BY ALAN J. STEINBERG
COMMENTARY
The 2010 World Series. Or, as Casey Stengel used to call it, the World Serious.Texas Rangers versus the San Francisco Giants. I am having a difficult time deciding whom I will root for.
I served in the administration of former President George W. Bush, and I maintain a strong loyalty to him. The former President was once an owner of the Texas Rangers, and he remains one of their leading fans. It would delight me to see him on television in the winning locker room of the World Champion Texas Rangers.
Baseball is a game of nostalgia, however, and I have vivid memories of the Giants, dating all the way back to when they played in Manhattan. Their all time greatest star was also the finest player I ever saw, Willie Mays. It would bring me to tears to see him in the winning locker room of the World Champion San Francisco Giants.
So I can't make decision as to which team I will support.
My first year as a baseball fan was 1955. The Giants played in New York's late, lamented, and legendary Polo Grounds in Harlem. They were the reigning World Champions, having defeated the highly favored Cleveland Indians in four straight games in the 1954 World Series.
That was the World Series of THE CATCH — the over-the-shoulder Willie Mays catch in deep center field off the bat of Vic Wertz. His throw after the catch was even more spectacular. The Polo Grounds was 480 feet to straight-away center field, and Willie patrolled it as if he owned it.
The 1954 New York Giants were managed by my all-time favorite manager, Leo Durocher. Leo was a real character — he probably was the greatest womanizer in the history of professional sports! He also, however, was not without strength of character. He took a firm stance against the Brooklyn Dodger players in 1947 who signed a petition refusing to play with Jackie Robinson. Leo was a true father figure to Willie Mays, reassuring him when he was slumping at the plate in his early days at the Polo Grounds. And nobody was a better strategist of the National Pastime than Leo the Lip, Leo Ernest Durocher.
One of the things I remember about 1955 was the first commercial by a baseball player I ever saw on television. The product was P.F. Flyers, and the player making the endorsement was one of the Giants' pitching stars of the 1954 World Series, lefty Johnny Antonelli. P.F. Flyers was a leading brand of what we then called tennis shoes. Today, people call them sneakers.
In 1956, the baseball New York Giants were participants in another landmark event in my life. On July 1, 1956, my dad took me to a doubleheader at Pittsburgh's Forbes Field between the Pirates and Giants. In the second game of the twin bill, the Giants' third baseman, Foster Castleman hit the first Major League home run I ever saw in person.
My father would actually meet Foster Castleman fifteen years later. The former Giant moved to Cincinnati and became a salesman for the same trouser company that employed my father, Wright Slacks. Dad told Foster what a major milestone his home run had been in my life.
The Giants did not draw very well in the Polo Grounds during the 1950s, even when they won it all in 1954. The ball club was owned by Horace Stoneham, one of the major drinkers of Major League Baseball. Stoneham had planned to move the ball club to Minneapolis, the site of his top farm club.
Across town, however, in Brooklyn, the Dodgers, the most profitable ball club in the National League, were unable to obtain the site they wanted for their new ball park at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues. Their efforts to have the land condemned and granted to them were opposed by Robert Moses, the then de facto despotic ruler of New York City. Moses wanted a ball park built for the Dodgers at the site in Queens which later became the location of Shea Stadium.
O'Malley wanted no part of Queens. If he couldn't get his stadium in Brooklyn, he decided that he might as well move his ball club to Los Angeles. Such a move was not practicable, however, unless O'Malley could persuade another team owner to move his ball club to San Francisco.
So in early 1957, O'Malley called Stoneham and asked why they both couldn't move their teams together to California. Stoneham agreed and dropped his plans to move his club to Minneapolis. Like the famous Al Jolson song, it was California, Here We Come for both owners. In 1958, the Brooklyn Dodgers became the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the New York Giants became the San Francisco Giants.
I often have occasion to drive by the sites of both the Polo Grounds and Brooklyn's Ebbets Field. When I do, I think of the Frank Sinatra song, "There Used to Be a Ballpark Right Here."
In Los Angeles, the Dodgers have won five World Championships. In San Francisco, the Giants have never won once. The 1954 World Championship was the last World Series won by the Giants.
I do remember the time when the San Francisco Giants came very close to winning a World Championship. It was the seventh game of the 1962 World Series between the Giants and the New York Yankees at San Francisco's Candlestick Park. I watched that game on television.
It was the bottom of the ninth inning. The Giants had men on second and third. Willie McCovey, one of the game's most feared hitters, was up for the Giants.
On the mound for the Yankees was Ralph Terry. Two years earlier, Ralph had given up the homer to Bill Mazeroski that won the World Series for the Pittsburgh Pirates over the Bronx Bombers. If McCovey got a hit, both runs would score, and the Giants would win the World Series. Ralph Terry would then be remembered as the man who lost two World Series seventh games, both in the bottom of the ninth inning.
Terry delivered his pitch. McCovey hit a hard line drive, but right into the glove of the leaping Yankee second baseman, Bobby Richardson. Ralph Terry was saved from ignominy.
The Giants had many top flight ball players during those early San Francisco years — McCovey, Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal, and Gaylord Perry, all of whom are members of the Baseball Hall of Fame. None was nearly as great, however, as the man I remember from the Polo Grounds as the Say Hey kid, Willie Mays.
Other members of that 1954 World Champion New York Giant ball club are still alive, including Monte Irvin, Alvin Dark, Johnny Antonelli, and Don Mueller. It would be great to see them surrounding Willie in the 2010 San Francisco Giants World Championship locker room.
President Bush, we don't know whether Willie will have this opportunity again. Would you mind waiting one more year for a World Championship?
And one more thing, Mr. President: If Willie Mays is in the locker room of the World Champion San Francisco Giants, the ghost of Leo Ernest Durocher will be there, too.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Alan J. Steinberg served as Regional Administrator of Region 2 EPA during the administration of former President George W. Bush. Region 2 EPA consists of the states of New York and New Jersey, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and seven federally recognized Indian nations. Under former New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman, he served as Executive Director of the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission.
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