Back Story to the Catch and Throw That Ended the "Wait Till Next Year"

On October 4, 1955—sixty years ago—Johnny Podres retired the Yankees in order in the last of the 9th at Yankee Stadium to complete an eight-hit 2-0 shutout in Game 7 that finally, after seven previous Brooklyn visitations to the Fall Classic, ended the "wait till next year." Podres, who also won Game 3 to prevent the Yankees from taking a three games-to-none lead in the '55 Series, was the World Series MVP. But it was an exquisite defensive play by Sandy Amoros that saved the day for the Flatbush Faithful, which might not have happened if not for the decision to pinch hit for Don Zimmer.

Back Story to the Catch and Throw That Ended the "Wait Till Next Year"

When the late, great Yogi Berra, then managing the 1973 New York Mets, said in the midst of a pennant race in which his team was lagging in August, "It's not over 'til it's over," he most assuredly was not thinking about the 6th inning of Game 7 in the 1955 World Series. 

That’s when, with Yankee runners on first and second and nobody out, Sandy Amoros made a great catch at the left field fence after a long run to rob him of an extra-base hit that would have tied the score at 2-2. Savvy veteran Gil McDougald, the runner on first, was so certain Berra's drive would be a hit and so determined to score, that he failed to consider it might actually be caught. But catch it Amoros did. He immediately fired a strike to cut-off man Pee Wee Reese, whose throw to first doubled off McDougald before he could scramble back.

And thus was the game and the World Series over before it was over, regardless of any philosophical musings to the contrary by Mr. Berra.

A key part of the lore and majesty of that moment is that Amoros had just entered the game to play left field. This has usually been described as a prescient move by Dodgers manager Walt Alston. 

But Amoros was put into the game at that precise moment, just in time to make the most important defensive play of the World Series, less because Alston had an inclination to upgrade his defense than because he had just pinch hit for starting second baseman Don Zimmer with the bases loaded, two out, and the Dodgers ahead 2-0, in the top half of the inning in a bid to put the game away. Stengel had relieved left-handed starter Tommy Byrne with right-handed Bob Grim two batters earlier, and Alston judged the left-handed George Shuba as the better bet to break the game open than the weaker-hitting, right-handed Zimmer. 

Shuba, in his last at bat in a major league game, made out, after which Alston moved Jim Gilliam from left to replace Zimmer at second, and put Amoros in to play left. Gilliam was the Dodgers' Mr. Versatility. He had replaced Jackie Robinson at second base in 1953, with Jackie moving to play third and occasionally left field, and had started the '55 season playing second, but Alston used him increasingly in the outfield as the season drew to a close when Amoros, who had started the year in left field, was mostly sidelined because of his struggles at the plate.

These moves were consistent with the 1950s baseball renaissance in platooning and substituting for position players based on the game situation that was brought back into prominence by Alston's rival in the Yankee dugout—one Mr. Casey Stengel. (The heyday of both practices, particularly platooning, had been in the 1920s.) 

Alston, however, then in his second year as Dodgers manager, was not yet anywhere near Stengel’s zip code when it came to substituting for position players in his starting line-up. Stengel made 211 position-player substitutions during the regular season (much fewer than the record-setting 286 he made in 1954), while Alston made only 106, which was also below the National League average of 127. That might be because the Dodgers’ faced only 55 left-handed pitchers all season.

The Dodgers also faced only 11 southpaw starting pitchers in 154 National League games, so Alston had little opportunity to platoon even if that was something he was inclined to do. But two of the Yankees’ top starting pitchers, Whitey Ford and Byrne, were left-handed, causing Alston to bench the left-handed-batting Amoros, who was now being platooned, in favor of right-handed infielder Zimmer in the eighth spot of his batting order in three of the four games Stengel started his southpaws. Gilliam, the Dodgers' lead-off batter, was in the starting line-up for every game of the Fall Classic, in left field when Zimmer played and second base when Amoros played. 

