60 YEARS AGO/57: REBOUND AND RECOIL

Sunday doubleheaders, the staple of baseball ever since the joining of the two rival leagues at the dawn of the twentieth century up through the early 1970s, remained in play for the Dodgers and Giants on Sunday, June 10, 1962. All indications that day pointed to the notion that the two teams were moving in opposite directions...

IN St. Louis, the Giants dropped two games to the Cardinals (who thus swept the four-game series, extending San Francisco's losing streak to six). The first was a heartbreaker, decided on a turnaround walk-off homer by Curt Flood off Billy O'Dell. The Giants amassed sixteen hits. but the Cardinals turned five double plays in the game (including a strikeout-throwout in the eighth when Al Dark decided to turn catcher Ed Bailey loose on a 3-2 count). Final score: Cardinals 6, Giants 5 (first game).

The nightcap (a term once commonly used but that now only refers to what the Giants collectively needed after experiencing their games on 6/10/62...) was a slow-motion nightmare that reached a fever pitch in the bottom of the fourth, when the Cardinals scored six runs, capped by Stan Musial's three-run homer off Stu Miller (who added his own gasoline to the fire started by ersatz Giants starter Jim Duffalo). 

Ray Washburn kept the Giants in check over the final six innings, as St. Louis scored eleven unanswered runs, including a big game from backup first baseman Fred Whitfield, who hit his first major league homer and drove in four runs. (Despite an impressive rookie season, Whitfield could not beat out Bill White and he was traded to Cleveland after the '62 season for reliever Ron Taylor, who would subsequently hurl seven hitless innings during two different World Series appearances--the first for the Cardinals in 1964, and the second with the Miracle Mets in 1969.) Final score: Cardinals 13, Giants 3 (second game).

DOWN in Houston, the Dodgers rebounded from their shellacking the night before with a sweep of their doubleheader, putting them in firm possession of first place. In the first game, they received sharp hitting from their current core (Willie Davis-Tommy Davis-Ron Fairly, all .300+ hitters at this point, and who amassed a total of ten hits and seven RBI) and Don Drysdale cruised to his tenth win after giving up an early homer to Bob Aspromonte, the ex-Dodger who did his best hitting in '62 against his former team (4 HRs, .305 BA, .973 OPS). Final score: Dodgers 9, Colts 3 (first game).

Game Two featured a seemingly endless sixth inning in which the Dodgers scored six runs and the Colts responded with four runs of their own, turning what had looked like a laugher into a tight contest in the late innings. (The Dodger sixth was also the last major-league inning for pitcher Red Witt, profiled previously in these pages: in Witt's defense, half of the runs he allowed in his big-league swan song were unearned, thanks to three fielding errors in the inning.)

Things got sticky in the ninth when Ron Perranoski, asked to stretch his bailout of teenage monster Joe Moeller into a fourth inning, labored mightily through eight batters before retiring the pesky Aspromonte with the bases loaded and the potential winning runs on base. (This was not quite in the category of "heroic lengthy relief appearances" that we've just recently discussed, given that Perranoski threw "only" 3 1/3 innings--but given the amount of action that occurred in that frenetic bottom of the ninth, Ron may well have felt that he'd pitched all eighteen innings that day!) Third-string catcher Norm Sherry had four RBI for the Dodgers, including a three-run homer off the never-to-be-seen-again Witt. Final score: Dodgers 9, Colts 7 (second game)

[FOOTNOTE: Remember when we told you that the Dodgers had 15 "mega-losses" (run margin of -7 or more) in '62? For sake of comparison, we looked up that same stat for the Giants: they had only seven such losses that year.]

SEASON RECORDS: LAD 43-19, SFG 40-21