The Trolley Dodger

From Chris Jaffe over at The Hardball Times, check out “50 years since baseball’s most surreal bottom of the ninth (6/2/11)” –

Fifty years ago today, the Giants and Dodgers played possibly the most bizarre half-inning in baseball history. It’s an inning I remember reading about in one of the Baseball Hall of Shame books that came out when I was a kid.

It’s the bottom of the ninth in Los Angeles, and the Giants cling to a 2-1 lead. Leadoff hitter Willie Davis immediately erases that with a homer to leadoff the inning. So that means all the inning’s upcoming oddities are taking place in a dramatic context: Late in a tie game between two fierce rivals.

Thanks, Chris — great story.

Oh, this is a tough one. Rest in Peace to Duke, and our condolences to his family. From the Dodgers Press Release:

Dodger Hall of Fame outfielder Duke Snider passed away this morning at the age of 84 at the Valle Vista Convalescent Hospital in Escondido, Calif.

Born Edwin Donald Snider in Los Angeles, CA on Sept. 19, 1926, Snider was among the game’s most feared hitters during his 16 seasons with the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers (1947-1962), playing on a pair of World Championship teams (1955 and 1959) and in six World Series overall.

The seven-time All-Star center fielder ranks as the franchise’s all-time leader in home runs (389) and runs batted in (1,271) and during the 1950s, he topped all Major Leaguers with 326 homers and 1,031 RBI. He slugged four home runs in both the 1952 and 1955 World Series.

From a previous Trolley Dodger post, here’s Duke on the classic What’s My Line? show just after the Dodgers move to Los Angeles:

The set of people who are both readers of this site and users of the Mac flash card program iFlash is probably quite small, but just in case I’ll let you know I uploaded a “Dodgers Retired Numbers” deck to their Deck Library if you’d like to memorize those.

Here’s the Dodgers Retired Numbers page on Dodgers.com as well.

(I discovered over the weekend that you can also sync up iFlash decks with an iPhone/iTouch app for on-the-go memorization, so that’s pretty handy. I grabbed a couple of GRE vocab study decks to keep up my vocabulary chops. :)

Thanks to the Game Show Network, I’ve been able to watch a bunch of episodes of “What’s My Line?” from the 50s. Every episode has a celebrity mystery guest, the identity of whom the blindfolded panelists attempt to guess.

Earlier, I saw a special episode from Los Angeles (the show was normally shot in NYC), with an extra mystery guest of Duke Snider, Los Angeles Dodger center fielder. It was awesome to see them discussing the recent move from Brooklyn, not to mention the audience cheering about the comment that the team was “the Los Angeles Dodgers now.”

Back in NYC, and before the move west, Duke Snider joined NY Giants pitcher Sal Maglie as co-guests:

And here’s Roy Campanella from 1953:

Recently I also caught an episode of “The Name’s the Same” with Gil Hodges, but I’ve not been able to find the episode online yet.

Tim Dierkes over at MLB Trade Rumors cracked me up with a bullet point in his post earlier today, “Rosenthal On Teixeira, Dunn”:

Rosenthal believes the Royals could not even acquire a Tony Abreu from the Dodgers for Octavio Dotel. Previously it had been said that the Dayton Moore was asking for Matt Kemp or James Loney. And Duke Snider plus Sandy Koufax.

Repeat after me: Octavio Dotel is a reliever who is on a one-year contract.

Maybe if they add what’s left of the corpse of Zack Greinke on the table, plus eat the remainder of the Odalis Perez salary we’d still be paying, then we’ll start talking guys like Tony Abreu.