Until Game 7, Alston had substituted for a position player just once in the Series, in the sixth game. But that was a move made necessary when Duke Snider twisted his ankle on a sprinkler head making a catch in center field in the third inning. Those darned Yankee Stadium outfield sprinklers . . . let us not forget Mickey Mantle was maimed by one during the 1951 World Series. Snider was back in the line-up for the Series finale, although the sprained ankle may have contributed to his 0-for-3 day.

Anyway, with Stengel starting Byrne in the finale, the right-handed-batting Zimmer was in Alston's Game 7 starting line-up, and the left-handed-batting Amoros not. And after Stengel changed pitchers, Alston pinch hit for Zimmer the first chance he had, necessitating a defensive replacement, which meant Gilliam moving to second and Amoros replacing Gilliam in left field.

That series of moves came just in time to save the game for the Dodgers, helping them to secure their first World Series triumph, which turned out to be their only World Series championship in Brooklyn.

Postscript: Neither Zimmer nor Amoros had the career they or the Dodgers envisioned. 

Sandy Amoros was a brilliant prospect who led the International League in batting with a .353 average in 1953, when he played for Brooklyn's top Triple-A team in Montreal. In the majors, however, Amoros had difficulty hitting lefties. Playing in only 517 major league games, mostly between 1954 and 1957, Amoros was almost exclusively a platoon-player against right-handed pitching, starting just six games against southpaws in his career—three of them, plus Game 6, in 1955—and had only 92 plate appearances against lefties. 

Zimmer had difficulty hitting anybody, perhaps because of a horrific beaning in 1953, when he was a hot prospect with the Dodgers' Triple-A team in St. Paul, that left him unconscious for 10 days with a fractured skull. Don Zimmer was never a star player, but went on to become a cherished baseball figure as a manager and, ultimately, as the wise confidant to Joe Torre when Torre was building his Hall of Fame managerial credentials in the Yankee dugout.

60 Years Ago (April 14, 1955): Enough With Four is Enough

When Don Newcombe took the mound to start the second game of the 1955 season for the Brooklyn Dodgers against the defending-champion New York Giants at the Polo Grounds on April 14, 1955, he had four black teammates on the field with him—Jim Gilliam at second, Jackie Robinson at third, Sandy Amoros in left, and Roy Campanella calling the game behind the plate—giving the Dodgers five black players in their starting line-up. Although this was not the first time the Dodgers had done so, having a majority of players in the starting line-up who were minorities was a significant milestone in major league baseball's consolidation of integration because it meant a team's manager was starting the best players he thought could win the game without regard to racial considerations.

Enough With Four is Enough

It was not until 1952, six years into the Jackie Robinson era, that a major league team had more than four black players on their roster at any one time. The Dodgers had been the first with four when they opened the 1950 season with Robinson, Campanella, Newcombe, and right-hander Dan Bankhead on their roster. In 1951, the Dodgers, Giants, and Indians all had four black players on their rosters at the same time. Twice in 1951 the Giants could have been the first major league team with five blacks on their roster, but chose not to be: they sent down reserve infielder Artie Wilson two days before calling up Willie Mays on May 23, and with outfielders Mays and Monte Irvin, third baseman Hank Thompson, and back-up catcher Ray Noble already on the club, the Giants decided against bringing up Ray Dandridge when Thompson badly injured his ankle on July 18 but remained with the team. Instead the Giants decided to shift Bobby Thomson to third base from the platoon-role he had been playing in the outfield since the arrival of Mays, in no small part because Thomson was struggling at the plate.

