Yankees, Dodgers ready to provide baseball with another chapter

The day had gone perfectly, as far as the citizens of Brooklyn were concerned. It was the fifth of October but felt like the Fourth of July, partly because of the unseasonably muggy 85-degree day, mostly because much of the afternoon had been a 2 ½-hour civic celebration. 

The local nine, the Dodgers, had rallied from an early 3-0 hole thanks to the hitting heroics of Jimmy Wasdell and Pete Reiser. Now, in the ninth inning, relief pitcher Hugh Casey had retired Johnny Sturm on a grounder to second and Red Rolfe on a comebacker, and he’d gotten two quick strikes on Tommy Henrich. The Dodgers were about to win, 4-3, and tie the 1941 World Series, two games apiece. 

Later in his career, Henrich would earn a forever nickname, “Ol’ Reliable,” much of that thanks to his exploits in another Yankees-Dodgers World Series. But here he waved helplessly at a Casey breaking pitch that, for all times, everyone on both sides agreed, was wetter than the Gowanus Canal.

But there was a problem: 

The spitter hadn’t just fooled Henrich, it foiled Dodgers catcher Mickey Owen, too. It skipped to the backstop. Owen retrieved it. Henrich dashed to first. And if you think that Citi Field specializes in ominous foreboding … well, that New York National League prescience was hatched in this moment, 4:35 p.m., as a game the Dodgers already believed they had won was now very much in doubt. 

Two hitters later, the Yankees had a 5-4 lead, on the way to a 7-4 victory. 

“I blew it,” Owen said later, disconsolate, lying on his stomach on the trainer’s table. “I blew the game. And I may have blown the World Series.” 

It was the moment that Yankees-Dodgers became an essential part of baseball, of American life. At first it was a New York thing: the teams would engage in Subway Series in 1941, ’47, ’49, ’52, ’53, ’55 and ’56. Later, when the Dodgers hightailed it west, it became a cross-country phenomenon and a bicoastal rivalry renewed in 1963, ’77, ’78 and ’81. 

Now, we get Yankees-Dodgers for the 12th time, beginning Friday night in Dodger Stadium. You no longer can shuttle between games on the old 6th and 9th Avenue El lines. It no longer costs between a quarter and five bucks to attend the games, which was the range for the 33,813 who squeezed into Ebbets Field to watch Mickey Owen cleave their hearts. 

What Yankees-Dodgers has given us across the years, across the decades, is several volumes of scrapbooks that keep a priceless array of unforgettable snapshots pressed cleanly between the pages of memory and legend. 

You may not have been alive when the ball skipped by Mickey Owen. You may not have been alive when a little-known Dodgers outfielder named Al Gionfriddo robbed Joe DiMaggio of a home run in 1947, causing the great DiMaggio to uncharacteristically kick the dirt near second base in frustration. 

You may not have been alive when Billy Martin rescued the 1952 Series by racing in from second base to snare a Jackie Robinson pop-up inches from the grass, saving three runs; or three years later when Robinson stole home, umpire Bill Summers called him safe and Yogi Berra exploded, an outrage neither time nor the fact that the Yankees won that game could ever lessen inside Yogi’s heart. 

But you feel like you were, same as you can summon what it surely felt like to be inside Yankee Stadium on Oct. 18, 1977, witnessing Reggie Jackson swat those three home runs, or what it was like to be there on Oct. 4, 1955, when Next Year finally arrived for the Dodgers, or on Oct. 5, 1949, when Henrich earned his nickname by hammering a walk-off homer off hard-luck Don Newcombe to give the Yankees a 1-0 win in Game 1. 

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“It was different with the Dodgers than it was with the Red Sox,” Yogi Berra told me in 2004. Yogi was always the one to go to on such matters because he’d participated in so many of them. “The Red Sox were like our kid brothers, we knew we’d figure out a way. But the Dodgers were our equals. We’d keep our eyes on them all year and we knew they were good. And we knew we always had to be at our best. Mostly, we were.” 

They were on Oct. 8, 1956, when Don Larsen struck out Dale Mitchell to go 27-up, 27-down, still the only perfect game in World Series history. And of course Yogi had been there nine years and five days earlier, Oct. 3, 1947, catching for a pitcher even more obscure than Larsen, Bill Bevens, who kept the Dodgers hitless for 8 ²/₃ innings (despite 10 walks) before Cookie Lavagetto hit one off the wall at Ebbets Field, scoring two to win the game. 

(And in a small, sweet slice of redemption, the winner of the game that day was none other than Hugh Casey.) 

There were times when Dodgers-Yankees felt like a perennial part of baseball’s calendar, along with Memorial Day doubleheaders, Ladies Day and the All-Star Game. That was true in the ’40s and ’50s, of course (with the apex coming in 1951, when the Dodgers, Giants and Yankees all finished first) and then in the late ’70s, when so many of baseball’s one-name stars (Reggie and Thurman, Fernando and Garvey) gathered on either end of the country. 

It wasn’t all textbook ball, either. There was George Steinbrenner’s (likely imaginary) elevator fight with a couple of chatty Dodgers fans in 1981, followed by his apology to New York on behalf of his vanquished (and furious) team. There was Bob Lemon taking Tommy John out of Game 6 that year in the fourth inning of a game he was dominating. 

(Lem SHOULD’VE apologized for that one.) 

There was Joe Pepitone losing a throw from Clete Boyer in the white shirts in the Dodger Stadium field boxes in Game 4, ’63, which set up the last go-ahead run in a Dodgers sweep. And there was Gil Hodges’ 0-for-21 Series in ’52, which in a simpler and more civil time drew neither boos nor talk-radio outrage but rather a call to pray for his bat, instead — and stands in stark contrast to when Dave Winfield went 1-for-22 in the ’81 Series, a struggle that ultimately led to him being slandered as “Mr. May” by his Boss. 

But then, even timeless songs sometimes have issues with the lyrics. Some of the best movies have weak subplots. Even Fonzie jumped the shark — literally — once. 

So mostly we are allowed to remember, and recall, the good stuff: Yogi jumping into Larsen’s arms. Sandy Koufax announcing himself to America by fanning 15 Yankees in Game 1, 1963, eight years after another Sandy, Amoros, robbed Berra of a two-run double that would’ve tied Game 7, ’55. Brian Doyle — owner of 32 lifetime hits, total — going 7-for-16 in the ’78 World Series, which is .438 on anyone’s calculator. 

How different has Yankees-Dodgers been through the years? 

Well, as Reggie rounded the bases after the last of his three home runs in ’77, the one off Charlie Hough that reached The Black at old Yankee Stadium, Steve Garvey later revealed that even in a moment when he understood his team had all but officially lost the World Series, his reaction was as human and as pure as the law allows. 

“I quietly applauded in my glove,” he admitted. 

Here’s to seven games in the nine nights to come where we can all feel the way folks used to feel whenever the Yankees and Dodgers collided on a field. It’s still OK to applaud wonderful things. Yankees-Dodgers qualifies. Enjoy.