The first such aid is a monthly summary of the Giants and Dodgers game logs (figure at right). About halfway through each month, we'll post this (Giants in orange, Dodgers in blue) and we'll revisit it when we get to the end of the month.
We've incorporated off days (as you'll see, the only day when both teams were off occurred on April 20) and we've bolded the games that the two teams play against each other.
We've also drawn boxes around the days when the two teams both lost games (or, at least up through the April 22nd game: we might preview a version of this with those incidences noted without the actual game scores included, just because we incline toward the perverse).
So the box around 4/22 tips you off right away that this was a "double loss" day for the two teams that would meet in a playoff for the NL pennant--and, in fact, are the last two teams to meet in a regular season playoff in which a trip to the World Series was on the line.
We'll briefly summarize these games, since nobody loves a loser (unless there's an ensemble of them all starring in a latter-day TV series, that is). In Milwaukee, the Dodgers scored three in the first (a two-run HR from Tommy Davis, his fourth) but Don Drysdale had control problems and the Braves capitalized on an error by Maury Wills to score three unearned runs in the third to take the lead. Bob Shaw allowed only three hits over his last eight innings of work, and Pete Richert was even wilder than Drysdale (the Dodgers issued 10 walks in this game...), allowing the Braves to add two insurance runs in the seventh. Final score: Braves 6, Dodgers 3.
The most singular moment in the game occurred in the ninth inning when the Giants, down by two but with two on and the go-ahead run at the plate, sent Willie McCovey up to pinch-hit. Reds manager Fred Hutchinson countered by bringing in left-hander Bill Henry. At which point Al Dark pulled McCovey and sent pitcher Don Larsen to the plate instead. Further research will be needed to confirm it, but one suspects that this is the first and only time McCovey was ever pinch-hit for by a pitcher. Larsen, who'd begun his pinch-hitting career by going 1-for-25 but who'd gone 5-for-12 in that role while with the Kansas City A's in '61, hit a long fly to center, but it was tracked down by Pinson. Final score: Reds 6, Giants 4.
So how many times will two teams whose combined seasonal record was 205-125 lose on the same day? You could calculate the odds, of course, but we're hoping that you'll enjoy finding out gradually.
There's a lot of data packed into such a listing; in '62, you'd be lucky to see OBP or SLG in a daily listing--once in awhile, they would be added to a list of leaders that appeared below the top ten hitters sorted by BA, usually underneath leaders in doubles, triples (HA!), and homers.
For our updated version of this 1962 list, we've shaded the rows for the Giants and Dodgers who appear here in yellow. So you get a sense of how well Felipe Alou and Tommy Davis are doing compared to the other hot hitters during the early days of the season. (This data, by the way, was culled from the Day-by-Day Database devised by David Pinto at Baseball Musings.)
Whereas we combined our list to cover hitters in both leagues, these "top hitters" listings were divided (like all Gaul) into two--one listing for each league. They were, as you can see, strictly limited to batting average.
1962 proved to be the "boom year" for three of the players on the AL list (above left): Floyd Robinson hit .312, led the AL in doubles (45) and drove in 109 in his second full year for the White Sox; Rich Rollins drove in 96 runs and hit .298 in his first full year with the Twins (before shredding the "age-27 paradigm" a few years later when he seems to have just forgotten how to hit); and Jerry Lumpe, a sentimental fave of our pal Jeff Angus, hit .301 and achieved career highs in doubles, triples (HA!), homers, RBI, runs scored, and swizzle sticks collected from all the bar-and-grills littered and lit-out-to on the AL circuit.
Tommy Davis might not have appeared on the leader list, which often only contained a Top Ten by batting average (he's twelfth here), but he would certainly begin to do so with an insistent frequency as the season progressed.
In the AL after the games of 4/22, only 3 1/2 games separated the league leader from the cellar dweller; in the NL, however, the Pirates were 9 1/2 games ahead of those soon-to-be-lovable doormats who were impersonating a baseball team in the Polo Grounds, while all the while an old man raved with devilishly smirky intent...
