomson’s shot but also its resonance. In his novella Pafko at the Wall, Don Delillo describes Hodges’ call as “a pure shout, wordless, a holler from the old days” and the event itself as “another kind of history,” an episode that “joins (us) all in a rare way, that binds (us) to a memory.”

What he doesn’t mention is what remains most essential: We, as contemporary fans, aren’t required to have been there. We don’t need to have stood at the Polo Grounds or sat huddled ’round a radio or TV to recall The Shot. It is with us — in image, in sound, in print. Luck and timing have favored us. Modern prose has even revealed our fortune in retaining Hodges’ call: In the 1950s, radio stations did not record their broadcasts. The call survives today only because a fan in Brooklyn asked his mother to record the final half-inning of the game while he was at work.

History is made of these serendipities, small events that become great events because they didn’t happen otherwise. A fastball could have been a curveball. It wasn’t. The result, from a place in midair, is at once a monument and a model. We watch as two careers are condensed to a single event that could have broken, but didn’t break, in any numbers of ways, and we know the same abbreviation would attach, obit-style, to other careers. We listen as two men become the archetype for the hero/goat dyad, a lifetime yoke that has now delivered Bill Mazeroski and Ralph Terry, and Mookie Wilson and Bill Buckner, into the heaven-and-hell fodder of today’s adversarial talk shows. We read as two ex-players, working as a team, turn fame and infamy into a pioneering venture in memorabilia by further immortalizing an already immortal event, and we read, alas, that cheating is nothing new: The Giants were stealing signs, and Thomson just might have received the one that mattered most.

Still, its status as a touchstone for modern incidents — a reference point for the miraculous victories, the crushing defeats, the media hysterics, the capitalist repercussions and even the scandalous fallout — hardly cheapens its role as a stand-alone moment in American history. It occupies an era, and a geography, unlike the others, a time in place whose inhabitants could not have imagined the multimedia resonance of 3:58 p.m. EST at the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan.

A pair of surnames would emerge most prominently from that black-and-white wash of men in blurry jerseys, and today, no amount of revisionist history can reverse the roles of those two players. One is the pitcher and the other the batter. They have their place in that moment, and their time in this space. Ralph Branca was, and is, here.


John Paschal is a regular contributor to The Hardball Times and The Hardball Times Baseball Annual.
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Dennis Bedard
6 years ago

Great article. History can be defined as “one damn lie after another.” And so it goes with baseball. It has always had a nostalgic hold on the American psyche, a lens through which people love to re-create an image that they pretend were true as opposed to actually having any basis in reality. 1950’s New York baseball has a lot of historical baggage. One is that baseball was the epicenter of the New York sports world for so many ethnic and racial groups. Sort of a microcosm of the melting pot. Think The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn and every kid spending his spare time perusing the daily box scores and going to sleep with a radio next to his pillow. Another is the notion that the Dodger and Giant fans were victims of greedy Scrooges like O’Malley and Stoneham. Think Jimmy Breslin sitting at some bar in Queens telling his tale about Hitler and O’Malley. This all makes for great storytelling and allows us to feel good about ourselves, but time to throw some water on the theme.
1. True, it was a fantastic pennant race in the last month of the season. The Polo Grounds had a seating capacity of over 50,000. The last two games of the series were played there. Attendance was about 38,000 and 34,000 respectively. so there were at least 10,000 empty seats for each game.
2. Go back a few weeks when things were heating up. The Giants hosted the Braves on September 23rd and 24th and 25th. Saturday and Sunday day games and Monday day game. Attendance? 11,925, 17,774, and 6,059 on Monday afternoon. Not exactly a ringing endorsement from the locals.
3. The last games the Giants ever played in the Polo Grounds was on Sunday, September 29, 1957. Attendance was 11,606.
Imagine a pennant contender producing these numbers today? And remember, no TV’s in every household. Looking in the rear view mirror, this game has a lot of historic relevance but let’s face it, the popularity of New York baseball was not exactly what we would like to think. I would refer anyone interested in this era to read Michael D’Antonio’s Forever Blue, a book that puts all the myths in perspective.

Marc Schneider
6 years ago
Reply to  Dennis Bedard

Those are good points although I would argue that one key thing that has changed is that the country is simply more affluent and more people can afford to go to games and have more ability to do so in the middle of the week. The standard for attendance was much different then and the game is marketed differently. Such a game today would be played, for better or worse, at night when more people could come. World Series crowds, almost always in NY during the fifties, featured suit-wearing men who were able to afford a ticket and had the flexibility to take off from work, most likely corporate executives.

The point is, I’m not sure that this makes the popularity of the game a “myth” so much as it reflects economic and social realities of the day. The Dodgers and Giants left town, not so much due to greedy owners, as to changing demographics that affected their attendance. I’m sure that baseball was not as popular as nostalgia buffs make it out to be because how could it? In the same way, we have myths about how people lived generally, as if, for example, pre-marital or extramarital sex did not exist until, say, 1968.

bucdaddy
6 years ago
Reply to  Dennis Bedard

I seem to recall Bill James covered this to some extent in the original Historical Abstract, under the title “Sympathy for the Devil” in regard to the Dodgers, that they had provided great baseball to the Brooklyn for a decade, only to see their attendance slide and their pleas for a new ballpark rejected.

