Life just published these photos from the 1955 World Series. Pretty incredible stuff. Can you imagine...
1) A time when baseball was the #1 thing that anybody cared about.
2) A time when New York had two teams that mattered, staring at one another from across the river.
And those two things come together. Amazing.
World Series starts tomorrow. I still don't know who I will be cheering for. I never really did get 100% behind San Francisco. But we'll see where it all takes me.
OK, baseball nerd correction. New York had three big teams in the first half of the century. Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants. Mid 50s, the Dodgers and Giants both moved to California. Hence the current stat that the SF Giants haven't ever won the series--while in SF. They won in 1951, at least, with Bobby Thompson's "shot heard round the world." Probably other times too. Who'd they beat that year? None other than the Brooklyn Dodgers.
ReplyDelete(I pretty much know all of this from Don Delillo's Underworld, which is a big long thick book, but the first 60 pages are about that series and that game, and they're a great read.)
Meanwhile. "Subway series" is a whole subset of baseball playoff series that happened in NY. The most recent was pretty recent-- I think 2000 or so? Clemens throwing a broken bat at Piazza. Yankees won it.
Also. Ken Burns's epically long 10 part baseball documentary. The first hour or so is about how baseball was basically invented in New York. Firefighter teams. Butcher teams. Office teams. This is before a lot of very smart rules were invented, like that a game can only be 9 innings, or that you can't keep playing for three days because get your ass back to work. It's a slow, slow documentary, but there's lots of fun stuff in it.
I did say "two teams that mattered", so I could suggest that I was technically correct. But no. I missed a team. You're right.
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