“The Giants win the pennant!” Remember those radio broadcast words from
Oct. 3, 1951, when Bobby Thompson hit a high-inside pitch from Ralph Branca,
maybe not even a strike, into the short porch at the Polo Grounds in upper
Manhattan. The Polo Grounds were like a
huge back yard, with a distant centerfield fence (room for Willie Mays’s catch
of a drive from Vic Wertz in the 1954 World Series), and short porch foul
lines, 278 in left and 252 in right. It’s
not clear that the drive would have cleared a “normal” modern outfield. When
the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to LA for 1958, they had a short porch in left like
that their first year in the LA Coliseum.
“Branca’s Pitch”, by Andrew J. Muscato, traces the life of
Ralph Branca since then, as related in interviews with his tattooed ghost
writer, David Ritz, whose hideaway is not so far from the site of the old
coliseum. Branca’s autobiography would
be called “A Moment in Time”. People do
hire real writers to write their biographies.
Some of the later part of the film deals with the question
as to whether the Giants stole signs, as the Dodgers collapsed in September,
1951., setting up the playoffs. The road
teams had won the first two games, and the Giants won the third game in a walkoff,
coming from behind a 4-1 deficit in the bottom of the ninth. Branca was brought in to pitch and threw the
gopher ball.
The film is shot in refreshing black and white.There are excerpts from "Concentration" and from the Ed Sullivan Show.
The DVD will be available from Strand Releasing on Oct.
1. I reviewed from a Vimeo
screener.
I couldn’t find an official site for the film, but I found
one for the book here.
Josh Prager, who wrote an article on the 1951 pennant from a
broader perspective in his book “Echoing Green” also appears, and explains how
memoirs are often not as objective as broader historical articles.
Wikipedia attribution link for Polo Grounds geometric
diagram.
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