Pierce
6 years ago

Dear god…that is the most tortured, overwrought plop of steaming nonsense I’ve seen in quite some time. I myself have attended services at the Church of Greil Marcus from time to time, but never to such florid and ridiculous effect.

Too many laugh-out-loud moments to bear cataloguing, but this is worthy of attention and specific ridicule:

“With a contraction to begin the remark and a word slur to advance it, the phrase “it’s gonna be” is a stark departure from the Queen’s English and thus a brassy demonstration of the revolutionary spirit that inspired a rebellion and motivated the seminal Shot Heard ’Round The World, the bullet blast at Concord.”

They did use contractions in Ye Olde England, y’know…like, for hundreds of years before Concord. Holding out one utterly ordinary demotic usage as revealing *anything* is a tall order, though it can be done in the hands of a careful writer less intoxicated by the heady vapors of pretension. (Here the word ‘Hi’ does all the work you so desperately try to assign to the mediocre Hodges. https://newrepublic.com/article/90767/why-i-love-america).

Sadly, “it’s gonna be” cannot bear the crushing weight. Sometimes a really big load requires several flushes.

Colin
6 years ago

Check out this poem in the New Yorker on Branca.

Colin
6 years ago
Reply to  Colin
Marc Schneider
6 years ago

Personally, I think Hodges’ call is fabulous because it’s not canned or pre-planned; it’s pure exuberance. Complaining that it was unprofessional or something seems to me, to miss the point.

Your point about the game being played during the Korean War is interesting. People sort of forget that we were at war then; there were no anti-war protests a la Vietnam, but Korea took over 50,000 lives. Yet, unlike WW II or Vietnam, people don’t even really think about it when talking about the era. During Vietnam, you couldn’t get away from it hanging over you. When people grow nostalgic for the 1950s, it’s really the second half of the decade that they pine for. The first half was pretty terrible.

Marc Schneider
6 years ago
Reply to  John Paschal

Yes, and the Beaver was not killed in Vietnam.

FrankJackson
6 years ago

Regarding the empty seats…after Bobby Thomson hit the home run, there were only six more seasons for the Giants and Dodgers in New York. No one should have been shocked when they decamped for the West Coast.

Also, I did see the movie “Paterson.” A very pleasant movie, an ode of sorts to New Jersey Transit, and it includes likely the only reference to William Carlos Williams in movie history.

Jim O'Connell
6 years ago

My guess is this post will never be read but…
I am Ralph Branca’s 78 year old nephew. unlike some of you I lived and breathed baseball in the 1950’s. I lived just north of Mt. Vernon.
The way Uncle Ralph lived his life AFTER the home run is more interesting than the telescope and buzzer the Giants used to (in my Uncle’s words) “steal the pennant.”
i suggest you google “RALPH BRANCA A MAN A LEGEND”
Then, if it is still available try:
http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_ / 18370118/story-ralph-branca-jackie-robinson-resonates
or Google the Chris Russo (mad dog in the old days) interview with Bobby Valentine. Or look for the story in Psycology today about Ralph.
LOVED THE MAN AND MISS HIM

Craig Krym
6 years ago
Reply to  Jim O'Connell

Thank you for sharing your memories of your beloved uncle Mr. O’Connell. The posted link didn’t work, but I found the article here: http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/18370118/story-ralph-branca-jackie-robinson-resonates
Your uncle was a great guy.

Marc Schneider
6 years ago
Reply to  Jim O'Connell

Your Uncle Ralph’s was a life well-lived. And that’s more important than giving up a home run.

slope
6 years ago

Regarding the empty seats…after Bobby Thomson hit the home run, there were only six more seasons for the Giants and Dodgers in New York. No one should have been shocked when they decamped for the West Coast.

Marc Schneider
6 years ago
Reply to  slope

What’s interesting, though, is that, while the Dodgers have done incredibly well in LA, the Giants have had their ups and downs in SF. In part, that was because of old Candlestick Park. But, not only has their performance on the field been erratic, the attendance has seen very sharp spikes up and down. Obviously, right now the Giants are in an up cycle and their new stadium is clearly a huge improvement. But, there was talk in the 1970s about moving them to Tampa.

GFrankovich
6 years ago
Reply to  Marc Schneider

Actually it was Toronto they almost moved to in 1976. Bob Lurie bought the team then and kept it in San Francisco. After years of trying to get a new stadium – even trying for San Jose – the Giants in 1993 were set to move to Tampa-St. Petersburg, but again, Peter Magowan jumped in to save the day.

Happy Room
6 years ago

Thanks again for posting.

Steve Leyden
6 years ago

I grew up with the voice of Russ Hodges on the radio every day of the season. He was our voice of summer from 1958 until he retired at the end of the 1970 season. He was teamed with Lon Simmons and, in retrospect, they were amaterish homers by today’s standards.

We didn’t know any better because San Francisco was geographically isolated as far as AM radio reception went. On a rare clear night we might be able to receive a static-filled few minutes of Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett from LA but that’s it. It wasn’t like the midwest where everyone knew the voices of Harry Carey and Jack Buck. Looking back over time I treasure the voice of Russ Hodges. He was like a crazy uncle who had no business being on the radio but we loved him anyway.