When Giants Walked the Earth
Last week was all about the Brooklyn Dodgers and Ebbets Field; I offered a bouquet of baseball quotations about Brooklyn — notably my adored Dodgers team of 1947–1957 and especially Jackie Robinson. Short shrift was given to the other two clubs in New York at that time, so let’s turn our attention now to things folks said about the New York Giants of those years.
Like the Dodgers the Giants headed west after 1957 but in the preceding decade they went to the World Series twice, including a four-game sweep of the mighty Cleveland Indians in 1954. Dusty Rhodes may have been the hero with his home runs, but it is Willie Mays, and “The Catch,” that sticks in memory.
Between 1947 and 1957 the National League entries in the World Series were the Dodgers (six times), the Giants and Braves (twice each), and the Phillies (once). The Yankees topped the American League nine times, with only the Cleveland Indians interrupting what would have been an eleven-year skein. In New York these were the Glory Days, but for ten of the sixteen big-league clubs, not so much.
We’ll get to the Giants of those years in a minute, but I can’t resist offering this earlier reference, in a snippet from Ogden Nash’s “Line-Up for Yesterday”:
T is for Terry
The Giant from Memphis
Whose 400 average
You can’t overemphis.
OK, now we resume our regular programming.
ROGER ANGELL: “Like the team itself, the Polo Grounds is an absurd and lovely thing. It is the only ball park built against a cliff — Coogan’s Bluff — so that a patron could walk downhill to his seat. It had a crazy name and crazy dimensions. In shape it was closer to a bowling alley than a ball field. Straightaway sluggers loathed the field because a really noble smash to center, good for a homer in any other park, only amounted to a loud and discouraging out.”
MONTE IRVIN: “Hank Thompson and I were the first black players on the New York Giants — July 1949. I was very grateful that I cracked the color line on the team that was in the capital of the world. In my first major league at-bat, my knees started to tremble. I was thirty-one years old, and I had been a star in the Negro Leagues for ten years. I ended up walking, but I was just glad to get on base.”
BOBBY THOMSON, October 4, 1951: “‘Get in there, you so-and-so, and bear down.’ I guess my anger was a way of disciplining my anxiety, forcing me to concentrate on the pitch, making me be selective. I let Branca’s first pitch go by, then swung at the second, a high fastball, it was up where I could see it and I pulled it into the left field stands, about 30 feet fair. I wasn’t mad anymore. I was floating on a cloud. I didn’t run around the bases — I rode around ’em on a cloud. . . I hope this cloud I’m riding on never gets to a landing field.”
RUSS HODGES, after Thomson hit the home run: “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant! I don’t believe it — the Giants win the pennant.”
RED SMITH, after Thomson’s home run: “The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”
LEO DUROCHER on Willie Mays: “He could do the five things you have to do to be a superstar: hit, hit with power, run, throw, and field. And he had that other magic ingredient that turns a superstar into a super superstar. He lit up the room when he came in. He was a joy to be around.”
DIXIE WALKER on Leo Durocher: “I don’t know how he did it, but he could make you play better than you thought you could.”
JACK McCORMACK: “As far as my father was concerned, the greatest betrayal since Judas’ kiss took place in mid-season, 1948. The Giants fired the idol of all Giant fans, Mel Ott, and replaced him with the most hated Dodger of all time, Leo ‘the Lip’ Durocher.”
ALVIN REED: “We went to the Polo Grounds often, but we never paid. I mean, we’d climb the rocks outside and just wait. On the other side was a ramp the people walked across after they paid their admission. We’d wait till the coast was clear, hop over onto the ramp, and just start walking like everybody else.”
LARAINE DAY, actress, wife of Leo Durocher: “The people in the streets and shops are often cruel. I can’t remember a stranger ever congratulating me when the Giants won a game. But if we lose, a driver is sure to lean out the window of his car and yell across at us: ‘Wassa matter, you guys?’”
LARAINE DAY: “What I thought Mr. Stoneham and Mr. Hubbell were doing in our living room at eleven o’clock at night is not clear to me, but I had never once connected it with the Giants. I had prepared myself for leo losing his job in Brooklyn, but that he should ever join the hated Giants was quite beyond my comprehension.”
CARL ERSKINE: “By the time I arrived to join the team, Leo had just been acquired as the manager of the accursed Giants. Now I had to stomach him coaching third base in that orange-trimmed uniform with “GIANTS” written across his chest. And did he ride me! I couldn’t believe that this same man who had persuaded Mr. Rickey and scout Clyde Sukeforth that I was ready was now a sworn enemy the first time he saw me in the big leagues.”
DUKE SNIDER: “We didn’t have a chance to feel overshadowed [by Mickey or Willie]. We were overshadowed by the Giants when they won the pennant. Individual numbers weren’t our concern. We were focused on the team effort. The newspapers compared Willie, Mickey and I, and that was their thing. As a team, we competed with the Giants, and we faced the Yankees in the World Series. So we had a rivalry as a team, that was it. It was an honor to be compared to them.”
MONTE IRVIN: “What I especially recall of that Last Golden Age were the three dominant managers. I don’t think any city had three guys of that stature around at the same time. There was Leo Durocher, my manager on the Giants, he was fiery, outspoken, tough. He also knew baseball strategy inside and out. There was Casey Stengel of the Yankees. He could out-talk, out-platoon, and many times out-think all the competition. There was Walter Alston of the Dodgers, the strong, silent type, he was a man’s man and a guy dedicated to the game and to the people of Brooklyn.”
LEO DUROCHER: “I made a number of moves, but the biggest was bringing Willie Mays up from the minors in May. Willie was just 20 years old then and his natural talent was unbelievable. He was hitting .477 and playing a great center field for Minneapolis in the American Association. It took a while to convince Mr. Stoneham that I needed Willie and he wasn’t an overnight sensation when I finally got him. Time and patience proved to be the necessary ingredients on my part before he began to produce. But then things began to happen, because Willie’s arrival necessitated other changes that turned out to be just as important to the success of the club. In a sense, Willie was the final piece to the puzzle, because all of the changes I made worked, and that’s what made us a championship ball club.”
WILLIE MAYS: “I never became a cleaner or a presser in a laundry. That was the job they trained me for at the Fairfield Industrial High School in Alabama. There just weren’t that many other opportunities for a young black kid living in the Deep South almost twenty years before the coming of the civil rights movement. . . . . No, they wound up writing a song about me instead, about me and some other guys you may know of: ‘Willie, Mickey, and the Duke.’”
The Glory Days, Part 2 was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.