Dodgers-Giants history more extensive than you’d think
You may frequently hear, and probably already have, that the Dodgers-Giants National League Division Series that starts tonight in San Francisco marks the first postseason meeting ever between the franchises not involving a tiebreaker.
Don’t believe it.
You’ll have to go back to ‘89 — that’s 1889, 133 years ago — but the ancestors of these proud clubs indeed played each other in an October series of league champions, and it was indeed known as the “World’s Series.” (Forgive the punctuation. In those days the sport was commonly known as Base Ball.) It gave us, according to some accounts, one of the first sightings of the seventh-inning stretch. And even though they were in separate leagues then, the budding seeds of a rivalry seemed to already be in place.
It is not actually the forerunner of what we know today as the World Series, the National League vs. American League showdown that began in 1903. This was more a challenge match, arranged more or less on the spur of the moment.
The New York Giants had won the National League pennant, and the Brooklyn Bridegrooms — this club would cycle through six nicknames before settling on Dodgers in 1932 — won the championship of the American Association, which at the time was considered a major league but by 1892 had merged with the NL.
The owners, John B. Day of the Giants and Charles Byrne of the Bridegrooms (their nickname inspired by a number of marriages among the Brooklyn players a couple of years before) made the arrangements on Oct. 17, and the best-of-11 series began the next day at the Polo Grounds. And — stop me if you’ve heard this before — sign-stealing would be involved.
New York would win its second straight World’s Series in nine games after the Bridegrooms had won three of the first four, and later Brooklyn shortstop Germany Smith would tell Cincinnati sportswriters, “The Brooklyns would have beaten the New Yorks for the World’s championship if (Giants catcher Buck) Ewing hadn’t discovered we were on to his signs.”
The Dodgers have had more recent acquaintance with the unethical (i.e. mechanically aided) methods of sign stealing, of course. There was 2017 with its closed-circuit monitors and trash cans in Houston. Before that there was 1951, and while we don’t know for sure that Bobby Thomson knew what Ralph Branca was throwing when he hit the “Shot Heard ‘Round
The World” to win the deciding game of that best-ofthree tiebreaker in the Polo Grounds, it has been established that Giants manager Leo Durocher placed bullpen coach Herman Franks in an office high above the center field clubhouses with a high powered telescope and a button connected to the bullpen and dugout phones.
In the late 1880s, young Brooklyn manager Bill “Gunner” McGunnigle was looking for any way he could to crack the opposition’s code. He’d flirted with the idea of rigging a center field cigarette advertisement to manipulate the eyes of the pictured dog to let the hitter know what was coming. (His players mocked that idea mercilessly to the point he backed down.)
And shortly after electrification came to Brooklyn, he explored installing a metal plate under the batter’s boxes in his home park, which would vibrate when a particular pitch was called.
Even in an anythinggoes era of baseball, he was talked out of that one. Among the persuasive arguments: It wouldn’t take long for the opposition to figure out what was going on. One at-bat, maybe?
The sign-stealing in the World’s Series was probably organic, since the teams alternated the first four home games and it’s hard to steal signs mechanically on the road. Brooklyn scored 32 runs in the first four games (and that’s with getting beaten 6-2 in Game 2 at home), and 20 runs in the remaining five games.
The saga of those late 1880s Bridegrooms was chronicled beautifully by author Ronald O. Shafer in the book “When The Dodgers Were Bridegrooms,” published by McFarland & Company, 2011 (and yours truly drew on some of that scholarship in writing a book about Dodgers history, from the team’s origins in Brooklyn to the present day in L.A., that hopefully will be published early next year). Brooklyn had challenged in 1887 and ‘88 but couldn’t get past the
St. Louis Browns, then the dominant team in the American Association.
McGunnigle was hired as Brooklyn manager before the 1888 season, and among his distinctions were that he was the first catcher to use a glove, in 1875, and he bucked the trend of playermanagers when Brooklyn hired him. In fact, he would manage while wearing a suit and tie in the dugout, and a player he later managed, Connie Mack, would do the same with the Philadelphia A’s from 1901 through 1950.
Brooklyn finished second to St. Louis in 1888 but won the American Association pennant by two games over the Browns the next year, in just the sixth season of the team’s existence. The Giants, who had been established in 1883 as the New York Gothams a year before the Brooklyn Atlantics began play, won the National League pennant by a game over the Boston Beaneaters. They had six future Hall of Famers (to Brooklyn’s none) including the aforementioned Ewing, the first catcher to go into the Hall.
New York was the betting favorite in an era way before the Black Sox scandal, when wagering (even by players) wasn’t yet frowned upon. The competing managers, Bill McGunnigle and Jim Mutrie, bet a suit of clothes on the Series outcome, so the friendly wager of dinner between Dave Roberts and Bruce Bochy on this year’s season series (and Roberts’ suggestion Wednesday night that he’d offer a “double or nothing” proposition to Bochy on the Division Series matchup) has precedent.
Any good feelings in the 1889 series didn’t last long. Day fumed after Brooklyn’s 10-7 Game 4 victory was called after six innings because of darkness, accusing the Bridegrooms of stalling and threatening, “If the Brooklyns resort any longer to the dirty tactics that have characterized them in the games already played, and if the umpires continue to favor Brooklyn, the series will end.” Or else he was fuming about the stolen signs and nobody picked up on it.
An unsigned editorial in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle responded: “If the Giants were the better team why were they not prepared to salute the setting orb (presumably, the sun) with a score in their favor?” The heading: “Our Boys Are Innocent.” Baseball writing was far more uninhibited then.
New York had the last laughs, sweeping the rest of the series and scoring 43 runs to Brooklyn’s 20 in those final five games. The Giants clinched the series 3-2 on October 29 in the Polo Grounds, and a year later Brooklyn would bolt the American Association, join the National League, and ramp up a rivalry that will go to still another dimension beginning Friday.
Oh, and a newspaper from the other side of the country reported the result this way, in the florid style of the time: “VICTORY FOR THE GIANTS ... The Champions of the World ... They Are The People and Nobody Now Disputes It.”
It was the San Francisco Examiner of Oct. 30, 1889. Who could have imagined there would be a local angle 133 years later?