And so on this day in Philadelphia (switching towns in the middle of a weekend, a practice that seems to have been common before the advent of divisional play but now seems downright strange...) the Dodgers were literally in mid-season form.
Maury Wills stole his 47th base (what was he going to do with all of them, anyway?) slapped two doubles and scored three runs; he was driven in every time he scored by Tommy Davis, who would up with four RBI for the game and now had 95 for the year. LA slapped around three Philly hurlers who all had five-letter surnames (Smith, Brown, Short), Frank Howard hit a mammoth homer off the middle one and threw out Johnny Callison at third base, and Johnny Podres scattered six hits and struck out seven to earn his fifth win of the year. (He'd get worked very hard from this point on, once Koufax was on the shelf.) Final score: Dodgers 9, Phillies 1(first game).
LA hit a 2-out-of-3 winning percentage (62-31) with this win, a figure they would flirt with on and off for about a month until the loss of Koufax and the increasing wear-and-tear on Don Drysdale would start to take its toll. In the second game of their "ides of July" doubleheader, the Phils' Art Mahaffey, pushed into a role similar to Drysdale's as the heavily-used ace (and whose future career would suffer for it), shut down the Dodgers on five hits, including an impressive fourth inning when he struck out the side against the heart of LA's order (Tommy Davis, Ron Fairly, Frank Howard).
Phil Ortega got the spot start and pitched creditably for four innings, giving up a homer to Roy Sievers but surrendering what proved to be the winning run in the bottom of the fourth on a two-out single by flyweight hitter Bobby Wine. The Dodgers mounted a last-gasp threat in the top of the ninth when Willie Davis tripled with two out, but Mahaffey retired Tommy Davis on a grounder to seal his twelfth win on the year. Final score: Phillies 2, Dodgers 1 (second game).
Truth told, the Giants needed to clear roster space, for they'd just splurged for a "bonus baby" pitcher, Bob Garibaldi, upon whom they'd just bestowed the then-princely sum of $150,000. According to the rules in play at the time, handing that much green stuff to an equally green player meant that said greenster needed to be parked on the major league roster for at least the year in which he'd pocketed the cash (or, presumably, one billion S&H green stamps).
Neither Orsino nor Garibaldi would make much of an impact on the Giants. After having shown some HR pop in his first time up with the Giants the previous year, Orsino didn't show much spark down the stretch run in '62 as he got a shot to start against southpaws. Over the '62-'63 off-season, the Giants decided they needed different pitchers, so they banished two hurlers who'd underachieved for them in their pennant-winning year--Stu Miller and Mike McCormick--in a deal with the Baltimore Orioles, who shrewdly held out for Orsino as well. What the Giants got back will only depress you, even if you aren't a Giants fan, so we'll let you go look that up at baseball-reference.com. Orsino hit 19 HRs for the O's the next year but would soon fade as a hitter; Miller, of course, rebounded sharply in Baltimore and was a mainstay in their bullpen for the next five years.
Garibaldi is a bigger mystery. That's because unlike almost everyone they ever had under contract at one point or another, the Giants held onto him forever--but they never gave him any real chance to play in the big leagues. Garibaldi would spend most of the next eight years (1963-1970) toiling for the Giants' AAA farm club (Tacoma and Phoenix: in 1970, a sportswriter mock-congratulated him in print for being re-elected "mayor of Phoenix" and suggested he run for governor.)
Oddly, Garibaldi pitched pretty well at AAA for all those years (96-81 lifetime); he bounced back from a 1964 arm injury and became more of a finesse pitcher (and was almost as effective as before). But over four widely-spaced opportunities in the majors over those nine years (1962-70), Garibaldi was allowed to face only 115 batters.
All three of these Italian guys--Orsino, Garibaldi, and Pignatano--saw action in one or the other of the two games played at the Polo Grounds between the Giants and Mets on July 15th. A fourth "newbie" that day--Billy Pierce, coming off the disabled list after being sidelined for a month--started the first game for the Giants, but wasn't quite ready: after three scoreless innings, he gave up four runs in the fourth and had to be removed. (Pierce would be nursed along for a couple weeks and then was pivotal to the Giants staying in the race in August, posting a 5-1 record that month.) Dark then paraded all of his relievers (except for Stu Miller)--Duffalo, Larsen, McCormick--into the game as he waited in vain for the Giants to turn things around on the Mets' Jay Hook. (You might say that Jay just kept wriggling off the hook; then again, you might not...)
Garibaldi made his debut in the bottom of the eighth, retiring the side in order and recording his first big-league strikeout against fellow Italian Chris Cannizzaro.
Tom Haller homered off Hook in the ninth, but it was what the Internet generation would call "tater bait." Final score: Mets 5, Giants 3 (first game).
In Game Two, the Giants battered ex-Dodger Willard Hunter to erase a 2-0 deficit and built a 9-2 lead after seven innings. They started to wish they'd been able to cash in on an aborted eighth-inning rally, however, when the Mets rose up and smacked around starter Bobby Bolin in the bottom of the inning. Fittingly, it was Joe Pignatano's double that chased Bolin from the game, making the score 9-6.
Stu Miller came in and promptly gave up two more hits, and Dark had to bring Juan Marichal in to stop the bleeding after the Mets had closed to within one run.
Before things had gone wacky, the Giants had piled up 16 hits, including two-run homers from Harvey Kuenn and Orlando Cepeda. Order finally re-emerged from chaos, however, as Marichal retired the Mets in order in the bottom of the ninth to stave off disaster and salvage the nightcap. Beware the ides of July! Final score: Giants 9, Mets 8 (second game)
SEASON RECORDS: LAD 62-32, SFG 59-34
