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.

On September 18th this year, it will be the 5th anniversary of the famous 4+1 game, in which the Dodgers tied the score with four consecutive home runs, then beat the Padres in extra innings with a walk-off homer.

With Russell Martin no longer with the Dodgers, that means the five players (six if you count Kenny Lofton’s walk that represented one of the two runs in the 10th) involved in the 4+1 are gone.

1. Jeff Kent
2. JD Drew
3. Russell Martin
4. Marlon Anderson

and then Nomar Garciaparra. In fact, looking at the boxscore for that night, only Rafael Furcal, Jonathan Broxton, and Andre Ethier are still on the team.

Starting catcher for the Padres? Mike Piazza.

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:

Chris Jaffe at the Hardball Times has an article up tracing the worst endings to postseason games “10 worst endings to postseason games” — and there have been some doozies, including a couple of Brooklyn Dodger-related items in 1941* and 1947, one good, one not good at all. (Passed ball on the final strikeout, anybody?) As Vin Scully says from time to time about the old days, that’s Dodgers baseball.

* – there’s a “1971″ typo, but it’s ’41.

Happy New Year!

With winter’s wrathful vengeance plummeting our local temperatures to the low 60s today, melancholy hearts turn to baseball and the return of Spring. And a young man’s thoughts naturally turn to 19th Century Baseball.

The Old Time Family Baseball blog got around to reading the massive, Tolstoyan Baseball Chronology tome and, as the blogger puts it, “Let me tell you, the 1800s were a weird and bizarre time.”

My personal favorite of the 1845-1875 factoid-vignettes he mentions:

August 16, 1870 – “Fred Goldsmith, an 18-year-old pitcher invited by Henry Chadwick to demonstrate his curveball at the Capitoline Grounds in Brooklyn, succeeds before a large crowd. Chadwick observes: ‘That wich had up to this point been considered an optical illusion and against all rules of philosophy was now an established fact.’”