‘Why did it have to be me?’

December 23, 2024 William A. Gralnick

William Gralnick. Photo courtesy of William Gralnick

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As December turns to January in South Florida and memories of the World Series are buried under the weight of news from other sports, there begins a stirring of baseball’s machinery like the chilly bulbs of the croquis beginning their move through the cold ground. Like the croquis, spring training is about to be re-born. With it, will be re-born by South Florida elders talk of baseball’s days gone by, and one of the most famous pitches that resulted in one of the most famous home runs in baseball history. Fitting then should be the story of Ralph Branca, also born in January. He was a strapping young man, 6’3” tall, weighing over 200 lbs who had such obvious talent that he began his professional career at 17 and made it to the majors in one year.

If I, a lifetime baseball fan, know little about the man who threw that pitch, I ask myself how many baseball fans know much more about Ralph Branca than that he threw the pitch that Bobby Thompson hit over the fence for the hated NY Giants at their home field, the Polo Grounds? Called “the shot heard round the world,” it capped an extraordinary run by the Giants to that tie-breaking game where they caught and vanquished Brooklyn’s Bums. There is more to know including whether or not Branca wore the memory of that pitch like Hester Prynne wore her scarlet letter.

So much of what makes the Branca story so interesting are the backstories. There’s a Jackie Robinson story, a cheating scandal, a career-wrecking encounter with a Coke bottle, and mismanagement that led to sore arms that were nursed back to life and then died again.

Courageous and heart-warming is the Robinson story. Branca famously stood next to Robinson during Opening Day introductions at Ebbets Field the day Robinson would break the color barrier in the majors. As Robinson trotted past Branca on the way to the dugout, he thanked him. Though they had started to get acquainted during an exhibition game the previous season, Branca thought Robinson might be thanking him for grooving a fastball during batting practice. Soon enough, he realized Robinson was thanking him for refusing to sign a teammate’s petition to keep the Dodgers as white as the first-base line.

This was the start of a lifelong friendship that didn’t last nearly long enough; Robinson died in 1972, at 53, and Branca died at 90. However the Robinson-Branca partnership had a lasting impact on many Americans who saw professional sports as the first public arena where whites and blacks successfully worked together toward a common goal. So, in these years of racial and ethnic divide, years that expose stubborn and depressing racial divisions across the country, it’s worth remembering the first white ballplayer to act as a human bridge between a black colleague and so many lost ignorant souls, so said ESPN Sports some years ago. It still rings true today.

Then there was the accident. How many people do you know who had a career ended by falling off a chair playing Monopoly? That’s exactly what happened to Branca. He fell backward off the chair on his back, his spine smacking an empty Coke bottle on the floor. The impact threw the pitcher’s back out of alignment. Years later, Branca commented on the advancements in sports medicine that were not available to him then. The team had an osteopath who didn’t check the alignment of the back. Branca was never the same pitcher again.

And of course, there was the so-called “shot heard ‘round the world.” It too has a back story. Most baseball fans know the story of the pitch. It was 4-2 Dodgers. Branca had come on to relieve Don Newcombe and face Thompson with two men on base. He threw a high, inside fastball, and at 3:58 pm, October 31, 1951, it was over, Russ Hodges screaming “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

In a grainy documentary available on U Tube done years ago by Howard Cosell about the closing of the Polo Grounds, there is a picture of Branca, hunched over on a bench in front of his locker. “Why did it have to be me?” he asked himself. “I’m a clean-living, hard-working guy who loves baseball. Of all the guys, why did it have to be me?” About an hour later, he entered a parked car. His fiancee and his priest were in it. The priest answered the question. “God chose you for this moment because He knew your faith was strong enough to bear the cross.” Branca said those words got him through the ordeal. A lesser man’s life might have been ruined by it.

Instead, he befriended Thompson and played his part in the endless calls for them to appear together and tell the story. After a time, they bonded and had an almost lifelong friendship. But that friendship was to sour. It seemed the fix was in that day and that’s the back story.

Joshua Prager, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, published the details of a sign-stealing scheme the Giants rigged in the Polo Grounds, their home ballpark. The scheme involved a telescope from windows in the center-field clubhouse, a buzzer rigged under dirt in the bullpen, and a reserve catcher positioning his body and equipment to tip off the batter to pitch that was coming. Prager’s story confirmed for the public what Branca had been told by his Detroit Tigers roommate Ted Gray in 1953. The Tigers were the next to last stop on Branca’s deteriorating career. Gray was friends with Giants reserve outfielder Earl Rapp and was told the story. Branca said Thomson knew what was coming on October 3, 1951, and while he still had to hit it, the information was certainly helpful.

“I begrudge the Giants the 1951 pennant,” Branca said emphatically in the 2008 interview. “They deprived our owner of money he deserved, they deprived our fans of the joy of a pennant winner, and they deprived my teammates and me of the fame and glory that comes from playing in the World Series. What the Giants did was despicable. It involved an electronic buzzer. No one else used that. Sometimes you could see people in the center-field scoreboard in Chicago or wherever using towels to give signals and you could do something about it. The buzzer was undetectable, and it was wrong.”

Branca kept the story essentially to himself until Prager’s article appeared. He appeared with Thomson on television and at autograph shows and generally played the role of good sport for half a century. The two ex-players who had been thrown together by fate became close friends; a friendship that Branca said became strained after Prager’s public exposure of the Giants’ scheme.

The sign-stealing revelations and the reactions to those revelations “affected my relationship with Bob. We’re not as close. We haven’t done a card show in two years, and we don’t talk as often,” Branca said. “Part of that might be that he moved down South,” Branca allowed. “He was one of the soldiers; he wasn’t one of the leaders. Still, he okayed it, and he used it.”

The rest of the story, told in the anals of SABR, was that Branca said he was especially disappointed in Giants captain Alvin Dark and former teammate Eddie Stanky. An observant Catholic, Branca said he took umbrage because Dark and Stanky claimed to be very religious. Most of his vitriol, though, was aimed at Giants owner Horace Stoneham, manager Leo Durocher, and coach Herman Franks, the man in the clubhouse with the telescope. “They were the generals,” Branca said.

Famous pitch or not, baseball was something Ralph Branc was good at. His career numbers show that. The hard-throwing righty won 88 games against 68 losses. His ERA was a respectable 3.79 through 322 games and almost 1,500 innings pitched. He struck out 829 batters, saved 19 games as a reliever, and finished up with a WHIP of 1.37. These summary figures are catalogued from Baseball-Reference.

Branca played for the Dodgers from 1946 to 1953. As back and arm problems caught up with him, he was traded to the last-place Tigers. In 1954 he spent part of the season with the Yankees, was sold back to the Tigers, and finally was bought by the Dodgers, according to Buzzi Buvasi so he, Branca, could retire as a Dodger.

Yet baseball was but half a life. According to SABR, the other half was as a successful entrepreneur and businessman in the life insurance field. When asked if he got the same satisfaction out of insurance as he got from baseball, Branca said there was nothing like the feeling of handing someone a 300,000 check from a policy he had sold the family. He lived a full life to the ripe old age of 90 in a nursing home in Rye Brook, NY, Nov, 23rd, 2016, the last living member of the 1947 Brooklyn, Dodgers.