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.

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. :)

The LA Times is reporting that Johnny Podres has passed away at the age of 75.

The left-hander was a four-time All-Star and the first most valuable player in World Series history. He became a hero to every baseball fan in Brooklyn when the Dodgers ended decades of frustration by beating the Yankees to win the World Series.

• Johnny Podres at Baseball-Reference.com
• Johnny Podres at Wikipedia

From the official Dodger statement on Podres:

Former Dodger General Manager Buzzie Bavasi:
“He was one in a million. I have said this many times: I’ve had many good pitchers on my teams during my career, including the best in the business in Sandy Koufax and I am sure that all these pitchers will agree that if a club had to win one game, it would be Podres that would get the call. He did it many times for me during his career. I am going to miss him. I know the first thing he will do when he gets upstairs is to look for Walter Alston and Leo Durocher.”

Former teammate Don Newcombe:
“When I heard of Johnny’s passing, my mind went back to Yankee Stadium, 1955, the seventh game of the World Series. I thank God for Johnny Podres, as I do all the time. I remember how confident he was in the clubhouse before Game 7. Walter Alston called a meeting and Johnny said, ‘Just give me one run.’ Well they gave him two and we were champs. He was a man of his word, he lived up to his word, and I appreciate it.”