IN honor of sixty years past, we initiate a reminiscence of baseball's lost treasure: the fraught, frenetic pennant race. And sixty years ago, one of the most fraught of all time (until time ran out...) occurred with the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants, the two transcontinental vagabonds who helped to usher in baseball expansion and the inexorable, problematic changes that have ensued ever since.
In 1962, April 10th fell on a Tuesday, which is no longer considered to be an appropriate day for the opening of the baseball season. But (as many are wont to say...) times were different, and baseball still had several quaint customs in play that marked how a new season was supposed to start. The previous day, Monday the 9th, was reserved for ceremonial openers in Cincinnati (honoring the advent of the professional game in 1869) and Washington DC (cementing the game's link with the nation's capital, until that link was broken in 1972 when a second Senators team would move elsewhere).
The Reds, defending NL champs, ran into a buzzsaw in their opener, and were routed by the lowly Phillies (who'd gone 47-107 the previous year). The final score was 12-4, with their 21-game winner Joey Jay knocked out in the fourth inning. (The Phillies would improve markedly in 1962, but much of it occurred due to their dominance of the two first-year expansion teams in Houston and New York--they would wind up with a 31-5 record against them.)
In DC, President
John F. Kennedy threw out the first pitch, and seemed to bring the second-year Senators luck as they beat the Tigers, 4-1, thanks in large part to a strong complete-game performance from right-hander
Bennie Daniels (who would, alas, wind up 7-16 for the year). Later in the season the Senators, who'd lose 100 games for the second consecutive year, would bring up an infielder named...John Kennedy.
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ALL of this is prologue, of course, to what became the main event in 1962--a topsy-turvy pennant race between former crosstown rivals who'd upset baseball's apple cart by moving to the West Coast four years earlier. The Dodgers and Giants had finished 2-3 behind the Reds in '61; they were teams loaded with young talent, and they would both blossom in 1962, showcasing differing ways to each win 101 games during the regular season. Their head-to-head rivalry was also highly fraught: they went into the third and final playoff game with the series series knotted 10-10.
And so it began, on April 10, 1962...the Giants received a preview of Juan Marichal's emerging brilliance as they beat the Milwaukee Braves 6-0 before 39,177 fans at Candlestick Park (already notorious for its capricious winds). Marichal had allowed only one hit going into the ninth, settling for a three-hit shutout, striking out ten (including Henry Aaron three times). Willie Mays homered off Warren Spahn in the bottom of the first; the Giants would chase the immortal southpaw in the fourth inning with four runs, with the key blow a two-run single by Marichal himself.
Down in LA, the Dodgers would draw 52,564 to their Opening Day game against the Reds (who'd traveled overnight from Cincinnati and their shellacking by the Phillies). Manager
Walt Alston was a bit leery of the ongoing hole he was desperately trying to fill at third base: he was leery of promising young hitter
Tommy Davis' ability to handle the position defensively, but his alternatives were not much better defensively and much worse offensively. Davis would watch the opener from the bench as Alston opted for journeyman infielder
Daryl Spencer at third and started aging, oft-injured
Duke Snider in right field.
This was the first game played at Dodger Stadium after four years of strangely-dimensioned baseball at the Memorial Coliseum. The problematic backstory of the stadium's creation had been assiduously whitewashed during the year of its construction, and its dazzling setting just northwest of downtown Los Angeles would carry its aura well into the next century.
But that didn't help the Dodgers on that Tuesday afternoon in April 1962.
Don Drysdale had been pushed back due to a lingering leg injury, and southpaw
Johnny Podres, the Game Seven hero from the 1955 World Series, got the starting assignment. After five innings, he had a 2-1 lead thanks to a two-run double by Ron Fairly off Reds' starter
Bob Purkey, but Podres could not get lefty-hitting
Vada Pinson out, surrendering the tying run in the sixth and giving up a three-run homer to
Wally Post in the seventh. Pinson wound up going 4-for-4 and scoring three runs as the Reds spoiled the Dodgers' first game in their new home with a 6-3 victory.
One ongoing problem that would emerge quickly for the Dodgers: the drastic change in performance from outfielder Wally Moon, particularly at home. In 1961, en route to a .328 batting average, Moon had hit .382 in the Coliseum. His 0-for-3 day while batting third in the Dodgers' batting order on Opening Day was a harbinger of the struggles he would experience in the new ballpark: over the course of 1962, Moon would hit just .219 at home...