Perhaps Wilson earned his demotion with a batting average of only .182 in 22 at bats as a bench player, but Dandridge, one of the all-time greats in the Negro Leagues, was having a terrific season for the Giants' Triple-A affiliate in Minneapolis (from where Mays was also promoted), hitting .324 on the season as a 37-year-old. The decision to move Thomson to third rather than call for Dandridge certainly did not hurt the Giants, as Thomson finished the season on a tear, ultimately culminating in his "Giants win the pennant! Giants win the pennant!" home run. As for Thompson with a "p," he pinch hit in seven games in August and another seven in September. Ready to play when the World Series began, courtesy of the Thomson (without a "p") home run, Irvin, Mays, and Hank Thompson became the first all-black outfield in major league history—and in the Fall Classic, no less.

The decision not to bring up Dandridge may have been motivated by the color of his skin, but probably not, in the case of the Giants, because of prejudice as much as by practical considerations to limit the number of blacks on big league rosters in the first years of integration, to avoid pushing the envelope of acceptance too far too fast. 

According to Roger Kahn, the elegant baseball writer who covered the Dodgers at the time and later wrote The Boys of Summer, it was understood in the beginning years of integration that teams should refrain from a majority of players on the field at any one time being blacks. He wrote that when Jim Gilliam made the club in the spring of 1953, the Dodgers sent outfielder Sandy Amoros back to the minor leagues despite his having had an outstanding spring training that followed a terrific season at Triple-A in 1952. Amoros had another terrific year in the minors in 1953 before being promoted to the Dodgers in 1954. 

Because 1954 was also the year that Dodgers' ace Don Newcombe returned from two years as a US Army draft pick during the Korean War, it was inevitable that sooner or later, Brooklyn manager Walt Alston would have a decision to make about exceeding the unofficial "quota"—if Kahn's account is correct—of no more than four black players on the field at any one time. July 17, 1954, in a game in Milwaukee, was the first time in history that five black players—Gilliam, Robinson, Amoros, Campanella, and Newcombe—were in a major league starting line-up. Newcombe pitched nine strong innings, giving up only one run, in a game the Dodgers ultimately won, 2-1, in eleven innings. 

These five players were also in Alston's starting line-up in three other games in 1954—on August 24 in Cincinnati, a 12-4 Dodger victory; September 6 at home against the Pirates, a 9-7 loss in which Newcombe failed to get out of the first inning; and September 15 at home against the Reds, a 10-4 Dodger win—meaning April 14, 1955, was only the fifth time that a major league starting line-up included five black players. 

Carl Erskine had started for the Dodgers on opening day and pitched a complete game victory against the Pirates, and Johnny Antonelli started for the Giants and lost in Philadelphia. Each had been their team's best pitcher in 1954, so their starting assignments were deserved. But when it came to Dodgers-Giants, a rivalry with real venom, the veteran masters in combat were Don Newcombe and Sal Maglie, and they both had the honor of going at it in the second game for both teams in the 1955 season. 

Both pitchers had much to prove. Maglie was 14-6 for the Giants in 1954, but that was after an 8-9 season and he was about to turn 38 years old later in the month. Newcombe had struggled in 1954 with a 9-8 record and 4.55 earned run average, raising questions about whether he would recover his excellence from before he was drafted into the Army.

The marquee match-up turned out to be anything but stellar. Maglie lasted only four innings, giving up four runs. Newcombe pitched 7-1/3 innings and gave up eight runs, five earned, on 12 hits. Newcombe got the win—and he earned it himself, because however ugly his pitching performance was, Newcombe could hit. Channeling his inner Babe Ruth, Newcombe tagged Maglie for a home run in the fourth, immediately after Campanella had put the Dodgers ahead with a three-run blast. And in the seventh, Newcombe hit a second home run, this time with Campy on base, to give the Dodgers a 10-3 lead. Hank Thompson hit a three-run home run off Newcombe in the bottom of the seventh to make it interesting, and a two-run home run by pinch hitter Bobby Hofman—whose name is largely lost in history—sent Newcombe to the Polo Grounds showers.

For both the Dodgers, now 2-0, and the Giants, 0-2, it was two games down and 152 to go in the 1955 season.