‘Shot Heard Round the World’ pitcher dies

RALPH Branca, the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who had three consecutive All-Star seasons for the team but who was never allowed to forget one pitch that crushed them – the ninthinning fastball that Bobby Thomson drove into the leftf i el d stands at the Polo Grounds in 1951 and on into baseball legend – died on Tuesday at his home in Rye, New York. He was 90. No cause was given. “A guy commits murder and he gets pardoned after 20 years,” Branca once said at an old-timers’ game. “I didn’t get pardoned.”

Branca’s unforgivable offence (at least to Dodger fans) came on the afternoon of October 3, 1951, when, in a final game with the New York Giants to determine the National League championship, he served up Thomson’s electrifying (at least to Giants fans), pennant-winning home run – “the Shot Heard Round the World” – probably the most memorable in baseball history.

The Dodgers had been in first place by 13 1/2 games in midAugust, but the Giants had come back to tie for first on the season’s final weekend.

On a Wednesday afternoon, the teams returned to the Polo Grounds to play for the pennant, and the Dodgers took a 4-1 lead into the bottom of the ninth inning behind the starting pitcher, Don Newcombe, who was still on the mound.

The Giants struck, scoring a run and putting men on second and third with only one out. Thomson, who had hit 31 home runs that season, was coming to bat.

Dodgers manager Charlie Dressen summoned Branca. Branca threw a fastball and Thomson took a strike. Branca then delivered a second fastball, this one high and perhaps a bit inside.

The ball flew off Thomson’s bat on a line toward the 16-foothigh green wall in left field.

Thomson had delivered a three-run homer to give the Giants a 5-4 victory, climaxing a pennant drive known as “the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff ” and sending them into the World Series against the New York Yankees, who won the Series in six games.

Branca bore that burden without complaint even after learning a few years later that Giants players had been tipped to forthcoming pitches for much of the 1951 season through a scheme in which the Giants used a telescope in the Polo Grounds’ centrefield clubhouse to pick up opposing catchers’ signals.

Thomson, who died at age 86 in August 2010, always maintained he was not tipped that Branca would be throwing a fastball on what became that fateful home-run pitch.

But Branca was convinced otherwise. “When you took signs all year, and when you had a chance to hit a bloop or hit a home run, would you ignore that sign?” Branca said in a July 2010 interview. “He knew it was coming. Absolutely.”