The Shot Heard 'Round The World

I'm a native San Franciscan, but at heart I'm from the East Coast. Most of my family's American roots are in New England, and my parents were frequent bleacher bums at Fenway in the seventies, so I root for the Sox. But other roots are from New York. Like a sizable portion of America, I had family members immigrate through Ellis Island. I had family who lived in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. A few of my aunts and uncles root for the current New York National League team and partial successor to the Giants, the Mets. My grandfather watched the Giants play at the Polo Grounds.

Combining that with the synergy of being from San Francisco, the fact New York is a fantastic city and a love of baseball history, I eat up everything about the New York Giants. I have books, caps, t-shirts, videos, etc. The next time I go to New York, I'm going to go down the staircase left from the park that took fans from the Harlem River Drive and Coogan's Bluff into the park (yeah, you walked down to get into the Polo Grounds).

Today I listened to the third game of the 1951 National League playoff on my computer, and a friend of mine was stunned to know that a copy of the game exists. As he said, it's the seminal moment in the history of the National League, and I have a feeling that most Giants fans have no idea this game is publicly available. Hopefully this will help.

There is a call of the game that lives on. Russ Hodges's call for WMCA radio is lost with the exception of the famous bottom of the 9th, which was recorded by a guy with a tape recorder in Queens. Red Barber's call is also lost except for, ironically, the bottom of the 9th, which an ad executive in Manhattan also taped. And Ernie Harwell's call for WPIX and NBC television - by the way, these playoff games were the first televised baseball games from coast to coast as the transcontinental coaxial cable had just been completed - has also been lost.

But the call most people actually heard was Gordon McClendon's call for the Liberty Broadcasting Network. McClendon was an experienced recreator of baseball games in his spare time while simultaneously running the Liberty network and inventing Top 40 radio. Occasionally he flew to broadcast live games and with stiff competition this time in the face of television (meaning that McClendon couldn't broadcast games by reading out Western Union wire reports), McClendon hopped on a plane to New York. He loved his verbiage - he created a character for himself as a sage old Scotsman handing down his opinions on sports, and he was capable at it from the days of recreations when he may have had to ad-lib for a good five minutes while Western Union's ball by ball coverage stalled.

The full game is available here
MLB charges 3 bucks for a day pass to listen to it. Hey, it's MLB. They're not going to give it to you for free.

I hope people enjoy finding out about this. It's probably the best game in the history of the National League, and deserves to be listened to.

Oh, and for your viewing pleasure, the following day's NY Daily News front page:

Those are some boss photoshop skills, what with scanning half a page each and putting them together. I rock. Yeah.

The 1954 World Series is on there too, but that's for another diary and abysmal photoshop effort.